Marinus Van der Lubbe

The Reichstag was set on fire February 27, 1933. June 30 – July 2, 1934: “The Night of the Long Knives”.

Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party won a fair amount of popular support by 1932– about 33% , the Communists won about 17% of the seats, and other parties, including the “Catholic Center” party (which later joined with the Nazis to approve “The Enabling Act” making Hitler dictator), the rest.

It was not enough to give Hitler absolute power.

Then came the burning of the Reichstag, part, it was alleged, of a plot to overthrow the government, led by Marinus Van der Lubbe.

Was there ever a less impressive threat to national security than this pathetic little whiner, who was actually drummed out of the Communist Party several times because he seemed to have no sense whatsoever? No wonder many historians tried their best to prove that he was never actually involved, that it was actually Goering and his fellow jackboots (Goering joked about being responsible for it at Nuremberg). But history seems to have coalesced around the idea that Van der Lubbe really did do it– handed the Nazis a fabulous excuse to arrest their political opponents. Hitler, a witness reports, seemed genuinely startled and confused by the event.

Was Goering? There’s room for doubt. But I doubt we’ll ever know for sure.

One thing is clear: if the Nazis had planned it, it was brilliant.

People are easily frightened. Very easily frightened. Very, very easily frightened. And they are easily deceived. The weakest leaders of all, the most frightened and timid and stupid, are those who panic in a crisis and enact draconian measures. Why “The Enabling Act”, which gave Hitler absolute power? Why the NSA today? Because our leaders are cowards. They are terrified. They don’t know what to do. So they make a great show of doing something, of spending unlimited amounts of taxpayer money on useless security measures, on wars on countries that were not even involved in the original attack, and then they trump up charges against marginal suspects and rigged the court system and march them off to prison, because they are cowards.

Who has wrecked more real havoc on the lives of Americans today than the terrorists? Well, the banks. Drug dealers with the violent gang wars. Energy companies with their coal plants. The medical establishment with their ruinous charges and their end-of-life unnecessary treatments. The government, sending foolish young men overseas to die in wars against the wrong enemy. The chemical – fertilizer industries with their explosions and their fires.


It is a duty of every citizen to take sufficient measures to ensure that his own indifference, ignorance, or complicity does not lead to his fellow citizens becoming subject to tyranny.

Incidentally, the Germans can’t get enough of Marinus Van der Lubbe, the crazy Dutchman who allegedly burned down the Reichstag. After his initial trial before the Reichsgericht (German High Court) in which he was found guilty and beheaded, he was posthumously given an eight-year sentence in 1967, found innocent in 1980, not guilty by reason of insanity in 1981, and pardoned in 2008. Did he actually do it?


Ernst Rohm

The Officer class of the German Reichswehr and Hitler’s industrialist sponsors were notably concerned about the “morals” of the SA (Sturmabteilung — “Storm Battalion”) under Ernst Rohm. They didn’t like the homosexuality, the parties, and the street violence. Once Hitler eliminated Rohm and his cohorts, they were fine with the rest of the Nazi program: genocide, war, totalitarianism. As long as we don’t have any of that icky homosexuality.

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