Was the Reichstag fire perpetrated by the NSDAP?

by Henryplant

The common wisdom I see on the internet, including some people who I would consider to generally be pretty knowledgeable about history, is that it was definitely a plot by the NSDAP to gain emergency powers. However I took a college class a while ago and the professor said it probably wasn't a plot because Goebbels (or maybe it was someone else) said in his diary that he knew nothing about it and he couldn't believe their luck. My professor also that Goebbels would generally talk about his plots in his diary a lot which is why he believed him when he said it wasn't a plot.

kieslowskifan

The general consensus among historians today is that the NSDAP was not responsible for the fire, but that they were preparing for some type of pretext to expand the emergency powers they already possessed. Several legal measures that greatly expanded the central government's power had already been instituted before the Reichstag Fire Decree. The emergency decree "For the Protection of the German People" of 4 February had granted the Chancellor the right to ban political parties, press organs, and lock up political opponents. Such decrees built on prior precedents in the 1930s when various central governments used the emergency powers of the constitution to curtail press freedoms and other political restrictions. The SA had already been elevated to the status of auxiliary police by 22 February. The Reichstag Fire Decree provided a capstone for removing most of the civil rights protected by the constitution, yet many of these rights were in the process of already being stripped away.

Richard J. Evans at the LRB has a good book review essay explaining the mainstream historical opinion on the fire as well as the more heterodox historians who maintain the NSDAP was guilty of a conspiracy.

vinokess

This diary notice was from '41. Goebbels was neither involved in the SA nor the interior minister in '33. One can argue that Lubbe was the arsonist, but this diary notice is a very weak evidence for this thesis.

xboxg4mer

No one knows exactly who did it, of course the NSDAP did use it to their advantage when a communist teenager was blamed but, like I said, we have no evidence that it was one hundred percent the NSDAP or whether it was someone without the party.