The rise of the Third Reich In 1933, shortly after Hitler's appointment as Chancellor of Germany, the German Parliament was set on fire by the Nazis and the Communists were blamed for this act of terrorism against the German people. Following the Nazi-inspired arson, Hitler exploited the outrage of the German citizens to arrogate to himself dictatorial powers, which he promised would be used to rid Germany of Communists. The next day, Chancellor Hitler demanded from the German cabinet an emergency decree which would enable him to deal decisively with the domestic crisis. President von Hindenburg signed the decree "for the Protection of the people and the State." An account of this watershed event is found at
http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/riseofhitler/burns.htm The History Place: "The exact sequence of events will never be known, but Nazi storm troopers under the direction of Goring were also involved in torching the place. They had befriended the arsonist [a Communist named Van der Lubbe] and may have known or even encouraged him to burn the Reichstag that night.

    The storm troopers, led by SA leader Karl Ernst, used the underground tunnel that connected Goring's residence with the cellar in the Reichstag. They entered the building, scattered gasoline and incendiaries, then hurried back through the tunnel. "The deep red glow of the burning Reichstag caught the eye of President Hindenburg and Vice-Chancellor Papen who were dining at a club facing the building. Papen put the elderly Hindenburg in his own car and took him to the scene. "Hitler was at Goebbels' apartment having dinner. They rushed to the scene where they met Goring who was already screaming false charges and making threats against the Communists. "At first glance, Hitler described the fire as a beacon from heaven. "'You are now witnessing the beginning of a great epoch in German history... This fire is the beginning,' Hitler told a news reporter at the scene. "After viewing the damage, an emergency meeting of government leaders was held. When told of the arrest of the Communist arsonist, Van der Lubbe, Hitler became deliberately enraged "'The German people have been soft too long.

    Every Communist official must be shot. All Communist deputies must be hanged this very night. All friends of the Communists must be locked up. And that goes for the Social Democrats and the Reichsbanner as well!' "Hitler left the fire scene and went straight to the offices of his newspaper, the Volkischer Beobachter, to oversee its coverage of the fire. He stayed up all night with Goebbels putting together a paper full of tales of a Communist plot to violently seize power in Berlin. "At a cabinet meeting held later in the morning, February 28, Chancellor Hitler demanded an emergency decree to overcome the crisis. He met little resistance from his largely non-Nazi cabinet. That evening, Hitler and Papen went to Hindenburg and the befuddled old man signed the decree 'for the Protection of the people and the State.' "The Emergency Decree stated: 'Restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press; on the rights of assembly and association; and violations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications and warrants for house searches, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.' "Immediately, there followed the first big Nazi roundup as truckloads of SA and SS roared through the streets bursting in on known Communist hangouts and barging into private homes. Thousands of Communists as well as Social Democrats and liberals were taken away into 'protective custody' to SA barracks where they were beaten and tortured. "'I don't have to worry about justice; my mission is only to destroy and exterminate, nothing more!' - Hermann Goring, March 3, 1933. "Fifty one anti-Nazis were murdered. The Nazis suppressed all political activity, meetings and publications of non-Nazi parties. The very act of campaigning against the Nazis was in effect made illegal." http://www.watch.pair.com/reich.html

    #1. The rise of the Fourth Reich The response of the United States Government to a frightened and enraged U.S. citizenry over the September 11 attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center has been eerily reminiscent of Hitler's strategy following the burning of the Reichstag. As well, the rapidity and recklessness with which the Bush administration and the U.S. Congress have abrogated the Bill of Rights places the U.S. Government squarely in the same camp with the "enemies of freedom" they purport to oppose. 1. The Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001 The U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee steamrolled through the Congress a bill which would dramatically increase the power of U.S. law enforcement agencies. Attorney General John Ashcroft insisted that the FBI needed additional surveillance and enforcement powers immediately and the Department of Justice demanded the bill be enacted by September 28. The House Judiciary committee was scheduled to vote on the Bush administration's bill on the morning of September 25; however, in response to an outcry the vote was rescheduled to take place only two days after the catastrophic attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The Senate voted for anti-terrorist legislation which increased Internet surveillance after senators were given just 30 minutes to read the measure.) According to http://www.eff.org/Pr%0d%0a%0d%0aivacy/Surveillance/20010919_doj_ata_analysis.html  (link no longer active)

