Enacted on February 28, 1933, less than one month after Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor:
§ 1. Articles 114, 115, 117, 118, 123, 124 and 153 of the Constitution of the German Reich are suspended until further notice. It is therefore permissible to restrict the rights of personal freedom [habeas corpus], freedom of (opinion) expression, including the freedom of the press, the freedom to organize and assemble, the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications. Warrants for House searches, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.
[The original German: § 1. Die Artikel 114, 115, 117, 118, 123, 124 und 153 der Verfassung des Deutschen Reichs werden bis auf weiteres außer Kraft gesetzt. Es sind daher Beschränkungen der persönlichen Freiheit, des Rechts der freien Meinungsäußerung, einschließlich der Pressefreiheit, des Vereins- und Versammlungsrechts, Eingriffe in das Brief-, Post-, Telegraphen- und Fernsprechgeheimnis, Anordnungen von Haussuchungen und von Beschlagnahmen sowie Beschränkungen des Eigentums auch außerhalb der sonst hierfür bestimmten gesetzlichen Grenzen zulässig.]
The decree was enacted without any accompanying specific guidelines, leaving wide open its interpretation and application by the National Socialist government. It remained in effect during the entirety of the Nazi era, and thousands of decrees by Adolf Hitler used the Fire Decree as their authority.
More: My Nietzsche and the Nazis, on the philosophical origins of National Socialism, in text book form or audio book form:
Hello Mister Prof. Hicks, I haven’t listened to your audio book yet. I’ll take the time to do it.
Friedrich Nietzsche would have vomited Nazism and he would have been deeply horrified by the atrocious fate that this abomination reserved for the Jews. He ended up hating anti-Semites. And we must pay attention to what he affirmed about the state:
“Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen.”
“A state, is called the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly lies it also; and this lie creepeth from his mouth: “I, the state, am the people.”
It is a lie! Creators were they who created people, and hung a faith and a love over them: thus they served life.
Destroyers, are they who lay snares for many, and call it the state: they hang a sword and a hundred cravings over them.
Where there is still a people, there the state is not understood, but hated as the evil eye, and as sin against laws and customs.”
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Concerning the socialism of Nazism, Ludwig von Mises observed in 1944 that Nazism had implemented most of the measures advocated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ Communist Manifesto:
— “Eight of the ten points (of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto) have been carried out by the Nazis with a radicalism that would have delighted Marx. Only two points have not yet been completely adopted by the Nazis, namely the expropriation of landed property and the allocation of land rent to state expenditure (point no. 1 of the Manifesto) and the abolition of inheritance (point no. 3). However, their methods of taxation, their agricultural planning, and their policy regarding the limitation of rents are moving daily in the direction of Marxism.”
Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government, The Rise of the Total State and Total War. Here : https://cdn.mises.org/Omnipotent%20Government%20The%20Rise%20of%20the%20Total%20State%20and%20Total%20War_3.pdf
And in his book The Bureaucracy . Here : https://cdn.mises.org/Bureaucracy_3.pdf)
“… Free enterprise had disappeared in Nazi Germany. There were no more entrepreneurs. Those who had been entrepreneurs were reduced to the role of Betriebsführer (factory manager). They could not run as they pleased; they were required to obey unconditionally the orders coming from the Central Office for the Organization of Production, the Reichswirtschaffsministerium, and from the agencies attached to it for each branch and each region. The state did not just set the prices and interest rates to be paid and demanded, the level of production and the methods to be used for production; it assigned a definite income to every factory manager, thus practically transforming him into a salaried civil servant. Such a system had, apart from the use of a few terms, nothing in common with capitalism and the market economy. It was simply socialism of the German type, the Zwangwirtschaff. It differed from the Russian model, a system of complete nationalization, extended to all factories, only in the technical field. And it was, of course, just like the Russian system, a type of purely authoritarian social organization.”
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Hitler declared to Hermann Rauschning in 1934, emphasizing the relationship between Nazism and Communism:
— “It is not Germany that will become Bolshevik, but Bolshevism that will transform itself into a kind of National Socialism. Moreover, there are more links that unite us with Bolshevism than elements that separate us from it. There is, above all, a true revolutionary feeling, which is alive everywhere in Russia, except where there are Marxist Jews. I have always kept things in perspective, and always enjoined that former Communists be admitted into the party without delay. The petty bourgeois socialist and the trade union leader will never make a National Socialist, but the communist militant, yes.”
Best!
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PS : I had written this under your article: “Rick Walker interviews Stephen Hicks: What recent history teaches us about the culture wars” (here : https://www.stephenhicks.org/2024/12/10/rick-walker-interview-on-what-history-teaches-us-about-the-culture-wars/#comment-458256
“… Sister who “nordified” (nordir, “nordifier” in French) his thought to stick it to Nazism. This is clearly a falsification of Nietzsche’s thought. She did not hesitate to modify certain texts in a very questionable way, to make them correspond to her own views. The most problematic falsification was that of one of Nietzsche’s major projects, but which remained unfinished and in the state of scattered notes, which she brought together according to her idea and published under the title The Will to Power. …”
Best again!
Helle Mister Prof. Hicks, me again.
So I start listening to your audiobook.
You don’t talk about what Bismarck put in place, clearly the basis for a takeover by socialism, the first welfare state.
Without that, I don’t believe that Nazism could have taken power.
Little by little, conservatism was “diluted”, it was the red carpet for socialism. True conservatism, in favor of limited government, ended up practically disappearing as the stakes went up.
Politicians promised their voters unemployment benefits, health care, reimbursed drugs, housing benefits…
This is the Bismarck paradox, who in order to attract the working class, and tried to make communism lose ground, resorted to regulations of a socialist nature.
Best !
Julien Damon – Otto von Bismarck. La protection sociale contre la social-démocratie / 100 penseurs de la société (Otto von Bismarck. Social Protection versus Social Democracy / 100 thinkers of society)
Tsanslation : Google Translate
“…
In response to socialist unrest and to combat the social democrats, Bismarck initiated a series of social reforms at the end of the 19th century that made Germany a great pioneer in social protection. On the one hand, he banned the social democratic party, and on the other hand, he introduced highly innovative legislation that was favorable to potential supporters of social democracy or socialism. In 1883, the first compulsory health insurance system for workers was thus set up. The structure was based on special institutions whose responsibility was entrusted to workers’ representatives. From 1884, industrialists had to contribute to funds that managed the risk of accidents at work. Finally, in 1889, a law introduced pensions (which could be taken at the age of sixty-five – an age rarely reached at the time)
…”