On February 27, 1933, the Reichstag, the German parliament building, burned. The Nazi government blamed a foreign leftist named Marinus van der Lubbe, warned of a vast leftwing conspiracy against Germany, and used the outrage and hysteria to crack down on their  opponents’ civil liberties.

The Reichstag Fire turned out so convenient for Nazi aims that a popular conspiracy theory by Communist propagandist Willi Munzenberg that the Nazis had set the fire themselves in a false flag operation was widely believed for decades on cui bono grounds.

But by the end of the 20th Century, the consensus among historians was that Van der Lubbe was guilty, although some hold to theories that the Nazis had used him as a catspaw.

But whether or not Hitler thought of the attack on the capitol, he was not one to let a crisis go to waste: