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Collaborating for Indigenous Rights 1957-1973

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There was little contact between the inhabitants of these two worlds. The majority either didn't know or didn't care about the sufferings of the minority. However, events in the late 1950s brought the sufferings of the few into the living rooms of the many.

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Civil Rights Icons Discuss: Which countries can you think of that were under colonial rule following WW2? What were the main imperial powers in the world at this time? Key Quotes from Mahatma Ghandi: "Be the change you want to see in the world" "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

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Harrowing Aftermath Of Atomic Bomb - Hiroshima - BBC

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Hiroshima: Dropping The Bomb - Hiroshima - BBC

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Intro and activity for Kokoda focus

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Guide for correct citation of research sources.

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Info sheets with activity

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Extermination Camps The Final Solution As the Nazi efforts to deal with the 'problem' of European Jews intensified, ghettos were shut down and the concentration camps reached the next phase in their evolution; the death camps or extermination camps. This phase of the Holocaust was known as the 'Final Solution'.

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The Nazi German concentration camp and center for the extermination of Jews created during World War II on the outskirts of Oświęcim. Initially it consisted only of Auschwitz I, created in the spring of 1940, later also of the considerably larger Birkenau camp, and later still of Monowitz and almost…

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First Newsreel Pictures Of The Liberation Of The Nazi Death Camps

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These are the first actual newsreel pictures of atrocities in Nazi murder camps. April 26, 1945. This footage contains very disturbing images and is not recommended for children or the easily disturbed. In the pre-TV era, people saw the news every week in their neighborhood movie theaters.

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Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

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Concentration camps ( Konzentrationslager; abbreviated as KL or KZ) were an integral feature of the regime in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945.

The term concentration camp refers to a camp in which people are detained or confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable in a constitutional democracy.

The First Concentration Camps in Germany

The first concentration camps in Germany were established soon after Hitler's appointment as chancellor in January 1933. In the weeks after the Nazis came to power, the SA ( Sturmabteilung; commonly known as the Storm Troopers), the SS ( Schutzstaffel; Protection Squadrons-the elite guard of the Nazi party), the police, and local civilian authorities organized numerous detention camps to incarcerate real and perceived political opponents of Nazi policy.

German authorities established camps all over Germany on an ad hoc basis to handle the masses of people arrested as alleged subversives. The SS established larger camps in Oranienburg, north of Berlin; Esterwegen, near Hamburg; Dachau, northwest of Munich; and Lichtenburg, in Saxony. In Berlin itself, the Columbia Haus facility held prisoners under investigation by the Gestapo (the German secret state police) until 1936.

Centralization of the Concentration Camp System

The SS gained its independence from the SA in July 1934, in the wake of the Röhm purge. Hitler then authorized SS leader Heinrich Himmler to centralize the administration of the concentration camps and formalize them into a system. Himmler chose SS Lieutenant General Theodor Eicke for this task. Eicke had been the commandant of the SS concentration camp at Dachau since June 1933. Himmler appointed him Inspector of Concentration Camps, a new section of the SS subordinate to the SS Main Office.

After December 1934, the SS became the only agency authorized to establish and manage facilities that were formally called concentration camps. Local civilian authorities did continue to establish and manage forced-labor camps and detention camps throughout Germany. In 1937, only four concentration camps were left: Dachau, near Munich; Sachsenhausen near Berlin; Buchenwald near Weimar; and Lichtenburg near Merseburg in Saxony for female prisoners.

Purposes of the Camp System

Concentration camps are often inaccurately compared to a prison in modern society. But concentration camps, unlike prisons, were independent of any judicial review. Nazi concentration camps served three main purposes:

To incarcerate people whom the Nazi regime perceived to be a security threat. These people were incarcerated for indefinite amounts of time.

To eliminate individuals and small, targeted groups of individuals by murder, away from the public and judicial review.

To exploit forced labor of the prisoner population. This purpose grew out of a labor shortage.

Concentration Camp Administration

Already as commandant of Dachau in 1933, Eicke developed an organization and procedures to administer and guard a concentration camp. He issued regulations for the duties of the perimeter guards and for treatment of the prisoners. The organization, structure, and practice developed at Dachau in 1933-34 became the model for the Nazi concentration camp system as it expanded. Among Eicke's early trainees at Dachau was Rudolf Höss, who later commanded the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Special "political units on alert" ( Politische Bereitschaften) originally guarded the SS concentration camps. They were renamed "SS Guard Units" ( SS-Wachverbände) in 1935 and "SS Death's-Head Units" ( SS-Totenkopfverbände) in April 1936. One SS Death's-Head Unit was assigned to each concentration camp. After 1936, the camp administration, including the commandant, was also a part of the SS Death's-Head Unit.

Although all SS units wore the Death's-Head symbol (skull and crossbones) on their caps, only the SS Death's-Head Units were authorized to wear the Death's Head Symbol on their lapels. The "SS Death's-Head Division" of the Waffen SS was created in 1940. Its officers were recruited from concentration camp service. They also wore the Death's-Head symbol on their lapel.

The SS Death's-Head Unit at each camp was divided into two groups. The first was the camp staff, which covered:

the commandant and his personal staff

a Security Police officer and an assistant to maintain and update prisoner records

the commandant of the so-called protective detention camp (Schutzhaftlagerführer) which housed the prisoners, and his staff (including the labor allocation officer, the roll call officer, and the Blockführer, who were responsible for the individual prisoner barracks)

an administrative staff responsible for the fiscal and supply administration of the camp

an infirmary run by an SS physician assisted by one or two SS sanitation officers and/or medical orderlies.

The second group constituted the guard detachment ( SS-Wachbataillon), which prior to 1939 was at battalion strength.

The model established by Eicke in the mid-1930s characterized the concentration camp system until the collapse of the Nazi regime in the spring of 1945. The daily routine at Dachau, the methods of punishment, and the duties of the SS staff and guards became the norm, with some variation, at all German concentration camps.

Authority to Imprison People in Concentration Camps

After 1938, authority to incarcerate persons in a concentration camp formally rested exclusively with the German Security Police (made up of the Gestapo and the Criminal Police).

The Security Police had held this exclusive authority de facto since 1936. The "legal" instrument of incarceration was either the "protective detention" ( Schutzhaft) order or the "preventative detention" ( Vorbeugungshaft) order. The Gestapo could issue a "protective detention" order for persons considered a political danger after 1933. The Criminal Police could issue a "preventative detention" order after December 1937 for persons considered to be habitual and professional criminals, or to be engaging in what the regime defined as "asocial" behavior. Neither order was subject to judicial review, or any review by any German agency outside of the German Security Police. As the concentration camp system expanded, the camps fell within the exclusive authority of the SS. The German judicial administration had no jurisdiction with the growing camp system.

Expansion of the Camp System

Nazi Germany expanded by bloodless conquest into Austria and Czechoslovakia between 1938 and 1939. The numbers of those labeled as political opponents and as "asocials" in German society increased, requiring the establishment of new concentration camps.

By the time the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, unleashing World War II, there were six concentration camps in the so-called Greater German Reich: Dachau (founded 1933), Sachsenhausen (1936), Buchenwald (1937), Flossenbürg in northeastern Bavaria near the 1937 Czech border (1938), Mauthausen, near Linz, Austria (1938), and Ravensbrück, the women's camp, established in Brandenburg Province, southeast of Berlin (1939), after the dissolution of Lichtenburg.

Forced Labor

From as early as 1934, concentration camp commandants used prisoners as forced laborers for SS construction projects such as the construction or expansion of the camps themselves. By 1938, SS leaders envisioned using the supply of forced laborers incarcerated in the camps for a variety of SS-commissioned construction projects. To mobilize and finance such projects, Himmler revamped and expanded the administrative offices of the SS and created a new SS office for business operations. Both agencies were led by SS Major General Oswald Pohl, who would take over the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps in 1942.

Beginning a pattern that became typical after the war began, economic considerations had an increasing impact on the selection of sites for concentration camps after 1937. For instance, Mauthausen and Flossenbürg were located near large stone quarries. Likewise, concentration camp authorities increasingly diverted prisoners from meaningless, backbreaking labor to still backbreaking and dangerous labor in extractive industries, such as stone quarries and coal mines, and construction labor.

Concentration Camps after the Outbreak of World War II

After Nazi Germany unleashed World War II in September 1939, vast new territorial conquests and larger groups of potential prisoners led to the rapid expansion of the concentration camp system to the east. The war did not change the original function of the concentration camps as detention sites for the incarceration of political enemies. The climate of national emergency that the conflict granted to the Nazi leaders, however, permitted the SS to expand the functions of the camps.

The concentration camps increasingly became sites where the SS authorities could kill targeted groups of real or perceived enemies of Nazi Germany. They also came to serve as holding centers for a rapidly growing pool of forced laborers used for SS construction projects, SS-commissioned extractive industrial sites, and, by 1942, the production of armaments, weapons, and related goods for the German war effort.

Despite the need for forced labor, the SS authorities continued to deliberately undernourish and mistreat prisoners incarcerated in the concentration camps. Prisoners were used ruthlessly and without regard to safety at forced labor, resulting in high mortality rates.

Last Edited: Jun 27, 2019

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Concentration camps ( Konzentrationslager; abbreviated as KL or KZ) were an integral feature of the regime in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945. The term concentration camp refers to a camp in which people are detained or confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable in a constitutional democracy.

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Shooting was the most common form of killing used by the Einsatzgruppen. Yet in the late summer of 1941, Heinrich Himmler, noting the psychological burden that mass shootings produced on his men, requested that a more convenient mode of killing be developed.

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Trying to understand German citizen complicity in the Holocaust

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Nuremberg Race Laws & Personal Histories

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Nuremberg Race Laws & Personal Histories

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Info & Activity sheets

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From Treaty of Versailles to the rise of the Nazi's

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Origin of the Term "Ghetto"

The term "ghetto" originated from the name of the Jewish quarter in Venice, Italy. Venetian authorities compelled the city's Jews to live in the quarter, which was established in 1516. In the 16th and 17th centuries, officials ranging from local authorities to the Austrian emperor ordered the creation of ghettos for Jews in Frankfurt, Rome, Prague, and other cities.

