The Reichstag Fire is presented not simply as the burning of a building but as a political rupture whose meaning is disputed even by those who profit from it. In Paul Doll’s account, it is an act of destiny that clears the way for dictatorship; in Angelus Thomsen’s later telling, it is a conveniently timed crime that the Nazis did not commit but exploited. Around those incompatible versions, the novel traces the arrests that followed, the fate of Dieter Kruger, and the brutal ease with which an emergency becomes an instrument of power.

Fire and Political Opportunity

Doll locates the decisive consequence of the fire in March 1933. After it, he says, the regime took the simple step of making all opposition illegal, leaving the road to autocracy clear. The fire’s political importance, in this account, lies less in its physical destruction than in what the new rulers were able to do in its aftermath: turn crisis into permission to eliminate organized opposition.

Doll refuses both ordinary explanations of responsibility. He dismisses the idea that the fire was started by the lone Dutch Communist Marinus van der Lubbe, and denies that the Nazis themselves set it. Instead, he attributes it to destiny and providence, then declares that God set the Reichstag ablaze on the night of February 27. The explanation is less an investigation than a performance of certainty: an event whose cause is disputed becomes, in Doll’s speech, sacred authorization for the political outcome he celebrates.

The novel sets that confidence against the immediate human consequences. In March 1933, four thousand left-wing notables were arrested, tortured, and imprisoned after the fire; Dieter Kruger was among them. He was sent to Dachau concentration camp, where Corporal Doll was among his early jailers. The sequence joins a public event to a specific life: the transition from emergency to repression is visible not only in the dismantling of political opposition but in Kruger’s imprisonment and exposure to Doll’s power.

Competing Accounts of Responsibility

The fire’s cause remains unsettled in the conversations that look back on it. Years later, Konrad Peters raises the possibility that Kruger may have had some connection to the fire. He points to Leipzig in January 1934, when van der Lubbe was executed by guillotine, and asks Thomsen whether Kruger might have been involved. The question does not establish Kruger’s role in the Reichstag fire; it shows how the event continues to draw other suspected acts and politically charged accusations into its orbit.

When Thomsen later tells Gerda Bormann about the fire, he gives a different account from Doll’s. He says that people believed the Nazis had started it because it suited them so perfectly, but insists that they had not: a Dutch anarchist had done it. His version rejects both Doll’s providential explanation and the accusation that the Nazi leadership set the blaze. Yet the political benefit remains central. The regime did not need to have started the fire for the fire to help it consolidate power.

These accounts are not reconciled into a final investigation. Instead, their difference makes the narration itself part of the subject. Doll converts uncertainty into divine purpose; Thomsen distinguishes the perpetrators from the beneficiaries; Peters leaves open a possible connection involving Kruger. The event’s political meaning is clearer than its full chain of responsibility: the regime used the crisis to suppress opponents, while the later storytellers handle culpability in ways shaped by their own positions and interests.

Dieter Kruger and the Afterlife of the Fire

Kruger’s story shows how the aftermath of the fire reaches beyond mass arrest. In Thomsen’s account, Kruger was a Communist and a published political philosopher. He had also, Thomsen says, taken part in an earlier arson at a welfare office in Neukölln. That earlier crime is distinct from the Reichstag fire, but the two become entangled in the story told about Kruger’s arrest, imprisonment, and execution.

Thomsen recounts that the Dutch arsonist was executed in January 1934 and that Kruger was executed as well, for good measure. The phrasing presents Kruger’s fate as political punishment rather than a neutral resolution of an evidentiary question. It does not prove that he helped set the Reichstag alight. Peters’s question preserves that uncertainty, while Thomsen’s account connects Kruger’s earlier arson and Communist identity to a later execution under the regime.

The execution acquires an additional, grotesque afterlife through Martin Bormann’s story. On the night before Kruger was to die, Bormann and several associates visited his cell with bottles of champagne. They stood the battered prisoner up, tore off his shirt, cuffed his hands behind his back, and staged a mock ceremony, pinning fabricated decorations on his bare chest. The scene is related as an anecdote for amusement, but its details expose the violence beneath the regime’s ceremonial language: medals and honors are turned into instruments of humiliation just before the prisoner’s death.

Recollection, Denial, and Power

The fire returns in the novel through retrospective scenes and stories, not as a single, settled account. Doll’s language of providence makes political violence sound inevitable; Thomsen’s later version acknowledges the advantage the regime gained while denying its responsibility for starting the blaze. Peters’s question about Kruger adds uncertainty rather than resolving it. These differing accounts make the reader attend to the distance between what happened, what can be established in the characters’ recollections, and what they need the event to mean.

The clearest consequence is not a final verdict on who set the fire. It is the political use made of it. The reported arrests, torture, and imprisonment of thousands of left-wing figures, including Kruger, give concrete weight to Doll’s account of opposition being outlawed. The fire’s lasting significance in the novel lies in this conversion of catastrophe into authority—and in the later stories through which its beneficiaries, witnesses, and victims try to name or evade responsibility.