Reichstag Fire Decree
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The Reichstag Fire Decree (in German, Reichstagsbrandverordnung) is the commonly used abbreviation for the law that was passed through Presidentially signed Decree by the Nazi-Nationalist coalition in direct response to the Reichstag fire of February 27, 1933. It took this last of the four governments acting under Presidential Dictatorship only the one day to draft and enact it on February 28.
The actual name of the decree is Verordnung des Reichspr�sidenten zum Schutz von Volk und Staat (Decree of the Reich President for the protection of people and state). At the behest of Chancellor Adolph Hitler, the law was issued by the aging (and lapsing in and out of senility) Paul von Hindenburg using the authority of Art.�48 subsection 2 of the Wiemer constitution, which allowed the Reichspr�sident to take any appropriate measure to remedy dangers to public safety. It represents the first of two key steps which the Nazi government took to un-constitutionally establish its rule, a process commonly referred to as Gleichschaltungby the Nazis and by German historians since. Remarkably, argument remains as to the constitutionality of the second step, that of the passing of the Enabling Act for Dictatorship only possible with the result of the clearly unconstitutional nature of the first step with this Decree. The Fire Decree, as used by the Nazi coalition of 7 weeks in 1933, itself entirely constitutional except in one respect, that it possessed no power against the sovereign immunity of elected parliamentarians, who constitutionally were, as is the foundation of all Democracy solely answerable to the People, and not even to their own electors but to all the People in their Constituency districts.
The Fire decree suspended most of the human rights set forth in the constitution of the 1919 Weimar Republic but is in fact politically important as it provided the vital cover for subsequent Prussian (including Berlin) Police abuse. The Prussian Police had just been rapidly infiltrated with many thousands of Nazi activists, and the abuse consisted in the immediate following of the Hitler plan for total eradication of the Communist KPD Reichstag Deputies, though in fact also even some 26 SPD Socialists) .The Decree is exemplary of how the Nazis, whilst in minority in this cabinet of coalition with Franz von Papen and Alfred Hugenberg gradually abolished all essence of that which makes a modern democracy.
The decree consisted of six articles. Article 1 suspended most of the civil liberties set forth in the Weimar Constitution — freedom of the person, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, the right of free association and public assembly, the secrecy of the post and telephone, not to mention the protection of property and the home. Articles 2 and 3 allowed the Reich government to assume powers normally reserved to the federal states (L�nder). Articles 4 and 5 established draconian penalties for certain offenses, including the death penalty for arson to public buildings. Article 6 simply stated that the decree took effect on the day of its proclamation.
��1 shall be reproduced in full:
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� 1. Die Artikel 114, 115, 117, 118, 123, 124 und 153 der Verfassung des Deutschen Reichs werden bis auf weiteres au�er Kraft gesetzt. Es sind daher Beschr�nkungen der pers�nlichen Freiheit, des Rechts der freien Meinungs�u�erung, einschlie�lich der Pressefreiheit, des Vereins- und Versammlungsrechts, Eingriffe in das Brief-, Post-, Telegraphen- und Fernsprechgeheimnis, Anordnungen von Haussuchungen und von Beschlagnahmen sowie Beschr�nkungen des Eigentums auch au�erhalb der sonst hierf�r bestimmten gesetzlichen Grenzen zul�ssig. |
� 1.The articles 114, 115, 117, 118, 123, 124 and 153 of the constitution are suspended until further notice. It is therefore permissible to restrict the rights to personal freedom [meaning habeas corpus], freedom of speech, including the freedom of the press, the freedom to organize and assemble, the privacy of letters, mail, telegraphs and telephones, order searches and confiscations and restrict property, even if this is not otherwise provided for by present law. |
In the following articles (���2-5), the Decree allowed the Reich government to seize state powers and introduced the death penalty for a number of Political offenses. According to ��6, the law was put into effect immediately with its rendition.
Among the German communists arrested on the basis of the Reichstag Fire Decree was KPD chairman Ernst Th�lmann; KPD founding members Wilhelm Pieck and Walter Ulbricht — later to be leaders in postwar East Germany — were among those who escaped arrest and lived in exile.
Goering issued a directive to the Prussian police authorities on March 3, stating that in addition to the constitutional rights stripped by the decree, "all other restraints on police action imposed by Reich and Land law" were abolished "so far as this is necessary ... to achieve the purpose of the decree." Goering went on to say that
- In keeping with the purpose and aim of the decree the additional measures ... will be directed against the Communists in the first instance, but then also against those who co-operate with the Communists and who support or encourage their criminal aims.... I would point out that any necessary measures against members or establishments of other than Communist, anarchist or Social Democratic parties can only be justified by the decree ... if they serve to help the defense against such Communist activities in the widest sense.
The decree served Hitler well but did not in fact constitutionally allow him to have the Communist Party Deputies arrested. However the third Nazi portfolio in this cabinet had given Ministerial control of Prussia to Hermann Goering and by means of his nazification of the Prussian Police the Capital and that State became overnight a region of State Terror in which no citizen, and least of all a Leftist, could safely seek official protection. Roaming police were enabled with this decree to menace and bluster their way into anywhere they chose, waving what was technically a document with no power against the Sovereign Immunity of the 100 KPD Deputies. These were incarcerated in make-shift political Concentration Camps along with some 11,000 other activists.
