The 70th anniversary wasn't noticed in the United States, and
was barely reported in the corporate media. But the Germans remembered
well that fateful day seventy years ago - February 27, 1933. They
commemorated the anniversary by joining in demonstrations for
peace that mobilized citizens all across the world.
It started when the government, in the midst of a worldwide economic
crisis, received reports of an imminent terrorist attack. A foreign
ideologue had launched feeble attacks on a few famous buildings,
but the media largely ignored his relatively small efforts. The
intelligence services knew, however, that the odds were he would
eventually succeed. (Historians are still arguing whether or not
rogue elements in the intelligence service helped the terrorist;
the most recent research implies they did not.) But the warnings
of investigators were ignored at the highest levels, in part because
the government was distracted; the man who claimed to be the nation's
leader had not been elected by a majority vote and the majority
of citizens claimed he had no right to the powers he coveted.
He was a simpleton, some said, a cartoon character of a man who
saw things in black-and-white terms and didn't have the intellect
to understand the subtleties of running a nation in a complex
and internationalist world. His coarse use of language - reflecting
his political roots in a southernmost state - and his simplistic
and often-inflammatory nationalistic rhetoric offended the aristocrats,
foreign leaders, and the well-educated elite in the government
and media. And, as a young man, he'd joined a secret society with
an occult-sounding name and bizarre initiation rituals that involved
skulls and human bones.
Nonetheless, he knew the terrorist was going to strike (although
he didn't know where or when), and he had already considered his
response. When an aide brought him word that the nation's most
prestigious building was ablaze, he verified it was the terrorist
who had struck and then rushed to the scene and called a press
conference.
"You are now witnessing the beginning of a great epoch in history,"
he proclaimed, standing in front of the burned-out building, surrounded
by national media. "This fire," he said, his voice trembling with
emotion, "isthe beginning." He used the occasion - "a sign from
God," he called it - to declare an all-out war on terrorism and
its ideological sponsors, a people, he said, who traced their
origins to the Middle East and found motivation for their evil
deeds in their religion.
Two weeks later, the first detention center for terrorists was
built in Oranianberg to hold the first suspected allies of the
infamous terrorist. In a national outburst of patriotism, the
leader's flag was everywhere, even printed large in newspapers
suitable for window display.
Within four weeks of the terrorist attack, the nation's now-popular
leader had pushed through legislation - in the name of combating
terrorism and fighting the philosophy he said spawned it - that
suspended constitutional guarantees of free speech, privacy, and
habeas corpus. Police could now intercept mail and wiretap phones;
suspected terrorists could be imprisoned without specific charges
and without access to their lawyers; police could sneak into people's
homes without warrants if the cases involved terrorism.
To get his patriotic "Decree on the Protection of People and State"
passed over the objections of concerned legislators and civil
libertarians, he agreed to put a 4-year sunset provision on it:
if the national emergency provoked by the terrorist attack were
over by then, the freedoms and rights would be returned to the
people and the police agencies would be re-restrained. Legislators
would later say they hadn't had time to read the bill before voting
on it.
Immediately after passage of the anti-terrorism act, his federal
police agencies stepped up their program of arresting suspicious
persons and holding them without access to lawyers or courts.
In the first year only a few hundred were interred, and those
who objected were largely ignored by the mainstream press, which
was afraid to offend and thus lose access to a leader with such
high popularity ratings. Citizens who protested the leader in
public - and there were many - quickly found themselves confronting
the newly empowered police's batons, gas, and jail cells, or fenced
off in protest zones safely out of earshot of the leader's public
speeches. (In the meantime, he was taking almost daily lessons
in public speaking, learning to control his tonality, gestures,
and facial expressions. He became a very competent orator.)
Within the first months after that terrorist attack, at the suggestion
of a political advisor, he brought a formerly obscure word into
common usage. He wanted to stir a "racial pride" among his countrymen,
so, instead of referring to the nation by its name, he began to
refer to it as "The Homeland," a phrase publicly promoted in the
introduction to a 1934 speech recorded in Leni Riefenstahl's famous
propaganda movie "Triumph Of The Will." As hoped, people's hearts
swelled with pride, and the beginning of an us-versus-them mentality
was sewn. Our land was "the" homeland, citizens thought: all others
were simply foreign lands. We are the "true people," he suggested,
the only ones worthy of our nation's concern; if bombs fall on
others, or human rights are violated in other nations and it makes
our lives better, it's of little concern to us.
