Rise of the NSDAP

What follows are book excerpts and notes which were prepared for this presentation.

Justifying the National Socialist Reaction to the Reichstag Fire, Part 2 - The Inevitability of the Enabling Act

In part one of this series, we showed that the threat of a Communist revolution in Germany was very real, and that the threat was recognized by the German Federal Government, right up through the early 1930's. We also saw that in its own propaganda, the German Communist Party itself had been threatening such a revolution through all of the years of the Weimar Republic. Therefore when the Reichstag burned, and the culprit was found to be a communist who admitted torching the building for the purpose of setting off such a revolution, whether the Communist Party itself was complicit or not is immaterial, the NSDAP and the German government as a whole had every right to believe that such a revolution was the purpose of the fire, and the Communist Party was therefore banned.

What follows are book excerpts and notes which were prepared for this presentation.

The Threat of Communist Revolution in Germany, 1929-1933

In order to understand why the National Socialists would immediately believe that the Reichstag Fire was a Communist plot, one must understand the extent to which Communist Revolution was a threat all throughout the post-war period of Weimar Germany. Here that shall be made evident, from a rather liberal academic who has a clear bias against the Nazis. For reason that this author, Dietrich Orlow, has a clear antipathy for National Socialism, we have chosen this source in order to make our presentation.

This article  ran in The Barnes Review in May, 1996

The 1933 International Boycott of Germany – Execution

By Udo Walendy

Udo Walendy is a German publish­er and author best known for expos­ing propaganda photographs from the world wars as fakes, “doctored” to indict Germans and Germany. His revisionist work includes periodic publication of the magazine Historical Facts, D-4973 Vlotho/Weser, Postfach 1643, Germany.

By 1933 the German people had reached their limits of tolerance under the draconian terms of the Versailles Treaty. Nationalism was on the rise. It was immediately met with an internationally coordinated effort to crush Germany's economy and keep the people in perpetual poverty and subjugation.

Previously, in an article entitled “The Economic Boycott of Germany­ - Prelude” (TBR April, 1996), the organi­zation of an international boycott against Germany was discussed. When Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor in 1933, the handwriting was on the wall for the plutocratic European forces which had kept the German nation weak and its people in near-starvation conditions for 15 years. The re-emergence of Germany as a viable player on the international stage both in commerce and as a political power could not be allowed to happen.

Consequently, Jewish organizations outside of Germany set in motion an international boycott with the specific goal of bringing down the fledgling National Socialist government. Other groups, including religious and labor organizations, were recruited to help the effort.

In this program we presented and discussed Fire in the Reichstag, by Peter Wainwright, which may be found at the Institute for Historical Review, and also Myths, Wartime Propaganda and the Burning of the Reichstag by Fred Blahut, which was published in the January, 1996 issue of The Barnes Review, the text of which is found below.

Before presenting these articles, we discussed a 2008 article from Der Spiegel, Late Justice for Nazi Scapegoat: Verdict against 1933 Reichstag Arsonist Thrown Out, which helps to establish that there is absolutely no evidence that National Socialists set the Reichstag blaze, and any assertions that they did are admittedly based only upon assumptions, by their own admittance.