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On the night of 27th February 1933, just four weeks after Hitler became Chancellor, a fire broke out in the Reichstag building, the home of the German parliament. As the dome of the building burned against the Berlin sky, Hermann Göring, a leading Nazi, declared: “This is the beginning of a communist uprising!” Whether it was or not didn’t matter. For Adolf Hitler, the Reichstag Fire was not a crisis; it was a golden opportunity. It was the perfect excuse he needed to legally dismantle German democracy and turn his Chancellorship into a dictatorship with breathtaking speed. To write a…