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.
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:
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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. (...)
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"The Nazis took power in Germany in January
'33. And those first few months were very turbulent. There was the
Reichstag fire. There was the crackdown on the Communist party. There
was a crackdown on the Social Democrats. There were some arrests of
Jews who were targeted because a journalist had written against Hitler,
or they were lawyers and had prosecuted Nazis. But these were all
isolated. But there was a lot of turbulence, a lot of Nazis marching
through the streets, Fackelzug, I don't know if you know what a Fackelzug
is, that's a torchlight parade. And that's pretty frightening you
know, and somebody said, well, let's wait a little bit, maybe, it
will simmer down, it will settle down, you know, it's not going to
be that bad, maybe as time goes on, the soup isn't going to be eaten
as hot as it is cooked. We'll voe him out of office. We'll have another
election."
(From an interview with Holocaust survivor Walter
F. at the Holocaust Center of Northern California on May 15, 1990) |
Hitler and the Reichstag Fire
(from
The Columbia Encyclopedia)
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)
| (...) In fact, the Reichstag fire
of 1933 meant Hitler never actually governed from there.
Then Hitler, as the newly-installed chancellor, blamed communists
for the blaze. Most historians believe either Hitler's National
Socialist party itself was responsible or that a Dutch hitchhiker,
Marinus van der Lubbe, committed the arson attack independently.
Whoever was responsible, Hitler used the fire as a pretext to push
through an emergency law disempowering parliament and outlawing
all political opposition.
("The
Reichstag: A turbulent History" BBC News, 19 Apr 1999) |
The Reichstag Fire and the Enabling Act of 1933
(from
www.schoolshistory.org)
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.
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| 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. |
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Zyklon-B, an extermination
gas produced by Hoechst, was used to kill millions of innocent
people, before their corpses were burnt |
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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.
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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."
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On March 1,
1941, the Reichsführer of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, inspected
the construction site |
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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.
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The Nuremberg War Criminal Tribunal
US-Chief Prosecutor
Telford Taylor
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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. |
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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.
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Nuremberg War Tribunal 1946/47: 24 managers
of Hoechst, Bayer and BASF were indicted for mass murder,
slavery and other crimes against humanity. |
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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."
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