Burning the Reichstag: The Third Reich's Enduring Mystery

When the Reichstag (the German equivalent of the Capitol building) went up in flames in February 1933, Adolf Hitler was newly in power.

He blamed the Communists and, in the name of security, gutted the German constitution, arrested thousands of people and set the Third Reich on its disastrous course. But did the Nazis set that fire? Historian Benjamin Hett challenges orthodoxy and recovers the true significance of the part the fire played in Hitler’s rise to dictatorship.