85 years ago today, on 27 February 1933, a 24 year old Dutch council-communist (who according to some sources also considered himself an anarchist),
Marinus van der Lubbe set fire to
the German parliament building, the
Reichstag.

He did this alone after having been profoundly disappointed by the lack of resistance to both capitalism and fascism, and hoped his act would spark a revolution.

Unfortunately this did not happen and the Nazis
instead started a campaign of mass arrests against communists who were placed in concentration camps. They also used the Reichstag fire to pass laws that gave them more power, another step towards dictatorship. Marinus was arrested and executed a few days before his 25th birthday.

It was long believed that the Nazi’s themselves started the fire as an excuse to gain this extra power and historians who pointed to evidence to the contract have had their careers ruined on the suspision that they were trying to cover up nazi crimes. By now, we now that the Reichstag fire was not a conspiracy but an isolated heroic act of resistance to capitalism and fascism.