All-New
Terrorist Evil-Doers Trading Card #13 of 55 - Evil Nazis
It's also somewhat misleading to refer to the first world war as "World War I" in the context of 1933, because in those days, there was only the one great war of worldwide involvement that had ever taken place in the history of the world so far, and it was popularly known by names such as "the Great War" or "the war to end all wars." In 1933, there was no need for a numbering of something for which there was only one instance (so far).
Since the German government had no such position, Hitler created the position of Führer for himself, when German President Paul Von Hindenburg died on August 2, 1934. The new position combined the pre-existing powers of chancellor and president into the more dictatorial official title of Führer und Reichskanzler (Leader and Chancellor of the Empire).
When Hitler and his Nazi pals took over the German government in 1933, they considered it to be far too weak. They thought Germany had become too conciliatory to other nations, and to the League of Nations, in the aftermath of their defeat in the war to end all wars.
Although the German Nazi political party name translates roughly into English as something like "National Socialist Worker's Party," Hitler and the others who controlled the party weren't really all that interested in mundane political causes like socialism, or the social welfare of German workers per se, although the rebuilding of the German "war machine" or "Wehrmacht" army would come to show some economic benefits all around.
The Nazis set about to reshape the government along fascist lines rather than socialist lines. By rebuilding the German armed forces, with the ultimate goals of remilitarizing the German foreign policy and reclaiming German territories lost in previous wars, they revitalized the German economy, and set Germany on a course of European conquest, later turning towards world conquest, with forays into Russia and Africa, and with "axis powers" agreements he would come to make with many other world leaders, although the axis would be primarily dominated by Hitler, Emperor Hirohito of Japan, and Il Duce Benito Mussolini of Italy. Hitler refered to the German Empire he sought to create as "the Third Reich" or "the Reich that would last a thousand years."
The German People were supportive of Hitler and the Nazis as they rose to power, first in Germany, and then later, in Europe and Africa. Contemporary history, scornfully described by some modern Germans and outsiders alike as being an "apologist's history," paints the Germans of the 1930s as having been somewhat hoodwinked by Herr Hitler, simultaneously oppressed, and tricked into giving up their civil liberties, even as they were being led unknowingly into racist policies, nationalistic conceits, and an offensive military posture they little understood or fully endorsed. In the apologist point of view, most of the crimes of Nazi Germany were imposed on the German people from above, by the Nazi Party, and were not really to the liking of the average German.
A less apologetic view is that Hitler played on feelings which were widespread and common to the average German, that he was a skillful politician and public speaker who was immensely popular with his people, and he won their support precisely because he told them exactly what they wanted to hear, and was leading them exactly where they wanted to go. There is undoubtedly some truth in both of these views. Some Germans were obviously much more supportive of Hitler than others.
Following World War II, all the Germans, regardless of their personal feelings or previous loyalties to Hitler and the Nazis, had to endure the humiliation of seeing the Allied Powers occupy Germany, and start to rebuild the German economy and the German cities that were destroyed during the war. They were put in a position of being dependent on their occupiers, who were mostly Americans. At Nuremburg, some German officers were being prosecuted for war crimes and the Holocaust, but most German soldiers were sent home, and average Germans were shown a level of forgiveness by their former enemies which was understandably difficult for some of them to take, leading to a complex state of emotional discord which is often referred to as "German guilt."
History is a fickle thing, for winners as well as losers. I can refer to the Nazis as "evil Nazis" without fear of reprisals, here and now, but for a German, living in Germany during Hitler's time in power from 1933 to 1945, a mere phrase such as "evil Nazis" could have lead to censure, arrest, imprisonment, or even death.
The Reichstag Fire occured in 1933, during Hitler's first year as Chancellor, and was an important first step in the restructuring of the German government along fascist lines, through the implementation of sweeping legislative powers.
