Delmer, ducking under ropes, managed to reach one of the Reichstag entrances just as Hitler leapt from his car and, followed by Goebbels and his bodyguard, ‘dashed up the steps two at a time, the tails of his trench coat flying, his floppy black artist’s hat pulled down over his head’. Inside they found Göring – more massive than ever in a camel-hair coat, his legs astride ‘like some Frederician guardsman in a UFA film’. He informed Hitler that communists had started the fire and that an arrest had already been made.
