Today's history snippet

Among my summer reading is Joachim C. Fest's biography of Hitler*. Hitler had been Chancellor for a month when, on February 28, 1933, the Reichstag was set ablaze. The fire aggravated fears of possible Communist-sponsored terror and revolution and gave Hitler a pretext for expanding state power with an emergency decree "for the protection of the people and the state." Fest talks about how conservatives who had helped bring Hitler to power, thinking they could use him for their own purposes, facilitated the establishment of Nazi dictatorship:

The decisive factor was that the conservatives made no effort to preserve the rights of habeas corpus. This "fearful gap" meant that henceforth there was no limit to outrages by the state. The police could arbitrarily "arrest and extend the period of detention indefinitely. They could leave relatives without any news concerning the reasons for the arrest and the fate of the person arrested. They could prevent a lawyer or other persons from visiting him or examining the giles on the case. . . . They could crush their prisoner with work, give him the vilest food and shelter, force him to repeat hatead slogans or sing songs. They could torture him. . . . No court would ever find the case in its files. No court had the right to interfere, even if a judge unofficially obtained knowledge of the circumstances."**

Protesters declaring equivalence between Nazi Germany and post-9/11 America go a little too far. Still, one cannot read the history of Hitler's seizure of power without seeing some parallels to actions undertaken by the American government in the name of fighting terrorism. Reading history gives us good examples of how fear can lead democratic republics down the wrong path.

*Joachim C. Fest, Hitler, Verlag Ullstein, 1973. English translation by Richard and Clara Winston, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974.
**Fest, p. 414, quoting Arnold Brecht, Vorspiel zum Schweigen: Das Ende der deutschen Republik, Vienna, 1948.