February 27, 1933: The Reichstag Fire

February 27, 1933: The Reichstag, the German parliament building in Berlin, catches fire. Nobody dies from the fire itself.

The first report of the fire came shortly after 9:00 PM, when a Berlin fire station received an alarm call. By the time police and firefighters arrived, the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house, was engulfed in flames. The police conducted a thorough search inside the building and found Marinus Van der Lubbe, a Dutch "council communist," who was arrested.

It had been 28 days since Adolf Hitler had been appointed Chancellor of Germany. He attributed the fire to Communist agitators. He used it as a pretext to claim that Communists were plotting against the German government, and induced President Paul von Hindenburg to issue the Reichstag Fire Decree, suspending civil liberties, and pursuing what he called a "ruthless confrontation" with the Communists.

This made the fire pivotal in the establishment of Nazi Germany. After the Fire Decree was issued, the Nazi-controlled police made mass arrests of Communists, including all of the Communist delegates in the Reichstag (the governing body, which was now operating elsewhere, not the building itself).

This severely crippled Communist participation in elections that were scheduled for March 5. After those elections, their absence gave the Nazi Party something they had never been able to manage before: A majority in the Reichstag. This greatly assisted Hitler's seizure of total power.

On March 9, the Prussian state police arrested Georgi Dimitrov, Vasil Tanev and Blagoy Popov, all Bulgarians, and known Comintern operatives. Unknown to German police at the time of his arrest, Dimitrov was the head of all Comintern operations in Western Europe. Ernst Torgler, the head of Germany's Communist Party, had surrendered to police on February 28.

Van Der Lubbe and the 4 Communists were the defendants in a trial that started in September. It ended in the acquittal of the Communists, and the conviction of Van der Lubbe, who was executed.

The responsibility for the Reichstag Fire remains a topic of debate and research. Some historians believe, based on archive evidence, that the arson had been planned and ordered by the Nazis as a "false flag operation." The building remained in its damaged state until it was partially repaired from 1961 to 1964, and completely restored from 1995 to 1999, at which point it regained its status as the house of Germany's national legislature.

In 2008, Germany posthumously pardoned Van der Lubbe under a law introduced in 1998 to lift unjust verdicts dating from the Nazi era.

Since 1933, any time a political leader has asked for special powers after a disastrous incident, it has been called a "Reichstag Fire." The 2001 attack on the World Trade Center is the most notable, with George W. Bush getting the Patriot Act afterward.

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February 27, 1933 was a Monday. Baseball and football were out of season. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. And while the NHL was in season, no games were scheduled. So there were no scores on this historic day.