The Wikipedia article on the Reichstag fire currently includes the assertion "During the election campaign, the Nazis had run on a platform of fervent anti-terrorism". But in reality the platform of the Nazis (see, for instance, the Program of the NSDAP) was not based on anti-terrorism but on irredentism, antisemitism, conspiracy theories, victimhood-based nationalism, and totalitarianism. Reinterpreting Nazism, or Nazi claims to be preventing a Communist revolution, as "fervent anti-terrorism" is no more than a pathetic present-day attempt to justify the 'Bush=Hitler' trope and the associated conspiracy theories.

The alleged relevance of the Reichstag fire to the discussion here is presumably this: if it is insane to believe that the Bush Administration was complicit in the 9-11 attack, why was it reasonable to suspect that the Nazis were responsible for the Reichstag fire? The answer is that although the two theories have superficial similiarities - they both allege conspiracies by governments to destroy buildings - the latter does not have any of the attributes that make conspiracy theories irrational (and so is not a conspiracy theory in the usual sense of the term). In particular, secretly setting the Reichstag fire (or secretly persuading a single dupe to set it, as the case may be) would not have involved any dedicated Nazi in doing anything contrary to the Nazis' publicly defended ideology. Therefore it does not require the Nazis to have had a secret ideology that violently conflicted with their overt one, does not entail an impossible recruitment system, dupe-management system, and so on.

We urge you to read our series on conspiracy theories.