Posted on 02/23/2019 8:35:51 AM PST by Twotone
Remember the Reichstag fire? It was perhaps the seminal event that sealed Germany’s fate as a socialist dictatorship before the Allies were finally able to pry that nation out of the jaws of Nazism in 1945 (although for the eastern portion of the country human dignity and freedom wouldn’t come for another 40-plus years thanks to Soviet imperialism).
If you’re not familiar with that event, the date was February 27, 1933. Adolf Hitler had been sworn in as Germany’s chancellor just four weeks hence, though his Nazi party was in an unstable position at the center of a coalition government holding a small plurality of 32 percent of the seats in the Reichstag — Germany’s parliament under its Weimar Republic. At the time Hitler had an agenda in mind to secure a much larger portion of the Reichstag’s seats in order to create a majority for passing an Enabling Act that would allow him essentially to rule by decree, at an election set for March 5.
By happenstance or contrivance on the part of the Nazis — it’s still a matter for debate — a fire was set in the assembly chamber of the Reichstag building which raged until the structure lay largely in ruins. A 25-year-old Dutch communist with a sketchy history as an arsonist named Marius van der Lubbe was found at the scene and charged with the crime, along with four other communists, as the Nazis used the Reichstag fire as evidence of a communist putsch to overflow the Weimar Republic. As a political weapon, the Reichstag fire was incredibly useful to the Nazis — their representation in the Reichstag grew to 44 percent of the body, giving them a majority of 52 percent...
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
FIFY
Is it?
At least so said the one I cited in the link. I also said we’d likely never know for sure.
Blood trumps ideology, when push comes to shoot.
Great column.
I’ve always known “four weeks hence” to mean “four weeks in the future,” not “for weeks prior.”
Adolf Hitler had been sworn in as Germany’s chancellor just four weeks hence
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