Ghettos during World War II

During World War II, the SS and other German occupation authorities concentrated urban and sometimes regional Jewish populations in ghettos. Living conditions were miserable. Ghettos were often enclosed districts that isolated Jews by separating Jewish communities from the non-Jewish population and from other Jewish communities. The Germans established at least 1,143 ghettos in the occupied eastern territories. There were three types of ghettos:

closed ghettos

open ghettos

destruction ghettos

German occupation authorities established the first ghetto in occupied Poland in Piotrków Trybunalski in October 1939. The largest ghetto in occupied Poland was the Warsaw ghetto. In Warsaw, more than 400,000 Jews were crowded into an area of 1.3 square miles. Other major ghettos were established in the cities of Lodz, Krakow, Bialystok, Lvov, Lublin, Vilna, Kovno, Czestochowa, and Minsk. Tens of thousands of western European Jews were also deported to ghettos in the east.

The Germans ordered Jews in the ghettos to wear identifying badges or armbands. They also required many Jews to carry out forced labor for the German Reich. Nazi-appointed Jewish councils ( Judenraete) administered daily life in the ghettos. A ghetto police force enforced the orders of the German authorities and the ordinances of the Jewish councils. This included facilitating deportations to killing centers. Jewish police officials, like Jewish council members, served at the whim of the German authorities. The Germans did not hesitate to kill those Jewish policemen who were perceived to have failed to carry out orders.

Ghettos and the "Final Solution"

In many places, ghettoization lasted a short time. Some ghettos existed for only a few days. Others lasted for months or years. The Germans saw the ghettos as a provisional measure to control and segregate Jews while the Nazi leadership in Berlin deliberated upon options for the removal of the Jewish population.

With the implementation of the " Final Solution" (the plan to murder all European Jews) beginning in late 1941, the Germans systematically destroyed the ghettos. The Germans and their auxiliaries either shot ghetto residents in mass graves located nearby or deported them. Jews were deported to killing centers. German SS and police authorities also deported a small minority of Jews from ghettos to forced-labor camps and concentration camps.

In August 1944, German SS and police completed the destruction of the last major ghetto, in Lodz.

Resistance in the Ghettos

Jews responded with a variety of resistance efforts. Ghetto residents frequently smuggled food, medicine, weapons, or intelligence across the ghetto walls. These and other such activities often took place without the knowledge or approval of the Jewish councils. On the other hand, some Jewish councils and some individual council members tolerated or encouraged the smuggling because the goods were necessary to keep ghetto residents alive.

The Germans generally showed little concern in principle about religious worship, attendance at cultural events, or participation in youth movements inside the ghetto walls. However, they often saw a "security threat" in any social gathering and would move ruthlessly to incarcerate or kill perceived ringleaders and participants. The Germans generally forbade any form of consistent schooling or education.

In the very beginning, my mother and several other women organized a clandestine school for children who were below the age of work, and it was a wonderful thing because we had something to look forward to
- Charlene Schiff

In some ghettos, members of Jewish resistance movements staged armed uprisings. The largest of these was the Warsaw ghetto uprising in spring 1943. There were also violent revolts in Vilna, Bialystok, Czestochowa, and several smaller ghettos.

Ghettos in Hungary

In Hungary, ghettoization did not begin until the spring of 1944 after the German invasion and occupation. In less than three months, the Hungarian gendarmerie, coordinating with German deportation experts from the Reich Main Office for Security, concentrated nearly 440,000 Jews from all over Hungary except for the capital city, Budapest. They forced the Jews into short-term "destruction ghettos" and then deported them into German custody at the Hungarian border. The Germans deported most of the Hungarian Jews to the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center.

In Budapest, Hungarian authorities required Jews to confine themselves to marked houses (so-called Star of David houses). On October 15, 1944, leaders of the fascist Arrow Cross movement seized power in a German-sponsored coup. A few weeks later, the Arrow Cross government formally established a ghetto in Budapest. About 63,000 Jews lived in this 0.1 square mile area. Approximately 25,000 Jews who carried certificates indicating they were under the protection of a neutral power were confined in an "international ghetto" in the city. In January 1945, Soviet forces liberated that part of Budapest in which the two ghettos were located and liberated the nearly 90,000 Jewish residents.

Last Edited: Dec 4, 2019

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The term "ghetto" originated from the name of the Jewish quarter in Venice, Italy. Venetian authorities compelled the city's Jews to live in the quarter, which was established in 1516. In the 16th and 17th centuries, officials ranging from local authorities to the Austrian emperor ordered the creation of ghettos for Jews in Frankfurt, Rome, Prague, and other cities.

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Citation: C N Trueman "Censorship in Nazi Germany"
historylearningsite.co.uk. The History Learning Site, 9 Mar 2015. 8 Aug 2017.

Censorship was rampant throughout Nazi Germany. Censorship ensured that Germans could only see what the Nazi hierarchy wanted people to see, hear what they wanted them to hear and read only what the Nazis deemed acceptable. The Nazi police dealt with anyone who went outside of these boundaries. Censorship dominated the lives of the ordinary citizen in Nazi Germany.

