71 Years "Reichstagsbrand"

Lessons from History

70 years ago, an event shocked the world and set the stage for the last World War. On February 27, 1933 the German parliament building, the Reichstag, was set on fire.

Reichstag Fire (from the Encyclopedia Britannica) Burning of the Reichstag (parliament) building in Berlin, on the night of Feb. 27, 1933, a key event in the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship and widely believed to have been contrived by the newly formed Nazi government itself to turn public opinion against its opponents and to assume emergency powers. Adolf Hitler had secured the chancellorship after the elections… ("Reichstags Fire." 2003 Encyclopaedia Britannica Premium Service.)

The official version that ‘terrorists’ had led the attack was soon questioned abroad. Today it is a fact that the Reichstagsbrand was deliberately used as a pretense and that the ‘empowerment laws’ following this event had been prepared in advance.

Following the burning of the Reichstag:

• civil rights were abolished,
• empowerment laws were enacted, including a “Homeland Security Act”
  (“Schutz von Heim und Reich”).

The Reichstag-Assault in 1933 provided the legal platform for 12 years of dictatorship and WWII. Its main benefactor was IG-Farben, the largest European petro-chemical Cartel seeking control of the oil and chemical industry worldwide.

In the Nuremberg War Tribunal in 1946/47 this Cartel was tried for ‘conquest ’ , ‘robbery’ and ‘slavery’ and - as a result - it was dismantled into Bayer, BASF and Hoechst.

This War Tribunal established that without these corporations, World War II would not have been possible. US-Chief Prosecutor Telford Taylor stated: “If their guilt is not brought to the daylight, they will do even more harm in future generations.”

Then and now millions of decent people are in danger of being mislead by their own governments. And those who do not learn the lessons from history are doomed to live through it again!”

The Daily Telegraph Wrote One Day After The Reichstag Fire:

Great Fire in German Reichstag Article from Daily Telegraph, Feb28, 1933: BERLIN, Monday Night. The German Reichstag was deliberately set on fire in no fewer than twenty places tonight, and the great hall where the Deputies actually meet was completely destroyed. Several arrests have been made. One man, stated to be a Dutch Communist, is reported to have confessed to the outrage and to starting a fire in the Imperial Palace. All the seats of the Deputies and the galleries of the diplomats, Press and public were destroyed. The iron pillars supporting the great golden dome are twisted, and the whole structure has been endangered. (...)

Hitler and the Reichstag Fire

In Jan., 1933, when Adolf Hitler became chancellor without an absolute majority, the Reichstag was dissolved and new elections were set for Mar. 5; a violent election campaign ensued. On Feb. 27, 1933, a fire destroyed part of the Reichstag building. Hitler immediately accused the Communists of having set the fire. President von Hindenburg proclaimed a state of emergency and issued decrees suspending freedom of speech and assembly. The elections gave a bare majority of seats to Hitler’s National Socialists (Nazis; see National Socialism) and their allies, the German Nationalists. Severe measures were taken against the Communist party, and its deputies were barred from the Reichstag.

On Mar. 23 the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act, which gave the government, i.e., Hitler, dictatorial powers. Only the Social Democrats dissented. In the sensational Reichstag fire trial of 1933, a Dutchman named Marinus van der Lubbe was charged with having set the fire as part of a Communist plot. Several Communist leaders, including Georgi Dimitrov, were charged with complicity. Van der Lubbe was sentenced to death; the others were found not guilty. For many years it was assumed outside Germany that the Reichstag fire was carried out by the Nazis themselves as a propaganda maneuver to ensure the defeat of the Communists and other leftist parties in the elections.
("Reichstag" The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition 2001)

The Reichstag Fire and the Enabling Act of 1933

Following his election as Chancellor, Hitler was in a position where he was the nominal leader of the Weimar republic but he did not have the majority necessary to implement his political program. To do as he wanted he required such a majority, indeed he needed the opposition to be silenced. A fire in the Reichstag buildings provided him with the ideal opportunity to take the initiative. (the fire being almost certainly started to facilitate the following actions).

The fire was publicly blamed upon the Communists. 4000 communist party members were consequently arrested and sent to concentration camps around Germany. In a stroke Hitler had annihilated the most potent threat to his leadership. This was followed, very quickly, by the Enabling Act. This measure allowed Hitler the right to rule without consultation of the Reichstag or the president. It was in effect a decree of a state of emergency. The result was the banning of all opposition parties, censorship of broadcasts and publications and a rapid replacement of Government officials who were deemed to be unsympathetic towards Nazi policy.

Such swift actions left the Nazi Party with little political opposition, certainly no legalised opposition. Hitler now had a one party state and control of most means of communication: the nazi propaganda machine could begin it's work.
("How did Hitler consolidate power?" Schools History)

IG Farben - The Main Benefactor

The most powerful German economic corporate emporium in the first half of this century was the Interessengemeinschaft Farben or IG Farben, for short. Interessengemeinschaft stands for "Association of Common Interests" and was nothing other than a powerful cartel of BASF, Bayer, Hoechst, and other German chemical and pharmaceutical companies. IG Farben was the single largest donor to the election campaign of Adolph Hitler. One year before Hitler seized power, IG Farben donated 400,000 marks to Hitler and his Nazi party. Accordingly, after Hitler's seizure of power, IG Farben was the single largest profiteer of the German conquest of the world, the Second World War.