Playing on this new nationalism, and exploiting a disagreement
with the French over his increasing militarism, he argued that
any international body that didn't act first and foremost in the
best interest of his own nation was neither relevant nor useful.
He thus withdrew his country from the League Of Nations in October,
1933, and then negotiated a separate naval armaments agreement
with Anthony Eden of The United Kingdom to create a worldwide
military ruling elite.
His propaganda minister orchestrated a campaign to ensure the
people that he was a deeply religious man and that his motivations
were rooted in Christianity. He even proclaimed the need for a
revival of the Christian faith across his nation, what he called
a "New Christianity." Every man in his rapidly growing army wore
a belt buckle that declared "Gott Mit Uns" - God Is With Us -
and most of them fervently believed it was true.
Within a year of the terrorist attack, the nation's leader determined
that the various local police and federal agencies around the
nation were lacking the clear communication and overall coordinated
administration necessary to deal with the terrorist threat facing
the nation, particularly those citizens who were of Middle Eastern
ancestry and thus probably terrorist and communist sympathizers,
and various troublesome "intellectuals" and "liberals." He proposed
a single new national agency to protect the security of the homeland,
consolidating the actions of dozens of previously independent
police, border, and investigative agencies under a single leader.
He appointed one of his most trusted associates to be leader of
this new agency, the Central Security Office for the homeland,
and gave it a role in the government equal to the other major
departments. His assistant who dealt with the press noted that,
since the terrorist attack, "Radio and press are at our disposal."
Those voices questioning the legitimacy of their nation's leader,
or raising questions about his checkered past, had by now faded
from the public's recollection as his central security office
began advertising a program encouraging people to phone in tips
about suspicious neighbors. This program was so successful that
the names of some of the people "denounced" were soon being broadcast
on radio stations. Those denounced often included opposition politicians
and celebrities who dared speak out - a favorite target of his
regime and the media he now controlled through intimidation and
ownership by corporate allies.
To consolidate his power, he concluded that government alone wasn't
enough. He reached out to industry and forged an alliance, bringing
former executives of the nation's largest corporations into high
government positions. A flood of government money poured into
corporate coffers to fight the war against the Middle Eastern
ancestry terrorists lurking within the homeland, and to prepare
for wars overseas. He encouraged large corporations friendly to
him to acquire media outlets and other industrial concerns across
the nation, particularly those previously owned by suspicious
people of Middle Eastern ancestry. He built powerful alliances
with industry; one corporate ally got the lucrative contract worth
millions to build the first large-scale detention center for enemies
of the state.
Soon more would follow. Industry flourished.
But after an interval of peace following the terrorist attack,
voices of dissent again arose within and without the government.
Students had started an active program opposing him (later known
as the White Rose Society), and leaders of nearby nations were
speaking out against his bellicose rhetoric. He needed a diversion,
something to direct people away from the corporate cronyism being
exposed in his own government, questions of his possibly illegitimate
rise to power, and the oft-voiced concerns of civil libertarians
about the people being held in detention without due process or
access to attorneys or family.
With his number two man - a master at manipulating the media -
he began a campaign to convince the people of the nation that
a small, limited war was necessary. Another nation was harboring
many of the suspicious Middle Eastern people, and even though
its connection with the terrorist who had set afire the nation's
most important building was tenuous at best, it held resources
their nation badly needed if they were to have room to live and
maintain their prosperity.
He called a press conference and publicly delivered an ultimatum
to the leader of the other nation, provoking an international
uproar. He claimed the right to strike preemptively in self-defense,
and nations across Europe - at first - denounced him for it, pointing
out that it was a doctrine only claimed in the past by nations
seeking worldwide empire, like Caesar's Rome or Alexander's Greece.
It took a few months, and intense international debate and lobbying
with European nations, but, after he personally met with the leader
of the United Kingdom, finally a deal was struck. After the military
action began, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain told the nervous
British people that giving in to this leader's new first-strike
doctrine would bring "peace for our time." Thus Hitler annexed
Austria in a lightning move, riding a wave of popular support
as leaders so often do in times of war. The Austrian government
was unseated and replaced by a new leadership friendly to Germany,
and German corporations began to take over Austrian resources.
