The Reichstag Fire and the threat of communist-inspired terrorism

In 1933, the most-recognizable symbol of the German parliamentary government, the Reichstag building, was set on fire. Inside the building, police found a shirtless Dutch council communist named Marinus van der Lubbe. The young communist took credit for the fire and insisted that he had acted alone. Nonetheless, those who feared the communists believed that the attack on the Reichstag was part of a plan to initiate the socialist revolution they had suspected was simply long-delayed in Germany; to understand why, let's turn the clock back about sixteen years earlier...

In 1917, during the First World War, the Bolsheviks overthrew the monarchy of Russia and set out to build the world's first socialist state there; however, the Bolsheviks expected to have more than just the resources of the Russian Empire at their disposal; Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik movement, believed the powers still in the war would eventually collapse under the weight of civil unrest just the same, and his revolution would spread there, too.

Although it was a confident assessment, several factors were working in Lenin's favor: first, by the end of 1917, the total number of war-time labor strikes in the German Empire had reached staggering levels and climbed over 500. Industrial production was down to nearly half of its pre-war level. Second, due to food shortages in the German Empire and the British naval blockage, people were close to starving. The nation was on the brink. Third, in the Spring of 1918, hoping to take advantage of the Russian Empire's departure from the war, the German Empire had launched one last offensive. In September, that offensive collapsed and, two months later, the German home front followed suit. The time for revolution had indeed come to Germany.

In November 1918, German sailors began mutinying in port and sabotaging the German High Fleet. Their activities caught on in the city of Wilhelmshaven and soon spilled over into Kiel. The mutineers had direct support from the German unions and striking workers and, together, they assembled a rebel army, set up socialist worker councils and took control of Kiel and Wilhelmshaven. The two socialist parties in the German parliament, the SPD and a splinter party, the USPD, declared their support of the uprising. Meanwhile, the revolution spread along the rest of the German coast. Then, it struck cities deep in the German heartland.

In Bavaria, hunger strikes turned into riots. The Bavarian royal ruling family fled. Returning from prison after doing time for organizing anti-war labour strikes, Kurt Eisner, a USPD politician, declared Bavaria a "free state". The date was November 7, 1918; two days later, with revolution spreading to the German capital of Berlin, the Emperor of Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm II, abdicated the throne. From the Reichstag building in Berlin, the SPD declared Germany a "parliamentary republic" and a provisional government was formed; at about the same time, in the exact same city, a group of hardline socialists declared Germany a "socialist republic". The battle lines had been drawn for the forthcoming German Revolution.

In January 1919, the provisional government convened in the city of Weimar to write up a constitution based on the SPD's social democratic and parliamentary ideals. The "Weimar Republic" was born. However, whereas the SPD wanted to integrate the old elite into a system that implemented progressive social reforms from the "top down", the hardline socialists wanted the worker councils to act as a parliament, control the state and seize the property of industrial magnates in a radical, "bottom up" social revolution. Over this point, the hardliners had already left the SPD (and the short-lived USPD) in droves to establish a new party: the Communist Party of Germany - the KPD.

Revolution comes: radical leftists firing
in the street as the Weimar Era began.

The KPD found strong support among the German working class, which was just as concerned about the newly-founded, SPD-led parliamentary government as the KPD was. For one, the SPD's literature had called for the brutal suppression of labor strikes. The party had also seen that a Berlin police officer was dismissed from his post after failing to take up arms against striking workers. As workers took to the street to protest these developments, demonstrations turned violent and an uprising began against the government of the so-called Weimar Republic. After much contemplation, the KPD decided to support the "new revolution" with finances, men and material. The die was cast. The Spartacist uprising had begun.

In response to the violence, the SPD leaders and new government did little to rekindle its relationship with the working class. Instead, they aligned themselves with the national-conservatives and military men of the old aristocratic order. Military units of the German Empire, which were just returning from the trenches of World War I, were refitted and organized into a combat group called the "Reichswehr". The Reichswehr's orders were simple: put down the new rebellion. Ultra-nationalistic paramilitaries called the "Freikorps" also received the same message. But the Reichswehr and Freikorps were by no means in favor of those who were relying on them to clean the streets.

