Perhaps the best-known case is Adolf Hitler’s response to the February 27, 1933, Reichstag fire, just a month after he was sworn in as chancellor. The question of whether a young Dutchman with communist sympathies started the fire in the Berlin parliament building or whether the Nazi leadership itself did remains a matter of debate among historians. Whatever the case, Hitler, Hermann Göring, and Joseph Goebbels arrived at the burning Reichstag and immediately used the event to justify emergency decrees that dismantled civil liberties.