Joseph Goebbels

The prime mover in censorship was the Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels. It was his responsibility to see that the German people were fed with material acceptable to the Nazi state. Newspapers, radio and all forms of media were put under the control of the Nazis. Even the film industry became controlled by the Nazis where the leading light was Leni Riefenstahl- who, though favoured by Hitler, did not enjoy a good relationship with Goebbels. Music was controlled by the Nazis. Music by Gustav Mahler and Felix Mendelssohn was banned as they were both Jews. Jazz was also banned. Even telling jokes about Hitler became a serious offence - one to send you to the concentration camps and potentially death.

Censorship was enforced by a number of methods. First, the secret police or the 'normal' police ensured that the rules were kept to. Secondly, anyone who wanted to go outside of the desired party norm faced the most serious of consequences. Third, people in general were expected to report anything unacceptable to their local party chief. Those who knew something but did not report it were deemed as guilty as those who went against the system. Censorship ensured that the Nazis had the German public in their grip as they bombarded them on a daily basis on how their lives had been improved from the day Hitler became Germany's leader.

"There was once a nanny-goat who said,
In my cradle someone sang to me:
"A strong man is coming.
He will set you free!"The ox looked at her askance.
Then turning to the pig
He said,
"That will be the butcher."Bertolt Brecht

Brecht was a left-wing writer who had his work banned.

"The chief function of propaganda is to convince the masses, who slowness of understanding needs to be given time in order that they may absorb information; and only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea on their mind.........the slogan must of course be illustrated in many ways and from several angles, but in the end one must always return to the assertion of the same formula. The one will be rewarded by the surprising and almost incredible results that such a personal policy secures."Adolf Hitler from "Mein Kampf"

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Censorship in Nazi Germany - History Learning Site

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Censorship was rampant throughout Nazi Germany. Censorship ensured that Germans could only see what the Nazi hierarchy wanted people to see, hear what they wanted them to hear and read only what the Nazis deemed acceptable. The Nazi police dealt with anyone who went outside of these boundaries.

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Citation: C N Trueman "The Nazi Police State"
historylearningsite.co.uk. The History Learning Site, 9 Mar 2015. 8 Aug 2017.

The Nazi Police State was to ensure that everybody did as they were told - or paid the price. The Nazi Police were controlled by Heinrich Himmler and his feared secret police - the Gestapo - did as it pleased in Nazi Germany. Children's loyalty could be developed with a policy of indoctrination via education and the Hitler Youth movement. Time and planning spent in these areas would bring a suitable reward for Hitler.

Adults were a different proposition. Some adults clearly supported Hitler - as the March 1933 election showed. But the same election clearly showed that a substantial number of Germans did not support Hitler and the Nazis. These people were likely to be a constant thorn for Hitler unless they were dealt with. For these people, the Nazis developed a policy of intimidation. Fear became a by-word for those who did not support Hitler. The wrong comment overheard by a Nazi official could have very serious consequences.

Hitler's police state worked on the rule that if you said nothing, no harm, could come to you. If you had doubts about the way the country was going, you kept them to yourself - or paid the price. As nearly 17 million people had not voted for either the Nazis or the Nationalist in March 1933, a large and visible police force was required to keep this sizeable group under observation and control.

In Nazi Germany the police were allowed to arrest people on suspicion that they were about to do wrong. This gave the police huge powers. All local police units had to draw up a list of people in their locality who might be suspected of being "Enemies of the State". This list was given to the Gestapo - the Secret Police. The Gestapo had the power to do as it liked. Its leader - Reinhard Heydrich - was one of the most feared man in Nazi Germany. His immediate chief was Heinrich Himmler. Both men ran their respective branches with ruthless efficiency.

Those arrested by either the police or the Gestapo had less than three minutes to pack clothing and say their goodbyes. Once arrested, they were sent to the nearest police cell. Those in custody were told to sign Form D-11; this was an "Order For Protective Custody". By signing this, you agreed to go to prison. Those who did not sign it were beaten until they did or officers simply forged their signature. Once a D-11 was signed, you were sent to a concentration camp. How long you stayed here depended on the authorities. The usual rule of thumb was whether it was felt that you had learned your lesson (even if there had not been one to learn) and would behave in an acceptable manner once outside of prison.

The concentration camps were deliberately barbaric. Before 1939, deaths in them occurred but they were not common. The idea was that anybody who had been in one, once released, would 'advertise' the fact that they were not places where people wanted to go. This was another way of ensuring that people kept their ideas to themselves.

The concentration camps were run by men who could disguise their violent nature simply because they wore a uniform. The flogging of inmates was common -25 strokes was common practice - and the amenities were very basic and sparse. At Buchenwald, 480 men had one water tap between them which could only be used for 15 minutes on getting up. Any abuse of this rule would lead to 25 lashes. Any arrested Jew would get 60 lashes - a personal order from Hitler. Soap, toothpaste, toothbrushes etc were unheard of in camps such as Buchenwald (which held 8000 prisoners) and Dachau. Food and drink were minimal and the Jews had half the rations of other prisoners

Who would get arrested?

The list was intentionally expansive. Anybody considered to be a political threat was arrested;

those who made jokes about the Nazi Party were also arrested (jokes about Hitler were punished with death); the "work shy" were also arrested (this fitted in exactly with Hitler's plan to reduce unemployment as an unemployed person would be offered work at a Labour Exchange and if they refused it as too menial for them, they would be arrested as work shy. As no-one in concentration camps counted as unemployed, the figures for unemployment had to come down; "Bibelforscher's" were also arrested (these were people who would only seek guidance from the Bible and rejected all Nazi ideas and they also refused to do military service); homosexuals were also arrested and the SS used this as a common tactic to discredit someone. habitual criminals were also arrested.