On February 27, 1933, a fire was started in the German parliament building, called the Reichstag. The Nazis immediately accused a Dutch Communist named Marinus van der Lubbe of starting the fire, and he was almost immediately executed for the crime. As William Shirer writes in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich:
|
The idea for the fire almost certainly originated with Goebbels and Göering. Hans Gisevius, an official in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior at the time, testified at Nuremberg that "it was Goebbels who first thought of setting the Reichstag on fire," and Rudolf Diels, the Gestapo chief, added in an affidavit that "Göering knew exactly how the fire was to be started" and had ordered him "to prepare, prior to the fire, a list of people who were to be arrested immediately after it." General Franz Haider, Chief of the German General Staff during the early part of World War II, recalled at Nuremberg how on one occasion Göering had boasted of his deed: "At a luncheon on the birthday
of the Fuehrer in 1942 the conversation turned to the topic of the
Reichstag building and its artistic value. I heard with my own ears
when Göering interrupted the conversation and shouted: 'The
only
one who really knows about the Reichstag is I, because I set it on
fire!' With that he slapped his thigh with the flat of his hand." Van der Lubbe, it seems clear, was a dupe of the Nazis. He was encouraged to try to set the Reichstag on fire. But the main job was to be done — without his knowledge, of course — by the storm troopers. Indeed, it was established at the subsequent trial at Leipzig that the Dutch half-wit did not possess the means to set so vast a building on fire so quickly. Two and a half minutes after he entered, the great central hall was fiercely burning. He had only his shirt for tinder. The main fires, according to the testimony of experts at the trial, had been set with considerable quantities of chemicals and gasoline. It was obvious that one man could not have carried them into the building, nor would it have been possible for him to start so many fires in so many scattered places in so short a time. Van der Lubbe was arrested on the spot and Göering, as he afterward told the court, wanted to hang him at once. |
In his 1998 work, The Oklahoma Bombing and the Politics of Terror, author David Hoffman compares the Reichstag fire with the Oklahoma City Murray Federal Building bombing. He compares what he describes as the scapegoating of Timothy McVeigh with the scapegoating of van der Lubbe. Since that time, many have drawn similar parallels between the Reichstag fire and the World Trade Center disaster of 2001. Regardless of any questions which might be raised as to whether or not any government, rogue government, or parallel government operatives might have been complicit in any of these three disasters, there is certainly a valid comparison to be made between the responses taken by the Nazi government, the Clinton admininstation, and the George W. Bush administration, in the wake of all of these three tragedies.
The Reichstag fire enabled the Nazis to increase their power, swiftly and surely, in the Germany of 1933. At trial, Herman Göering never admitted that he or his agents lit the fire, but whether he did or not, the Nazis certainly used that fire to their great political advantage. They terrified the population by claiming that the arson was a precursor of a Communist invasion. Chancellor Hitler persuaded President Hindenburg to sign Article 48 of the German Weimar Republic's Constitution, which immediately rescinded most of the German peoples' constitutional protections, purportedly "for the protection of the people and the state," and obliterated whatever resemblance the German government might previously have shown to being any kind of a "republic."
Other legal decrees soon followed which created the SA (Storm Troopers) and SS (Special Security) internal federal police agencies. These agencies gave the Nazis the means to ruthlessly suppress all opposition in upcoming elections. The Nazis gained a 44% plurality in the German Parliament, bringing the legislative branch right into line alongside the executive.
Herman Göering declared that there was no further need for state governments. Control was centralized within the federal government by sabotaging state governments and instigating disorder within them, and then, gradually "restoring order" by replacing all local governments with unelected, Nazi-appointed Reich Commissioners.
On March 23, the "Enabling Act" was passed, tranferring state powers and centralizing law enforcement authority within the federal government. Hitler appointed Joseph Goebbels as Minister of Propaganda --- that's what they called it, no kidding --- and his buddy Herman Göering became the top cop in the land, as the new German Interior Minister. He would later go on to be General in command of the Luftwaffe (the German air force).
Police agencies were instructed to move away from a primary function of crime-detecting, and punishing criminals, in favor of a preemptive, crime-prevention stance. Their functions, so the Nazis argued, now had to be to prevent crimes before they happened, by imprisoning their political enemies, and anyone they could identify as an enemy of the state, before these enemies had a chance to commit any crimes. Through propaganda, intimidation, and pressure, the attitudes of both the police and the public were being changed, so that the public now could be viewed as an enemy, and no longer had to be treated as individual citizens with rights.