In particular, the men in the "Freikorps" felt that the SPD-led, Weimar Republic democratic socialist movement, like the more-radical communist KPD-led movement, was an anti-German conspiracy. It did not help that the KPD had developed as an offshoot of the SPD; in fact, what this meant is that, until the split, the politics motivations of the former had colored the latter. Accordingly, prior to the First World War, the SPD had repeatedly voted against defense spending and interfered with the German Empire's ability to prepare for a potential military conflict. Likewise, Clara Zetkin, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht - all important to the communist movement in Germany had all conducted their agitation against German war interests under the SPD's banner. Liebknecht and Luxemburg, former SPD leaders, had pioneered the first German labor strikes in 1916; similarly, Kurt Eisner, who had guided the rebellion in Bavaria (and had encouraged the German home front to strike during the war), had been an SPD politician before joining the USPD and taking office as a representative of the Weimar Republic, in Bavaria.

In February 1919, a conservative German-nationalist assassinated Eisner. In response, the socialists killed an Old Order conservative-monarchist. Firefights broke out and the streets of Munich became engulfed in a full-blown war on the streets. One of Eisner's friends, Gustav Landauer, joined Ernst Toller, Eugen Leviné and Erich Mühsam and declared the city part of a new state called the Bavarian Soviet Republic. Needless to say, all the handshaking did not go unnoticed. Nor did the fact that Eisner, Landauer, Toller, Leviné and Mühsam could be linked to Zetkin, Luxemburg, Liebknecht and numerous faces and names behind the Russian Revolution on account of their Jewish backgrounds. These conditions gave way to various theories regarding the Jews, socialists and anti-nationalism.

In June 1919, the SPD-led Weimar Republic voted to accept the Treaty of Versailles. The Treaty blamed the German Empire for the war, carved up German territory, demanded war reparation payments from the German people and forced a reduction of the German armed forces. In accordance with the new terms, the SPD-led Weimar government ordered several Freikorps units to disband.  They refused.

In March 1920, the Freikorps protested the demands of the SPD-led Weimar Republic and, in an event known as the Kapp-Lützow Putsch, marched towards Berlin to overthrow the government. In response, the politicians of the Weimar Republic took flight. But the prospect of a military-styled putsch government was extremely unpopular and associated with working-class oppression and crackdowns against organized labor. The hardline socialists capitalized on these fears and stirred the pot in the hopes of leading a new revolution. All across the country, there was turmoil. Clashes quickly broke out between the socialists on one side, and the Reichswehr and paramilitaries of the Freikorps sent in to restore order. In working class districts such as the coal-rich Ruhr Valley (in western Germany), the hardline socialists amassed an armed fighting force called the "Ruhr Red Army", which swelled from 50,000 to 120,000 strong. But just as a new round of blood-letting was underway, the unexpected happened: the putsch government agreed to restore power to a representative government, and put the elected officials of the SPD-led Weimar Republic back in place. The strikes ended, workers put down their weapons and protesters cleared the streets.

By 1922, over 35,000 people had died in the fight to control Germany's fate. The socialists had murdered scores of old order elite and conservative-monarchists. But, more importantly, the Reichswehr and Freikorps had acted on its license to kill and made short work of the leaders of the hardline socialist movement, slaughtering them. Moving forward, the hardline socialists had two options. The first was to regroup, rearm and try to plan a new violent uprising against the parliamentary democrats; alternatively, the hardline socialists could try to reorganize, refine the image of the KPD and try to achieve power through the same parliamentarian system they had been fighting against.

Translation above:
"Enough of this system!"

Translation below:
"betrayed by the SPD, vote Communist!"


Hardline socialists believed the SPD, once in power,
turned heel and betrayed the socialist movement.

Although involved in the Hamburg uprising of 1923, the hardline socialists gradually came to understand that the general public was just not enthusiastic about violent street revolutions. Perhaps the public's thoughts were influenced by the situation on the ground to the east, where the Bolsheviks had finally firmed up their power and consolidated most of Russia's former empire into a state called the Soviet Union, but only after seven to twelve million people had died in the process, in a bloody civil war. It was a tremendous toll to pay.