In 1936, the Gestapo Law meant that the activities of the Gestapo were free from any review by courts of law. This law effectively meant that the Gestapo became a law unto themselves. This non-uniformed branch of the SS became justifiably feared just as the visible presence of the black uniformed SS men did. Himmler's view on the SS was simple. In 1943 he said:

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The Nazi Police State - History Learning Site

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The Nazi Police State was to ensure that everybody did as they were told - or paid the price. The Nazi Police were controlled by Heinrich Himmler and his feared secret police - the Gestapo - did as it pleased in Nazi Germany. Children's loyalty could be developed with a policy of indoctrination viaeducation and ...

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JUNE 17, 1936 HEINRICH HIMMLER BECOMES CHIEF OF THE GERMAN POLICE Adolf Hitler appoints SS chief Heinrich Himmler chief of all German police units. All police powers are now centralized. The Gestapo (German secret state police) comes under Himmler's control. Responsible for state security, it has the authority to send individuals to concentration camps.

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Night of the broken glass: victim account

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Night of the broken glass: victim account

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Transcript from JOHANNA GERECHTER NEUMANN

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The "Night of Broken Glass" On the night of November 9-10, 1938, the Nazi regime coordinated a wave of antisemitic violence in Nazi Germany. This became known as Kristallnacht or the "Night of Broken Glass." It was named for the shattered glass from store windows that littered the streets after the violence.

The violence was supposed to look like an unplanned outburst of anger against Jews. In fact, Nazi leaders actively coordinated it with Adolf Hitler's support. On the night of November 9, they ordered members of the Nazi Party's paramilitaries (the SS, the SA, and the Hitler Youth) to attack Jewish communities.

In the hours and days that followed, organized groups of Nazis wreaked havoc on Jewish life in Nazi Germany. They burned hundreds of synagogues. They vandalized thousands of Jewish-owned businesses, shattering the glass in storefronts. They damaged Jewish cemeteries and homes. Nazi leaders told the police and fire brigades to ignore the attacks. Police forces did not protect Jews or their property. Fire brigades did not put out fires in synagogues. Hundreds of Jews died during Kristallnacht and its aftermath.

The next morning, the Nazi regime ordered the police to arrest about 30,000 German Jewish men. These men had not committed any crime. The police arrested them simply for being Jewish. They were sent to such concentration camps as Dachau and Buchenwald. The arrests shocked and terrified Jewish families and communities. The Nazi authorities released many of these men if families could prove they had plans to leave Germany. Other men died in these camps.

The Night of Broken Glass was an important turning point for Germany's Jews. Afterwards, many Jews concluded that there was no future for them in Nazi Germany.

Key Dates

November 7, 1938
The catalyst for Herschel Grynszpan shoots Ernst vom Rath. Grynszpan is a 17-year-old Polish-German Jew living in Paris. Vom Rath is a minor German diplomat posted to the German embassy in Paris. Grynszpan apparently acts out of despair over the fate of his parents, whom the Nazi regime had expelled from Germany to Poland. The Nazis use the shooting to incite antisemitic fervor. They claim that Grynszpan did not act alone, but was part of a wider Jewish conspiracy against Germany. When vom Rath dies on November 9, Nazi leaders use this theory as a pretext for Kristallnacht .

November 9, 1938
Joseph Goebbels instigates Nazi Party leaders from across Germany gather in Munich to commemorate the Beer Hall Putsch. The Beer Hall Putsch was a failed attempt by Adolf Hitler in 1923 to seize power in Germany. During the event, they learn vom Rath has died of his wounds. In response, German propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels delivers a passionate antisemitic speech. With Hitler's permission, Goebbels calls for an attack on Germany's Jewish communities. After the speech, Nazi officials call their home districts and communicate Goebbels' instructions. This results in the violence known today as Kristallnacht , or the "Night of Broken Glass."

November 15, 1938
Americans condemn American newspaper headlines condemn the violence of Kristallnacht . At a press conference on November 15, 1938, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt denounces the antisemitic attack. In an official statement, he writes, "I myself could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a twentieth-century civilization." The president recalls the US ambassador to Germany.

Last Edited: Jan 15, 2021

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The "Night of Broken Glass" On the night of November 9-10, 1938, the Nazi regime coordinated a wave of antisemitic violence in Nazi Germany. This became known as Kristallnacht or the "Night of Broken Glass." It was named for the shattered glass from store windows that littered the streets after the violence.

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The Nuremberg Race Laws At the annual party rally held in Nuremberg in 1935, the Nazis announced new laws which institutionalized many of the racial theories prevalent in Nazi ideology. The laws excluded German Jews from Reich citizenship and prohibited them from marrying or having sexual relations with persons of "German or related blood." Ancillary ordinances to the laws disenfranchised Jews and deprived them of most political rights.