In a speech responding to critics of the invasion, Hitler said,
"Certain foreign newspapers have said that we fell on Austria
with brutal methods. I can only say; even in death they cannot
stop lying. I have in the course of my political struggle won
much love from my people, but when I crossed the former frontier
[into Austria] there met me such a stream of love as I have never
experienced. Not as tyrants have we come, but as liberators."
To deal with those who dissented from his policies, at the advice
of his politically savvy advisors, he and his handmaidens in the
press began a campaign to equate him and his policies with patriotism
and the nation itself. National unity was essential, they said,
to ensure that the terrorists or their sponsors didn't think they'd
succeeded in splitting the nation or weakening its will. In times
of war, they said, there could be only "one people, one nation,
and one commander-in-chief" ("Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer"),
and so his advocates in the media began a nationwide campaign
charging that critics of his policies were attacking the nation
itself. Those questioning him were labeled "anti-German" or "not
good Germans," and it was suggested they were aiding the enemies
of the state by failing in the patriotic necessity of supporting
the nation's valiant men in uniform. It was one of his most effective
ways to stifle dissent and pit wage-earning people (from whom
most of the army came) against the "intellectuals and liberals"
who were critical of his policies.
Nonetheless, once the "small war" annexation of Austria was successfully
and quickly completed, and peace returned, voices of opposition
were again raised in the Homeland. The almost-daily release of
news bulletins about the dangers of terrorist communist cells
wasn't enough to rouse the populace and totally suppress dissent.
A full-out war was necessary to divert public attention from the
growing rumbles within the country about disappearing dissidents;
violence against liberals, Jews, and union leaders; and the epidemic
of crony capitalism that was producing empires of wealth in the
corporate sector but threatening the middle
class's way of life.
A year later, to the week, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia; the
nation was now fully at war, and all internal dissent was suppressed
in the name of national security. It was the end of Germany's
first experiment with democracy.
As we conclude this review of history, there are a few milestones
worth remembering. February 27, 2003, was the 70th anniversary
of Dutch terrorist Marinus van der Lubbe's successful firebombing
of the German Parliament (Reichstag) building, the terrorist act
that catapulted Hitler to legitimacy and reshaped the German constitution.
By the time of his successful and brief action to seize Austria,
in which almost no German blood was shed, Hitler was the most
beloved and popular leader in the history of his nation. Hailed
around the world, he was later Time magazine's "Man Of The Year."
Most Americans remember his office for the security of the homeland,
known as the Reichssicherheitshauptamt and its SchutzStaffel,
simply by its most famous agency's initials: the SS.
We also remember that the Germans developed a new form of highly
violent warfare they named "lightning war" or blitzkrieg, which,
while generating devastating civilian losses, also produced a
highly desirable "shock and awe" among the nation's leadership
according to the authors of the 1996 book "Shock And Awe" published
by the National Defense University Press.
Reflecting on that time, The American Heritage Dictionary (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1983) left us this definition of the form of government the German democracy had become through Hitler's close alliance with the largest German corporations and his policy of using war as a tool to keep power: "fas-cism (fbsh'iz'em) n. A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."Today, as we face financial and political crises, it's useful to remember that the ravages of the Great Depression hit Germany and the United States alike. Through the 1930s, however, Hitler and Roosevelt chose very different courses to bring their nations back to power and prosperity. Germany's response was to use government to empower corporations and reward the society's richest individuals, privatize much of the commons, stifle dissent, strip people of constitutional rights, and create an illusion of prosperity through continual and ever-expanding war. America passed minimum wage laws to raise the middle class, enforced anti-trust laws to diminish the power of corporations, increased taxes on corporations and the wealthiest individuals, created Social Security, and became the employer of last resort through programs to build national infrastructure, promote the arts, and replant forests. To the extent that our Constitution is still intact, the choice is again ours.
Thom Hartmann lived and worked in Germany during the 1980s, and
is the author of over a dozen books, including "Unequal Protection"
and "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight." This article is copyright
by Thom Hartmann, but permission is granted for reprint in print,
email, blog, or web media so long as this credit is attached.
