Print
Shortly after 9/11, I privately told close friends and relatives that I hoped that the event would not become another Reichstag Fire. This week, Congress made my words seem prophetic. In The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer notes that on February 27, 1933, German President von Hindenberg was dining at an exclusive Berlin restaurant, when a waiter rushed in shouting the Reichstag was burning. From restaurant windows, they witnessed the conflagration. Herman Goering raced to the blaze and declared, “This is a Communist crime.”
To keep Coulter and company at bay, let me quickly interject that testimony at Nuremburg implicated the Nazis in setting the fire, using a tunnel from Goering’s President’s Palace. So I put this in caps: I’M NOT SUGGESTING GEORGE W.BUSH OR THE REPUBLICAN PARTY HAD ANYTHING TO DO WITH 9/11. I also add this because in the months after 9/11 several web sites and at least one columnist published articles comparing 9/11 to the Reichstag fire. Out in the backwoods of the Net, some people believe 9/11 somehow was an “inside job,” the way some people used to believe the moon landings were filmed in a Hollywood studio. I come from a different place. In order to understand my prediction we need to remember history, a history that becomes personal because my grandfather was at the center of it and, so am I.
In the 1920s the rule of law disintegrated in parallel with the Wiemar Republic. My grandfather was the Social Democratic mayor of what some called “red Altona.” He spoke strongly against left and right wing authoritarianism, so the Communists and Nazis machine-gunned his house. As parties openly recruited thugs and formed them into brown-shirted gangs, they turned them loose in the streets. Every day they walked home from school, my father and his sister faced the possibility of a violent encounter. On February 23, a few days before the Reichstag Fire, my grandfather gave what is called the “five minutes to twelve” speech, stating that if all the non Nazi parties did not unite quickly it could be too late.
Coming at a time when street violence had increased, the Reichstag Fire must have seemed yet another escalation. Some Germans at the time even believed the Nazis had a hand in it. However, the Nazi’s arson also received an incredible stroke of luck, because authorities found in the building a half-mad Communist, Marinus van der Lubbe. It was not until Nuremburg that Nazi officials formally implicated Goering in the crime. So in the heady days after the fire, many Germans believed Goering’s charges with the conviction of van der Lubbe cementing the case. But Hitler didn’t wait for a trial. The day after the fire, he announced a series of restrictions on personal liberty.
At this point the brown shirts swung into action, as squads of them raged through neighborhoods in trucks and cars, destroying houses and businesses and rounding up supposed “conspirators” who became the first “disappeared” to be tortured and murdered. The thugs shut down opposition newspapers and meetings of opposition parties. In Altona they built a gallows to hang my grandfather, a gallows my aunt walked by on her way home from school. A mysterious man ordered my family into a car. The next day they crossed over the Swiss border into exile.
Those who would experience the Shoah would not be so lucky. My uncle, a Berlin Jew, managed to get himself out of Germany as the hell escalated, but the rest of his family did not make it. The visa he had worked so hard to secure for his mother arrived too late.
Last Thursday night as I pondered the overwhelming votes in both House and Senate, I slept a restless sleep as this history flooded back. Part of me was glad neither my father nor my uncle were alive to witness what their adopted country had done. As I thought about them going through the formal process of becoming citizens, the words running over and over in my mind came from the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” For the men who signed that document the words that followed were important enough to risk their lives for: “That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
As I point out in The Strange Death of Liberal America, although we have often quarreled over the details of those words, principles of justice such as Habeus Corpus have remained through two centuries of legislators and courts. Since the Reagan Administration a Republican Counterrevolution has carried on an anti-government campaign in opposition to the words that follow the famous “life, liberty” phrase in the Declaration: “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men.” Now I genuinely fear that much in the way the Reichstag Fire made a nation forget its own history, the Republican Counterrevolution may cause us to forget our own.
NOTE: This is a repost of a piece from last fall, since I am on vacation. The thesis of the piece was interesting enough a writer for Huffington Post used it a few days later. Since then I have seen the idea in several other posts, but to my knowledge this was the first.
Print Posted by: liberalamerican