The Nuremberg Laws, as they became known, did not define a "Jew" as someone with particular religious beliefs. Instead, anyone who had three or four Jewish grandparents was defined as a Jew, regardless of whether that individual identified himself or herself as a Jew or belonged to the Jewish religious community. Many Germans who had not practiced Judaism for years found themselves caught in the grip of Nazi terror. Even people with Jewish grandparents who had converted to Christianity were defined as Jews.

For a brief period after Nuremberg, in the weeks before and during the 1936 Olympic Games held in Berlin, the Nazi regime actually moderated its anti-Jewish attacks and even removed some of the signs saying "Jews Unwelcome" from public places. Hitler did not want international criticism of his government to result in the transfer of the Games to another country. Such a loss would have been a serious blow to German prestige.

After the Olympic Games (in which the Nazis did not allow German Jewish athletes to participate), the Nazis again stepped up the persecution of German Jews. In 1937 and 1938, the government set out to impoverish Jews by requiring them to register their property and then by "Aryanizing" Jewish businesses. This meant that Jewish workers and managers were dismissed, and the ownership of most Jewish businesses was taken over by non-Jewish Germans who bought them at bargain prices fixed by Nazis. Jewish doctors were forbidden to treat non-Jews, and Jewish lawyers were not permitted to practice law.

Like everyone in Germany, Jews were required to carry identity cards, but the government added special identifying marks to theirs: a red "J" stamped on them and new middle names for all those Jews who did not possess recognizably "Jewish" first names-"Israel" for males, "Sara" for females. Such cards allowed the police to identify Jews easily.

Key Dates

September 15, 1935
Nuremberg Laws are instituted
At their annual party rally, the Nazis announce new laws that revoke Reich citizenship for Jews and prohibit Jews from marrying or having sexual relations with persons of "German or related blood." "Racial infamy," as this becomes known, is made a criminal offense. The Nuremberg Laws define a "Jew" as someone with three or four Jewish grandparents. Consequently, the Nazis classify as Jews thousands of people who had converted from Judaism to another religion, among them even Roman Catholic priests and nuns and Protestant ministers whose grandparents were Jewish.

October 18, 1935
New marriage requirements instituted
The "Law for the Protection of the Hereditary Health of the German People" requires all prospective marriage partners to obtain from the public health authorities a certificate of fitness to marry. Such certificates are refused to those suffering from "hereditary illnesses" and contagious diseases and those attempting to marry in violation of the Nuremberg Laws.

November 14, 1935
Nuremberg Law extended to other groups
The first supplemental decree of the Nuremberg Laws extends the prohibition on marriage or sexual relations between people who could produce "racially suspect" offspring. A week later, the minister of the interior interprets this to mean relations between "those of German or related blood" and Roma (Gypsies), blacks, or their offspring.

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The Nuremberg Race Laws At the annual party rally held in Nuremberg in 1935, the Nazis announced new laws which institutionalized many of the racial theories prevalent in Nazi ideology. The laws excluded German Jews from Reich citizenship and prohibited them from marrying or having sexual relations with persons of "German or related blood."

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Adolf Hitler History Channel Documentary

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1933 Hitler Becomes Chancellor of Germany

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2nd August 1934: Hitler becomes Führer following Hindenburg's death

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On the 2nd August 1934, the 86 year old German Reichspräsident Paul von Hindenburg died of lung cancer and Adolf Hitler became both the Führer and Reich Chancellor of the German People.

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The History Place - Rise of Hitler: Hitler Named Leader of Nazi Party

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Part 11 of a complete online histroy, The Rise of Adolf Hitler - From Unknown to Dictator of Germany, at The History Place.

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Citation: C N Trueman "Weimar elections 1928 to 1932"
historylearningsite.co.uk. The History Learning Site, 22 May 2015. 3 Aug 2017.

The elections that were held in Weimar Germany from 1928 to 1932 were invariably held against the shadow of the economic depression that haunted Europe. With rising unemployment and no obvious sign that Weimar was going to get out of the downward spiral, Hitler sold to the German people his simple idea: you have given the politicians of Weimar a chance since the end of World War One and they have failed - give me just one chance. The elections of 1928, 1930, and the two held in 1932 showed that the people of Weimar Germany were willing to do so - but not in the overwhelming numbers that Hitler might have anticipated.

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Weimar elections 1928 to 1932 - History Learning Site

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Weimar elections 1928 to 1932 The elections that were held in Weimar Germany from 1928 to 1932 were invariably held against the shadow of the economic depression that haunted Europe. With rising unemployment and no obvious sign that Weimar was going to get out of the downward spiral, Hitler sold to the German people his simple ...

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excerpt from Goebbels article, 1932

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mini lesson

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How did Hitler rise to power? - Alex Gendler and Anthony Hazard

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When each day brings more news than we are used to seeing in a week, and the kind of news that only the most catastrophic imagination can accommodate, we find ourselves talking about the Reichstag fire. Time feels both accelerated and slowed down, and so we imagine that we have been talking about the fire for years. It is the new president's new clothes: invisible, yet always present in our perception of him.

The Reichstag fire, it goes almost without saying, will be a terrorist attack, and it will mark our sudden, obvious, and irreversible descent into autocracy. Here is what it looks like: On a sunny morning you turn on the television as you make coffee, or the speaker in your shower streams the news, or the radio comes on when you turn the ignition key in your car. The voices of the newscasters are familiar, but their pitch is altered, and they speak with a peculiar haste. Something horrible has happened-it is not yet clear what-and thousands are dead, and more are expected to die. You hear the word "terror." You feel it.

