The Reichstag Fire

On 27 February, the Reichstag was burnt down by the fascists, who blamed it on the KPD. On this pretext, they completely suppressed the Communist Party. Goering shouted, “This is the beginning of the Communist revolution! We must not wait a minute. We will show no mercy. Every Communist must be shot where he is found. Every Communist deputy must this very night be strung up.” The next day, President Hindenburg signed a decree suspending all the sections of the constitution covering free speech, free press, assembly, etc. The Communist Party called on all anti-fascists to “fight the counter-revolution” by voting for List Three (KPD)! But the KPD offered no resistance. In the incredible words of Torgler: “The Communist Party could expect nothing from an armed insurrection, and aspired for only one thing: to survive without accident until the elections, when it expected to win a marked success.”

About 4000 Communist Party officials, together with Social Democratic and liberal leaders, were arrested. A swarm of Storm Troopers rushed through the streets of Germany, breaking down doorways, torturing and beating suspected communists. Throughout the election campaign, only the Nazis and the Nationalist Party were able to campaign without interference. The mass of petty bourgeois were wound up into an absolute frenzy against the “Bolshevik plotters” and the need for the Nazis to restore order. According to Daniel Guerin in Fascism and Big Business, on the night of 5 March, the leaders of the Reichsbanner divisions in the principal cities of Germany went to Berlin begging to be given the order to fight. They received the reply: “Be calm! Above all no bloodshed.” On 5 March the election results were known:

National Socialists		17,277,000	43.9%
Social Democrats		7,182,000	18.3%
KPD		4,848,000	12.3%
Centre Party		4,425,000	11.7%
Nationalist Party		3,137,000	3.8%

Despite all the murders, terror, intimidation, destruction of the opposition, Hitler had failed to win an absolute majority. The results gave the Nazis 288 seats in the new Reichstag, which together with its coalition partners, the Nationalists, amounted to a total support of 340 seats – a majority of 16 – well short of the two-thirds majority needed to “legally” change the constitution and establish totalitarian rule.

The fascists, however, did not see it as a problem. Firstly, the KPD were now illegal and their deputies in hiding or in jail. Secondly, Goering felt the SPD deputies could be dealt with simply “by refusing admittance”. On 23 March, Hitler put forward in the Reichstag an act granting him emergency powers, which was passed by 441 to 81 Social Democrats. The Fuehrer had become dictator of Germany.