On the night of 27 February 1933 Reichstag building in Berlin suffered a destructive arson attack. The alacrity with which the government responded has been taken by subsequent historians as an indication that they had somehow known in advance that the arson attack would take place. The Reichstag Fire Decree, suspending a range of basic civil liberties, was issued on 28 February 1933. The government let it be known that "communists" had been responsible for the attack, and a wave of arrests of known Communist Party leaders and activists rapidly ensued. As the trial of August Lütgens the previous week had demonstrated, the government still could not rely on the German courts to produce the right verdict when those arrested communists faced trial. The solution that presented itself was the revival of . By the end of March 1933 a network of special courts, specially designed to deal with political trials, was in place across Germany. As well as dealing with individuals arrested in the aftermath of the Reichstag fire, preparations were made to use the special court for various other self-evidently political trials that had not yet, from the government perspective, been satisfactorily concluded. The case of August Lütgens was one of these.