You reach for your cell phone, but the circuits are busy, and will be for hours-it will take you the rest of the day to check in with your loved ones. They are safe, but changed. And so are you. So are all of us. Tragedy has cast its shadow over every space where you encounter strangers: the subway, your child's school, your lunch spot. People are quieter, less frivolous, yet they are not subdued. They share a sense of purpose that is greater than their fear. They are experiencing something they'd only read about: War has come to their land. Everyone is a patriot now.

You used to scoff at that word, or argue that dissent was the highest form of patriotism. But now you find that the word expresses what you are. Now is not the moment for dissent. A couple of public intellectuals insist that it is, and you feel embarrassed for them. They quickly fade from the scene, and this serves to underscore an unprecedented sort of unity.

Nowhere is this unity more evident than in Washington. Bills are passed unanimously. These laws give new powers to the president and his security apparatus. The president, unpopular and widely considered incompetent before the attack, now steps up to direct the war effort. His demeanor-which some used to deride as primitive-is well suited for this new black-and-white era. His administration institutes sweeping surveillance to ferret out enemies at home, and wages one war and then another abroad.

American public life is profoundly transformed. The press becomes uncritical of the government. There is no outright censorship; correspondents are part of the effort now, as they were during the Second World War. American casualties pile up, the foreign carnage is enormous and unmeasured, but there is scant domestic resistance. Only at the margins of politics and the media do some people question the usefulness and legality of the war effort.

The government pushes the limits further, cutting off access to the judiciary for those deemed the enemy. The president is no longer unpopular, and he can impose his will on Washington and the country. The country is in a forever war, a state of exception that has taken away many American freedoms, some of which were ceded voluntarily.

That is what we talk about when we talk about the Reichstag fire, and it has already happened. Like sad versions of the characters in The Wizard of Oz, who set off in search of traits they already possess, we are living in fear of an event that will catapult us into a terrifying future, when the event has already occurred-and has given us our terrifying present.

The actual fire in the Reichstag-the German parliament building-burned on the evening of February 27, 1933. Adolf Hitler had been appointed chancellor four weeks earlier, and already he had begun placing restrictions on the press and expanding the powers of the police. Yet it is the fire, rather than Hitler's toxic first steps, that is remembered as the event after which things were never the same, in Germany or in the world.

Hitler capitalized on the fire by taking an uncompromising militant stand: "There will be no mercy now. Anyone standing in our way will be cut down." This, in turn, probably boosted his popularity, paving the way for a victory for the Nazi Party in parliamentary elections a week later.

Hitler immediately began cracking down on the political opposition. The day after the fire, the government issued a decree allowing the police to detain people without charges, on the grounds of prevention. Activists were rounded up by his paramilitary forces, the SA and the SS, and placed in camps. Less than a month later, the parliament passed an "enabling act," creating rule by decree and establishing a state of emergency that lasted as long as the Nazis were in power.

Anschluss-the annexation of Austria-was still five years away, and the start of the Second World War six and a half, but the Reichstag fire was used to create a state of exception, as Carl Schmitt, Hitler's favorite legal scholar, called it. In Schmitt's terms, a state of exception arises when an emergency, a singular event, shakes up the accepted order of things. This is when the sovereign steps forward and institutes new, extralegal rules. The emergency enables a quantum leap: The sovereign has to have enough power to declare a state of exception, and then by that declaration he acquires far greater, unchecked power. That is what makes the change irreversible, and the state of exception permanent.

Every galvanizing event of the past eighty years has been compared to the Reichstag fire. On December 1, 1934, Sergei Kirov, the head of the Communist Party in Leningrad, was murdered by a lone gunman. The killer, Leonid Nikolaev, was arrested and executed, but the assassination is remembered as the pretext for creating a state of exception in Russia. Show trials and mass arrests followed, swelling the gulag with people accused of being traitors, spies, and terrorist plotters. To handle the volume, the Kremlin created troikas-three-person panels that doled out a sentence without reviewing the case, much less hearing from the defense.

More recently, Vladimir Putin has relied on a succession of catastrophic events to create irreversible exceptions. In 1999, a series of apartment bombings in Moscow and cities in southern Russia killed hundreds. This allowed Putin to proclaim that he could summarily execute those deemed "terrorists" and became a pretext for a new war in Chechnya. In 2002, the three-day siege of a Moscow theater served as a demonstration of the principle of summary execution: Russian law enforcement pumped the theater full of sleeping gas, entered the building, and shot the hostage-takers as they lay unconscious. The Kremlin also used the theater siege as a pretext to ban the already cowed media from covering anti-terrorist operations. Two years later, more than three hundred people, most of them children, died following an attack at a school in Beslan, in southern Russia. Putin used this catastrophic event to cancel the elections of local governors, effectively abolishing the country's federal structure.

The thinking that transforms tragedy into crackdown is not foreign to the United States. During the crisis that followed the Alien and Sedition Acts at the turn of the nineteenth century, the ruling Federalists and the opposition Republicans accused each other of treason and a fatal lack of vigilance, of being Jacobin puppets. The courts, stacked with Federalist appointees, wasted no time shutting down opposition newspapers.

