The Reichstag fire was a pivotal event in the establishment of Nazi Germany. It began at 9:14 PM on the night of February 27, 1933, when a Berlin fire station received an alarm that the Reichstag building, assembly location of the German Parliament, was ablaze. The fire seemed to have been started in several places, and by the time the police and firemen arrived a huge explosion had set the main Chamber of Deputies in flames. Looking for clues, the police quickly found Marinus van der Lubbe, shirtless, inside the building. Van der Lubbe was a Dutch insurrectionary council communist and unemployed bricklayer who had recently arrived in Germany. Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring arrived soon after, and, when they were shown van der Lubbe, Göring immediately declared the fire was set by the Communists and had the party leaders arrested. Hitler declared a state of emergency and encouraged aging president Paul von Hindenburg to sign the Reichstag Fire Decree, suspending the basic rights provisions of the Weimar constitution.

The Nazi leaders were determined to demonstrate the Reichstag Fire was a deed of the Comintern, and in early March 1933, three men were arrested who were to play pivotal roles during the Leipzig Trial, known also as "Reichstag Fire Trial," namely three Bulgarians: Georgi Dimitrov, Vasil Tanev and Blagoi Popov.

The Brown Shirts or SA, German for "Storm Division", usually translated as stormtroops or stormtroopers, functioned as a paramilitary organization of the NSDAP – the German Nazi party. It played a key role in Hitler's rise to power in the 1930s. SA men were often known as brownshirts from the color of their uniform and to distinguish them from the SS who were known as blackshirts. Brown coloured shirts were chosen as the SA uniform because a large batch of them were cheaply available after World War I, having originally been ordered for German troops in Africa.