Nazis were not the instigators of this blaze fortuitous though
it proved for their campaign and cause. Göring, toppling help-
lessly toward the flames, would certainly have cursed his own
misfortune if they had been. “As I opened the door,” he told
George Shuster years later,
I was all but drawn into the flames by the hot
draught. Fortunately my belt snagged in the door [of
a phone booth] and that stopped me from toppling
forward. Just at that moment the huge cupola came
crashing down... I saw self-igniting firelighters on
the benches and chairs in the chamber that had eaten
through the leather upholstery and set them on fire.His office was still intact. He met Hitler and Goebbels there,
joined shortly by Rudolf Diels, chief of his political police, and
Vice-Chancellor von Papen, who had been dining over in the
cliquish Herrenklub with President Hindenburg when the
shocking news of the fire came. One of the security men told
Hitler that the last person he had seen leaving the chamber was
Ernst Torgler, the senior Communist deputy. In fact, Torgler
had left over an hour previously, which did not prevent Göring
from claiming mischievously in his conversation with George
Shuster, “I saw Togler there, carrying a briefcase.”
Shortly, a more convincing suspect was apprehended,
trying to get away through the south door. Naked to the waist
and streaming with sweat, this young man of twenty-four made
no attempt to conceal that he had started the blaze, using his
own clothes and four packets of firelighters for the purpose. A
burly, stooping bricklayer with tousled hair and vacant eyes, he
was identified as Marinus van der Lubbe, a member of a Dutch
Communist splinter organization. In a crazy one-man protest
against the new government for “oppressing the workers,” this