    The Electronic Frontier Foundation, "... the DoJ has sat on this bill, a 'wish list', for some time, waiting to take advantage of a tragedy like the World Trade Center attack to ram it through Congress with little debate or objection." The http://www.cdt.org/security/010911response.shtml Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001 would eliminate the legal requirement for government agents to obtain permission from a judge before being allowed to search homes and download computer files. Under the proposed law, the information gathered could be used in court, a legal change which presently violates constitutional protections against search and seizure. The proposed bill would also eliminate the requirement for a judge to sign a warrant in order for government agents to obtain billing records from hotels, phone companies, and other businesses, replacing judicial review with an administrative subpoena. Essentially, agencies would be able to sign their own search warrants and conduct searches in routine secrecy, without having to notify the subject of the search. Additionally, this law gives broad surveillance powers to the federal government, and authorizes the issuance of wiretaps by a secret seven-judge court in Washington, D.C.

    The DOJ bill proposes a host of Wiretap Act expansions which are not limited to terrorism investigations, and which vastly increase the power of the federal government to conduct surveillance of the reading habits and correspondence of the American people. The DOJ bill would expand the power of the police to record the phone numbers of incoming and outgoing phone calls on a phone line to include surveillance of Internet surfing and e-mail. http://www.watch.pair.com/reich.html#2  2. Coverage on Monday, September 24, of the Anti-Terrorism Act was limited to Attorney General John Ashcroft's testimony urging hasty passage of the sweeping new police powers sought by the Bush administration. Although Ashcroft's testimony was open to television cameras, the committee's Republican staff ordered camera crews to leave when civil liberties and free-speech advocates were called to testify. This happened in violation of House rules which state, "Whenever a hearing or meeting conducted by a committee or subcommittee is open to the public, those proceedings shall be open to coverage by audio and visual means." The Office of Homeland Security "On the evening of September 20, President Bush allied himself with the worst enemies of freedom. He made a seemingly innocuous -- even a comforting-sounding --announcement. He said he had created the cabinet-level Office of Homeland Security, with Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge as its head.
 

    "Most people were utterly unaware of the significance of Bush's new bureaucracy. But for anyone watching the advance of police-state policies in America, absolutely nothing could have been more ominous. "The Homeland Defense Agency is not a new idea. Conceived by a bi-partisan commission headed by former senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman, this Clinton-era conception, 'The Phase III Report Of The U.S. Commission On National Security/21st Century,' is nothing less than the framework for a permanent military-bureaucratic American police state. "The new Homeland Defense Agency is the lynchpin of a plan that extensively reorganizes both the executive a nd legislative functions of the U.S. government. Among other things, the plan makes the National Guard a national police force. It extensively federalizes both the study and the work of science, mathematics, and engineering. It creates numerous new sub-bureaucracies. The Homeland Security agency itself is to 'be built upon the Federal "Emergency Management Agency, with the three organizations currently on the front line of border security - the Coast Guard, the Customs Service, and the Border Patrol - transferred to it.' The plan calls for the new agency to oversee activities of the Department of Defense, as well as to assume a variety of duties now held by agencies from the Department of Commerce to the FBI." http://www.watch.pair.com/reich.html#3 

    3. Compulsory National Identification Cards Hitler controlled the German citizenry by mandating national I.D. cards without which no one could obtain work, food or travel. By means of the information on these card, those who were socially unfit for the new German state were easily identified and eliminated. Within two weeks of the WTC/Pentegon attacks, ORACLE Chairman and CEO Larry Ellison called for the United States to create a
http://www.siliconvalley.com/docs/news/svfront/ellsn092301.htm
national identification system to thwart terrorists and offered to donate the software for this massive enterprise. Under Ellison's proposal, Americans would be photographed and fingerprinted and the information would be placed on a database used by airport security officials to verify identities of travelers at airplane gates. "'We need a national ID card with our photograph and thumbprint digitized and embedded in the ID card,' Ellison said in an interview Friday night on the evening news of KPIX-TV in San Francisco. 'We need a database behind that, so when you're walking into an airport and you say that you are Larry Ellison, you take that card and put it in a reader and you put your thumb down and that system confirms that this is Larry Ellison,' he said." http://www.watch.pair.com/reich.html#4 