However the KPD Party , despite arrest, torture and even murder of these captured deputies, remained a force at the subsequent 5 March 1933 last Free and Fair Elections to be held in the Second German Empire, known to us now as the Weimar Republic. Their German Communist vote dropped only from 9.8 to 8.8 millions despite their physical absence and the wholescale eradication of all communist organs of propaganda and Street teams. A vast Nazi progaganda machine which for the first time included the State broadcasting apparatus did not succeed either in eliminating the KPD Reichstag bloc, nor even in providing the Nazis themselves with a Parliamentary majority (the KPD received 12.3 % and the NSDAP or nazis received 43.9%.
This result, despite the fact that the KPD remained incarcerated, left Hitler at his first subsequent cabinet meeting of the 6 March with the question of how to remove the remaining Parliamentary obstacle to his central objective, that of supreme dictatorial power , or national Fuhrerdom.
The Decree itself was the chief amongst the last such Decrees that had blighted the parliamentary nature of the Republic since October 1931, when the abherrant use of decrees which were only constitutionally valid when called forth by armed revolt amongst the people. Hitler had learnt his parliamentary lessons gradually, but was aware that of all these decrees, allowed and used even for reasons of taxation under the constitutional Presidential Dictatorships since 1931, the Fire Decree was the most apparently constitutionally legal.
The nature of the provocation or subversion that is the Reichsatg Fire itself, was immediately challenged both politically and Judicially during the circumstances of over-all State Terror in Prussia, and yet Goering on 3 March publicly claimed no need further for such quibbles as to legality. The Nuremberg trials of 1946 established however, beyond all (of the Tribunal's) reasonable doubt that the Fire indeed was a Nazi provocation, if the work of Goering and not actually chosen by Hitler.The scapegoating opportunity of the extremmely naive jailed van der Lubbe arsonist clearly suggests itself to historians as presenting an opportunity which Goering could not resist. That elimination of the parliamentary Communist bloc was a necessity was discussed There is in fact evidence that Hitler regretted the imediacy of the Fire coming as he thought rather too soon, as he had plans to rescuscitate a further decree for Special Courts, which would have Nazified the whole Judicial process itself. The Special Courts Decree was instituted, again though the same section 48 Presidential signature on the same day of cermonial opening of the burnt reichstag in the Kroll Opera House, a place of longstanding patriotic significance, on the 21 March. The Special Courts Decree enabled the implementation of gestapo Special Political Police rule, and the period even prior to this subsequent decree, is characterised by a confusion of police Forces acting in sometimes complete armed confrontation with each other in their eagerness to snatch their political victims.
Subsequently on 23 March 1933, when the newly elected but still slim coalition majority Reichstag first convened , Hitler's second key step towards Totalitarian power came with the successful two-thirds Reichstag vote for the Enabling Act. Hitler had within the seven week period since his 30 January 1933 Presidential Appointemnt as minority Chancellor of Germany, obtained through collaboration, opportunism, trickery and terror, the mastery of the entire modern German State apparatus.
The Reichstag Fire Decree was thus one of the major steps that allowed Hitler to seize power (see Gleichschaltung).Adolf Hitler had been named chancellor of Germany and invited by President von Hindenburg to lead a coalition government only four weeks previously, on January 30, 1933 in circumstances of such historical oddity that they are central to much mpublished investigation ever since. The actual appointment is shrouded in feverish last moments of counter threat by the German Wehrmacht or Army, represented by the until then Army General Chancellor,Kurt von Schleicher. Noticeable extra-parliamentary forces range behing the appointment from solid Aristicratic Class interests , to extraordinary financial and banking funding and backing for Hitlerism, even down to straight-forward Tax Evasion black-mailing and a 7,000 Acre land pay-off or inducement for the President of Germany himself.
The term presidential Dictatorship revolves around the permanent Weimar republic paliamentary log-jam, in which no clear majority Political Party could gain power. The Reichstag as a body was solely able to call and pass or veto a vote of confidence. Hitler had been for a decade aware that his risse to power had to appear legal and therefore retain the stamp of popular approval, but his impetus throughout was towards the subversion of the state from within its owmn legal aparatus. Before the Reichstag Fire, and within this part calculated and part opportunistc rolling subversion, Hitler's coalition urged von Hindenburg to dissolve the new Reichstag and to call elections for March 5. Hitler's prior negotiations with particularly the catholic Centre Party Germany chairman since 1928, the Priest Monsignor Ludwig Kaas, had been artificially dismissed by Hitler's desire for sole authority, and the Centre's demands for constitutional guarantees, despite the good faith in which they were presented , rejected.
Hitler rise to power was clearly categorised by the Four powers Allied Nuremberg Trials as a conspircay, or common purpose , but Hitler was careful to pick off his targets one by one, and so he retained always as needed those surrounding forces with which he could transiently comprpmise. The Industrial Barons, the Landed barons, the Churches, the Army , the Civil service and the judiciary, all played their part , more or less aware of the results likely from their collaboration. The individual German voters were in every way also aware of the nature of Hitlerism and of its brutality, thus the Reichdsatg fire and its decree were of inestimable importance in achieving apparent Judicial legality of his purpose.
See also
References
- Expanded from the Wikipedia article, "Reichstag_Fire_Decree" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_Fire_Decree, used under the GNU Free Documentation License