One hundred percent of all explosives and one hundred percent of all synthetic gasoline came from the factories of IG Farben. Whenever the German Wehrmacht conquered another country, IG Farben followed, systematically taking over the industries of those countries. Through this close collaboration with Hitler's Wehrmacht, IG Farben participated in the plunder of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, Holland, Belgium, France and all other countries conquered by the Nazis.

Zyklon-B, an extermination gas produced by Hoechst, was used to kill millions of innocent people, before their corpses were burnt

The U.S. government investigation of the factors that led to the Second World War in 1946 came to the conclusion that without IG Farben the Second World War would simply not have been possible. We have to come to grips with the fact that it was not a psychopath, Adolph Hitler, or bad genes of the German people that brought about the Second World War. Economic greed by companies like Bayer, BASF and Hoechst was the key factor in bringing about the Holocaust. No one who saw Steven Spielberg's film "Schindler's List" will forget the scenes in the concentration camp Auschwitz.

Auschwitz was the largest mass extermination factory in human history, but the concentration camp was only the appendix. The main project was IG Auschwitz, a 100% subsidiary of IG Farben, the largest industrial complex of the world for manufacturing synthetic gasoline and rubber for the conquest of Europe. On April 14, 1941, in Ludwigshafen, Otto Armbrust, the IG Farben board member responsible for the Auschwitz project, stated to his IG Farben board colleagues, "our new friendship with the SS is a blessing. We have determined all measures integrating the concentration camps to benefit our company."

On March 1, 1941, the Reichsführer of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, inspected the construction site

The pharmaceutical departments of the IG Farben cartel used the victims of the concentration camps in their own way: thousands of them died during human experiments such as the testing of new and unknown vaccines.

There was no retirement plan for the prisoners of IG Auschwitz. Those who were too weak or too sick to work were selected at the main gate of the IG Auschwitz factory and sent to the gas chambers. Even the chemical gas Zyklon-B used for the annihilation of millions of people was derived from the drawing boards and factories of IG Farben.

The map of Auschwitz (above) speaks for itself. The size of the IG Auschwitz plant (red area) was larger than all Auschwitz concentration camps (blue area) taken together.

The Nuremberg War Criminal Tribunal

US-Chief Prosecutor Telford Taylor

In 1946 the Nuremberg War Tribunal concluded that without the IG-Farben Chemical Cartel the second world war would not have been possible. US-Chief Prosecutor Telford Taylor concluded: "These companies, not the lunatic Nazi fanatics, are the main war criminals. If the guilt of these criminals is not brought to daylight and if they are not punished, they will pose a much greater threat to the future peace of the world than Hitler if he were still alive."

The Nuremberg War Criminal Tribunal convicted 24 IG Farben board members and executives on the basis of mass murder, slavery and other crimes against humanity. Amazingly however, by 1951 all of them had already been released, continuing to consult with German corporations. The Nuremberg Tribunal dissolved the IG Farben into Bayer, Hoechst, and BASF. Today each of the three daughters of the IG Farben is 20 times as big as the IG Farben mother was at its height in 1944, the last year of the Second World War.

More importantly, for almost three decades after the Second World War, BASF, Bayer and Hoechst (now Aventis) each filled its highest position, chairman of the board, with former members of the Nazi, NSDAP:

• Carl Wurster, chairman of the board of BASF until 1974 was, during the war, on the board of the company manufacturing Zyklon-B gas
• Carl Winnacker, chairman of the board of Hoechst until the late 70's, was a member of the Sturm Abteilung (SA) and was a member of the board of IG Farben
• Curt Hansen, chairman of the board of Bayer until the late 70's, was co-organizer of the conquest of Europe in the department of "acquisition of raw materials." Under this leadership the IG Farben daughters, BASF, Bayer, and Hoechst, continued to support politicians representing their interests.

During the 50's and 60's they invested in the political career of a young representative from a suburb of the BASF town of Ludwigshafen, his name: Helmut Kohl.

From 1957 to 1967 the young Helmut Kohl was a paid lobbyist of the "Verband Chemischer Industrie," the central lobby organization of the German pharmaceutical and chemical cartel. Thus, the German chemical and pharmaceutical industry built up one of its own as a political representative, leaving the German people with only the choice of final approval.

Nuremberg War Tribunal 1946/47: 24 managers of Hoechst, Bayer and BASF were indicted for mass murder, slavery and other crimes against humanity.

The result is well known: Helmut Kohl was chancellor of Germany for 16 years and the German pharmaceutical and chemical industry became the world’s leading exporter of chemical products, with subsidiaries in over 150 countries, more than IG Farben ever had. Several billion people will now die prematurely, if the pharmaceutical industry gets its way. Germany is the only country in the entire world in which a former paid lobbyist for the chemical and pharmaceutical cartel was head of the government. In summary, the support of German politics for the global expansion plans of the German pharmaceutical and chemical companies has a 100-year-old tradition.

It is with this background that we understand the support of Bonn for the unethical plans of the Codex Commission.

The U.S. lead prosecutor in the Nuremberg War Criminal Tribunal against the IG Farben anticipated this development when he said, "these IG Farben criminals, not the lunatic Nazi fanatics, are the main war criminals. If the guilt of these criminals is not brought to daylight and if they are not punished, they will represent a much greater threat to the future peace of the world than Hitler if he were still alive."