On the other hand, for the KPD, parliamentary politics seemed to be the long path forward. Immediately after the "Spartacist uprising" in 1920, the party managed to win just 4 seats in the federal parliament. But by 1924, the party had increased its share of the vote to 12.6% and captured 62 parliamentary seats. Post-war economic turmoil was the driving force of the KPD's growth, and the party's anti-system rhetoric became a magnet for populist sentiment. By 1930, the economy had completely collapsed under the weight of the Great Depression. The fallout translated into even greater success for the KPD, which won 77 parliamentary seats in 1930; two years later, the party increased its share of parliamentary seats to 89.

In that period, the KPD had managed to retool its image into that of a serious political party. At the helm, the party had acquired a popular figurehead in former SPD-politician Ernst Thälmann. What is more, the party enjoyed a solid backing from unions throughout Germany. The party was also benefiting from the financing that poured in from the Soviet Union. The KPD quickly became the largest communist party outside of the Soviet Union and the pride of the Third Communist International. Nonetheless, it was unable to rise to power in Germany.

By 1930, a different political party had burst onto the scene. The name of that party: the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) - the party of Adolf Hitler. In the four parliamentary elections (due two political instability) held between 1930 and 1933, in which the KPD took 13.1%, 14.6%, 16.9% and 12.3% of the vote, the NSDAP claimed a stunning 18.3%, 37.8%, 33.1% and 43.9%. As some allege, the NSDAP's gains down the stretch and the KPD's losses within that same period may have been attributable to the Reichstag Fire, which occurred just six days before that crucial final vote, and was reported to have been set by a communist revolutionary. Having taken a hard stance against fighting communism, the NSDAP surely benefited from the report, attracting the votes of concerned citizens who did not want to return to the time of communist revolutions and chaos on the street. Likewise, the general public probably would have been reluctant to jump on board with the communists at such at time, even with the KPD distancing itself from the arson attack. It is for these very reasons that some believe the NSDAP staged the fire, and the communists were framed by the NSDAP.

The problem, of course, is the "staged attack theory" conflicts with the accused's own admission to setting the Reichstag aflame. For historians, though, the even bigger problem is what this focus distracts the researcher from observing, and leads him or her to overlook what was really going on at the time, which very few people have bothered to inspect.

As the electoral results show, the KPD consistently took 13-17% of the vote and never more, suggesting that the party had perhaps hit its ceiling in terms of growth. Even in strongholds like the Berlin, the KPD was stuck hovering around a 20% approval rating, which it failed to surpass. In the 1932 local elections in the region of Prussia, we see the same thing. The KPD had captured 12.3% of the vote, a paltry increase of 0.4% from the previous local election result (11.9%). In that same period and battleground, the NSDAP went from obtaining 1.8% of the vote to 38.6%. Apart from the signs of the KPD's stagnation, these results reveal that the NSDAP had a marginal impact on the KPD's share of the electorate, almost as if the NSDAP had been fishing for votes out of a completely different pond. From the following chart, we see the same phenomenon across Germany - and, also, that the KPD's electoral gains were roughly proportional to the SPD's own losses:



Both of these developments are critical to understanding the situation in 1930s Germany and what really happened with the KPD in that period.

Understanding the growth of the KPD:

There is actually nothing altogether surprising about the KPD's growth coming at the expense of the SPD. After all, the KPD was born out of a fracture within the SPD, so it was only logical that the KPD ended up pulling supporters very similar to the SPD's own, often at the expense of the SPD. But what stands out here is the lack of growth by either the SPD or the KPD outside of one another, coupled with the KPD's inability to continue to build from within the SPD's niche. What we see, then, is a party that seemed to maximized its potential by advocating working class labor and for-the-people economic change like the SPD did, and was failing to pull in more people who were impressed by the KPD's devotion to communism and ties to the Soviet Union within that paradigm.

Understanding the growth of the NSDAP:

With the NSDAP, we see a party that combined the working class' anti-establishment rhetoric and promise of for-the-people economic change with virulent anti-communism and ultra-nationalism. Taken in combination, this platform had a strong appeal to the working class in Germany, but also the upper-middle class, industrialists and self-sufficient agrarians who, along with German nationalists, patriots, traditionalists and conservatives, felt threatened by the rise of communism in the Soviet Union and wanted a strong nation to defend against it. It was something completely revolutionary, but reactionary, and it propelled the NSDAP to reach a demographic that the KPD never could, and push beyond the ceiling that the KPD and SPD were restrained by.

