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Shortly
before election day, the Reichstag building went up in flames-most
probably at the initiative of the Nazis themselves. Hearing about
the arson, Hitler reportedly first said, "Now I’ve got them
in my hands." The Nazis exploited the torching of the Reichstag
to describe the act as a manifestation of an attempted Communist
putsch and, on the basis of this allegation, to legitimize an
all-out war against the Communists. That very night, Goering
declared a supreme state of emergency throughout his police forces.
The Nazis rounded up 4,000 political activists, mostly Communists,
but including several non-Communist intellectuals. The headquarters
and newspaper editorial boards of the Social-Democratic party were
taken over. The heads of the Communist party in the Reichstag turned
themselves over to the police voluntarily to prove that the charges
were groundless. The next morning, Hitler presented President von
Hindenburg with an emergency order, ready for his signature, that
voided important basic civil rights, expanded substantially the list
of crimes that carried the death penalty, and vastly boosted the
central government’s powers to pressure the individual states. The
police were now empowered to imprison suspects and extend remand
indefinitely at their discretion. They could keep relatives utterly
uninformed about the reason for the arrest and the fate of the
imprisoned person. They could prevent lawyers or other people from
visiting detainees and reviewing their files. No court was entitled
to intervene. The emergency order, "for the protection of the
people and the State," was augmented that very day by an order
"against treason and treachery." The two orders became the
basis of jurisprudence and the foundation stones of the Nazi
dictatorship. Thus, the emergency order of February 28, 1933, read:
"Paragraphs
114, 115, 117, 118, 123, 124, and 153 in the German Reich
Constitution are provisionally null and void. Accordingly, the
restrictions on personal freedom and the right to express opinions
freely, including freedoms of the press, association, and assembly;
monitoring of letters, cables, and telephone calls, searches of
homes, and expropriation of property, and restrictions thereon, are
hereby revoked within the limits previously stipulated in the
law." The order, to be in effect until 1945, replaced
constitutional rule with a perpetual state of emergency. |
