I'm currently reading through The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and when I read about the Reichstag Fire event that essentially allowed Hitler the opportunity to seize totalitarian power, my gut reaction was that the fire wasn't actually set by the accused Communist, but someone connected to the NSDAP like the S.A., for instance. Surprisingly, through the limited research I've done since, it's general consensus that said fire was indeed blamed on the Communist. Has there been anything historically reported that would suggest that this was instead a Nazi false flag event?
Thanks in advance for the replies.
The general consensus among most 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 before the events of 27 February . This was why contemporary observers like Shirer simply did not believe that van der Lubbe was responsible for the conflagration. The Hitler government had already instituted several legal measures that greatly expanded the central government's power 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. All of this means that responsibility for the fire is irrelevant even though the most of the evidence suggests the fire was not a false flag. There were moves in the direction of a dictatorship with expanded, extralegal powers even before the fire.
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.