Those who favored the KPD's sort-of collectivism and reform, but were not particular to the communist world view were drawn in by the NSDAP's message, as were those who feared all the baggage that communism was quickly becoming associated with thanks to the Soviet Union, where the population was rumored to be burdened by mass deportations, forced labor, politically-motivated murders and private-enterprise takeovers. Prior to voting 1933, the German public had been exposed to news and rumors about the mass starvation, under the communists, of some seven million Ukrainian people during the Holodomor (1932-1933). All in all, these points surely weighed on the minds of the people, and did little to cause the people to feel for the KPD or oppose the NSDAP's anti-communist position. The public had made its choice. In the words of the German Admiral Karl Doenitz, as written in his memoirs:
"the machinery of the Weimar state had proved itself incapable of coping with internal dissension, economic collapse and unemployment. Germany, then, was set on the road to dictatorship...by the beginning of the 1930s the choice had been narrowed to that of a Bolshevist or an anti-Bolshevist dictatorship...[Adolf Hitler's] aim to keep Communism out of Europe met at the time with the approval not only of the mass of the German people, but also of the governments of western Europe. As a result of his pre-war policy, not only did Germany (and with her the whole of eastern Europe) not fall victim to Bolshevist ideology, but, having achieved that measure of national unity which other nations had achieved centuries before, she also became Europe's strongest bulwark against the onslaught of Communism." [1]

The rise of any government declaring itself a "bulwark against the onslaught of Communism" would have been bad news for the KPD, because such a party was not likely to be any softer on them than the SPD-led democratic socialist government had been. But a government led by the NSDAP was at odds with the KPD on a completely different level; each step towards unifying the German nation at the heart through traditional and national culture, as the NSDAP had hoped to accomplish, was a step away from what the hardline socialists were trying to do, which was break down national unity and strengthen class identity while building up ties to the Bolsheviks. The NSDAP and the KPD were similar in that neither party could really build what it wanted out of Germany without stopping the progress of the other. Ultimately, the NSDAP ended up removing the socialists of all stripes (SPD and KPD) from the political process, stripped them from influential positions in society and put them in camps for reeducation and forced labour - actions that, by no sheer coincidence, mirrored the fate of the nationalists and traditionalists who had gotten in the way of what the communist regime had been trying to achieve socially and culturally with the Soviet Union.

Before these events took place, however, the KPD had an opportunity to take action. Looking at the election polls, the KPD was no weaker than it had been when it had given up on the revolutionary pathway a decade earlier. Moreover, the party could count on direct support from a now-stabilized, and increasingly-industrialized Soviet Union in the event of a new revolution, not to mention support from the unions due to the party's long-consolidated influence there. With the NSDAP transcending class boundaries and packing the parliament with anti-communists, the KPD had its back against the wall. It was only a matter of time before the NSDAP began to implement the policies that would roll back the KPD's social influence, closing the window for the KPD to achieve success through the democratic process indefinitely. Under the circumstances, there was an argument to be made that the KPD's best opinion was mobilizing its base and achieving a zero-hour rebellion, feeding off of the sentiments of the half of the country that had not voted for the NSDAP.  Of course, this would have given the NSDAP all the excuses it needed to ban the KPD from parliament, just as the NSDAP needed to do to move forward with its vision for the country. But before any decision could be made, the situation with Marinus van der Lubbe appeared.

Whether Marinus van der Lubbe personally set the Reichstag aflame, or whether the fire was a conspiracy to remove the SPD and KPD from opposition is actually irrelevant to the big picture. And, within that big picture, the public recognized that the hardline socialists were plotting a revolution because it was nothing that the forces of the radical left had not tried before, and were likely to try again instead of accept total defeat. The KPD tried to distance itself from Marinus van der Lubbe, both to preserve its electoral success and avoid persecution. But the damage was done. The center and center-right felt threatened by a repeat of hardline leftist violence and, along with the NSDAP, voted to ban the socialist press and throw the KPD out; whether the government knew that the decision would enable Hitler to consolidate his power and the power of the NSDAP to essentially establish a one-party government, one can only guess.



1 Karl Doenitz, Memoirs: Ten Years and Twenty Days (Anapolis: Da Capo Press Incorporated in assoc. w. Naval Institute Press, 1997), 476.