Despite Hitler's promise that "the government will make use of these powers only insofar as they are essential for carrying out vitally necessary measures," the Nazi storm troopers were soon rounding up hundreds of suspected dissidents at will, including many former politicians. They imprisoned and tortured them, without due process, summarily executing whomever they chose, with no public accountability for any of their actions. Refering again to The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich:
| Just to make sure the job would be ruthlessly done, Göering on February 22 established an auxiliary police force of 50,000 men, of whom 40,000 were drawn from the ranks of the S.A. and the S.S.… Police power in Prussia was thus largely carried out by Nazi thugs. It was a rash German who appealed to such a "police" for protection against the Nazi terrorists. |
Following the April 19, 1995 Oklahoma city bombing, FBI Director Louis Freed was able to circumvent decades of Congressional wrangling over the FBI's wiretapping authority. He called for much more sweeping powers for the FBI to spy upon citizens, assuring legislators that his proposal would not give government "expansive powers."
In 1996, exactly one year after the Oklahoma bombing, President Clinton signed the Anti-Terrorism Bill, which had originally been introduced following the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, but had been languishing ever since. The final bill that was drafted into law placed limits on federal appeals by death row inmates and some other prisoners, and made the death penalty available in some international terrorism cases, and in cases where a federal employee is killed on duty. The original house version of the bill as submitted by the President would have authorized federal agents to "pry into the personal affairs of any American citizen without first obtaining a court order, and without even a suspicion that the individual is involved in criminal activity," according to David Kopel of the Cato Institute, and would have given the President "the power to label a group a 'terrorist organization' and make it a federal felony to support the legal activities of that group." The final compromise version, as finally worked out between the Senate and the House, and submitted to the President to be signed and passed into law, had much of this taken out, and was criticized by the White House as being much weaker than what the President had submitted.
The search and detention provisions of the Patriot Act violate the Fourth Amendment protections of the US Constitution, according to ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union). The act is 342 pages long, and amends over 15 long-standing federal statutes. It grants the FBI and other federal spy agencies unprecedented wiretapping authority, and authorizes the scrutiny of personal library records, business records, electronic and computer records, e-mail, medical records, and DNA-related medical information, in the absense of, or under reduced judicial supervision (i.e., "warrantless" access). In the years since it was drafted into law, there have been many allegations of abuses, too numerous to go into here, but which are fairly well-documented in the same "Wikipedia" reference that was cited above. A better description of the USA Patriot Act can also be found here, at the SHAFT Web site.
Briefly stated, the USA Patroit Act grants the President unprecedented powers and nearly unlimited authority to detain or deport almost anyone he choses, simply on suspicion of being a terrorist or belonging to a terrorist group. The definition of what constitutes a terrorist or terrorist group is broadened and enhanced, and vague enough that, operating in secrecy and under the umbrella of national security, the White House and Pentagon can use the Patriot Act to target anyone they choose, with a minimum of public scrutiny or accountability.
The Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003, or Patriot Act II, was a draft legislation written by the Department of Justice and leaked to the press on February 7, 2003. If passed, it would have inreased government power to levels similar to those that were actually obtained by the Nazis in 1933, and would have almost entirely eliminated judicial review of those powers. The media and public opposition to this bill was much greater, and as of October 31, 2004, it has never yet been submitted for legislative review.
The powers of legislative and judicial review over the actions of the executive are part of our system of checks and balances. As it's taught to all US citizens in the public schools, and to all immigrants seeking naturalization, "checks and balances" between executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government are rules and laws that were originally installed by the framers of the US Constitution in order to prevent the consolidation of too much federal power in too few hands, or in any one branch, between the three branches of the federal government --- Executive (President and Cabinet), Legislative (Senate and House of Representatives), and Judicial (Supreme Court and Federal Court System).
Also in the wake of 9/11, over 20 some federal agencies, depending on how you want to count them, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS), were centralized into a newly formed cabinet level office of unprecedented federal authority and power, the DHS (Department of Homeland Security). The DHS is headed by former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge. Made up from offices formerly headed by the cabinet level Departments of Justice, Treasury, Agriculture, Transportation, Health and Human Services, Energy, Defense, Commerce, and the FBI, the DHS weakens all those diverse executive offices, in favor of one larger, more centralized, more bureaucratic, and more monolithic agency.
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That superstitious
old reprobate, the Curmudgeonly Old
Fussbudget, originally
published
this 13th card in the All-New Terrorist Evil-Doers Trading Card Series,
on Halloween, October 31, 2004, at just before Midnight, Central
Standard Time, from the highest point atop the Sears Tower at Chicago,
in the armpit of Illinois, just because he thought it'd be scarier that
way. Boo!
This trading card series was inspired by the fearsome and frighteningly foresighted Web content at www.shaftagents.com.