    4. In an http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/congrec2001/cr092501.htm Address to the Congress, Congressman Ron Paul offered a more sensible alternative to the draconian measure of compulsory national ID cards: "Precise identification of all travelers on all our air flights is a desired goal. A national ID issued by the federal government would prove to be disastrous to our civil liberties and should not be considered. This type of surveillance power should never be given to an intrusive overbearing government, no matter how well intentioned the motives. "The same results can be better achieved by the marketplace. Passenger IDs voluntarily issued by the airlines could be counterfeit-proof; and loss or theft of an ID could be immediately reported to the proper authorities. An ID, fingerprints, birth certificates, or any other information can be required without any violations of anyone's personal liberty. This delicate information would not be placed in the hands of the government agents but could be made available to law enforcement officers like any other information obtained with probable cause and a warrant." http://www.watch.pair.com/reich.html#5 

    5. The Real Terrorist Network WAKE UP! For those who are skeptical that the present crisis could be at all analogous to early developments in Nazi Germany, we wish to present solid evidence that genocide is very much a part of the Bush family tradition. Government documents housed in the Library of Congress should convince even skeptics of the fascist connections of the Bush family and of the gravity of the present crisis in America, which extends far beyond Osama bin Laden's terrorist network to the larger network of Anglo-American elites -- who financed the Nazi terrorist machine. "Bush - Nazi Link Confirmed" by John Buchanan New Hampshire Gazette, Oct. 10, 2003 "WASHINGTON - After 60 years of inattention and even denial by the U.S. media, newly-uncovered government documents in The National Archives and Library of Congress reveal that Prescott Bush, the grandfather of President George W. Bush, served as a business partner of and U.S. banking operative for the financial architect of the Nazi war machine from 1926 until 1942, when Congress took aggressive action against Bush and his 'enemy national' partners. "The documents also show that Bush and his colleagues, according to reports from the U.S. Department of the Treasury and FBI, tried to conceal their financial alliance with German industrialist Fritz Thyssen, a steel and coal baron who, beginning in the mid-1920s, personally funded Adolf Hitler's rise to power by the subversion of democratic principle and German law. "Furthermore, the declassified records demonstrate that Bush and his associates, who included E. Roland Harriman, younger brother of American icon W. Averell Harriman, and George Herbert Walker, President Bush's maternal great-grandfather, continued their dealings with the German industrial baron for nearly eight months after the U.S. entered the war... "

    The grandfather of President George W. Bush (Skull & Bones, 1968) was Prescott Bush (Skull & Bones, 1917), and his great grand father was George Herbert Walker. Prescott Bush and George Herbert (Bert) Walker were directors of the London-affiliated New York banking house of Brown Brothers-Harriman and its various fronts, which funded and directed the military- industrial complex behind Hitler and the Nazi revolution. In 1919, George Herbert Walker had organized W.A. Harriman & Co which merged with the British Brown Brothers in 1931. In 1924, Averell Harriman (Skull & Bones, 1913) and Fritz Thyssen, the German industrialist who began funding Hitler in 1923, set up the Union Banking Corp in New York to handle funds supplied to it through Thyssen's Dutch bank for American investment. Prescott Bush, who had been an officer of the W.A. Harriman bank since 1926, was a director of the Union Banking Corp from 1934 through 1943. According to government documents, "all of the shares of the Union Banking Corp., were held for the benefit of members of the Thyssen family." The federal government did not crack down on the Bush-Harriman/Nazi operation until 1942. After the war, Congressional investigation revealed that Fritz Thyssen's German Steel Trust, Germany's largest industrial corporation, which interlocked with Union Banking Corporation, produced a high percentage of Germany's national output of metal products and explosives. Vesting Orders signed by the Office of Alien Property Custodian, Leo T. Crowley, which were "published in obscure government record books and kept out of the news, explained nothing about the Nazis involved; only that the Union Banking Corporation was run for the 'Thyssen family' of 'Germany and/or Hungary'-- 'nationals...of a designated enemy country.'" More at: http://www.watch.pair.com/reich.html