Half a century later, Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, the right not to be imprisoned without civilian judicial review. He did this to be able to indefinitely hold rebels whom he judged a danger to the Union-but whom, he said, "the courts, acting on ordinary rules, would discharge." It wasn't until 1866 that the Supreme Court ruled the practice unconstitutional.

By the next major war, the First World War, speech perceived as critical of or detrimental to the American war effort was punished with prison sentences as long as ten years. Historian Geoffrey Stone has called Woodrow Wilson's Sedition Act of 1918 "the most repressive legislation in American history." Thousands of people were arrested-many without a warrant-and 249 anarchist and communist activists were deported to Soviet Russia. It wasn't until later that Supreme Court Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Louis Brandeis started on a dissenting streak that ultimately restored and clarified free-speech protections.

The Second World War brought another presidential assault on the Constitution: the internment of more than a hundred thousand Americans of Japanese descent. Then came the McCarthy era, when the government took up spying on the enemy within and accusations of treason, whether or not they were supported by evidence, ruined life after life. The next generation of Americans lived through the secrecy, deceit, and paranoia of the Vietnam War years, which culminated in a president who had his opponents prosecuted and wiretapped. For Americans in the twentieth century a state of exception came close to being the rule.

Not all the periods of exception are remembered as repressive: In State of Exception, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben notes that Franklin Roosevelt invoked emergency powers for the passage of the New Deal in 1933, arguing that economic catastrophe warranted "broad Executive power to wage war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe." Writing in 2005, Agamben drew a narrative line from the state of exception in Europe following the First World War to that in America following 9/11.

As long as war is raging, political consensus supports the crackdowns. Legal scholar Stephen Holmes calls this wisdom "the intuitive claim that grave emergencies require discretionary authority to act outside and against inherited rules and standard operating procedures." There is no proof that such a response is effective-and there is even copious evidence that it leads to abuse of power and damage to society-but the temptation to both seize and cede power in the face of fear proves irresistible time after time.

The war that began in 2001 is unlike other wars: The enemy is not a nation or an army but a tactic, one that has existed for millennia. This war cannot be won, because a tactic cannot be eradicated. A war that cannot be won cannot end, and so it has not. Nor have the liberties surrendered by Americans in response to 9/11 been restored. Under President Obama, the war on terror morphed into the more grammatically sensible war on terrorism. The Patriot Act became the Freedom Act. The use of torture appears to have been largely discontinued, but the camp at Guantánamo Bay continues its shameful existence-with a reduced number of inmates, though numbers are never a good measure of liberty. Millions of Americans who voted in the last election have lived with the war on terror for as long as they can remember.

In his farewell address in Chicago, Obama could claim only that he had "worked to put the fight against terrorism on a firmer legal footing. That's why we've ended torture, worked to close Gitmo, reformed our laws governing surveillance to protect privacy and civil liberties. That's why I reject discrimination against Muslim Americans," he said, interrupted by cheers before continuing, "who are just as patriotic as we are." Over the course of more than fifteen years, the essential premise-that the United States is at war, and that the Other in this war is Muslims-has remained unchanged. Trump claims that Muslim Americans celebrated 9/11, while Obama says that they are just as patriotic as we are; that they are not us is one of the few things the two men agree on.

The current state of exception rests in part on the national state of emergency, which George W. Bush declared three days after the September 11 attacks, which he renewed every year of his presidency, and which Obama also renewed every September of his. The president's ability to impose and renew a state of emergency is technically limited by the 1976 National Emergencies Act, which requires Congress to vote on the state of emergency within six months of the day it is imposed. But such a vote has never occurred-even though the act has been invoked at least fifty-three times. In practice, the president wields unilateral power over emergencies.

The National Emergencies Act can be invoked for disasters beyond an actual war-Obama declared a national emergency in anticipation of the swine flu epidemic in 2009-but it invariably represents both an outsized reaction to a perceived threat and a journey outside what we maintain is normal national and social conduct. At any given time in the past decade, roughly thirty simultaneous states of emergency have been in effect. Dozens of executive orders, and numerous other directives and regulations, have stemmed from these states of emergency-all of them creating powers that would be impossible in the increasingly illusory normal state of things. A state of emergency allows the president to unilaterally seize control of the media, food supplies, and commercial vessels, for instance. The fact that Bush and Obama did not utilize some of the more extreme possibilities of the state of emergency testifies only to their restraint, not to the legal limitations. At the same time, we know less and less about the powers the government has exercised; since 2001, an ever-increasing number of these emergency powers have been classified.

The state of exception also rests on the Authorization for Use of Military Force, which was passed by Congress three days after the attacks in 2001. It gives the president sweeping power to

use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations, or persons.

The law, passed with a single dissenting vote, remains in force as the nation enters its fourth post-9/11 presidential term.

Today, when it is said that a terrorist attack is sure to happen, it is assumed that the attack will be carried out in the name of the Islamic State. The premise of inevitability is notable-one would think that such acts of terror occurred in the United States on a regular basis. Since September 11, 2001, however, there have been eleven attacks ostensibly driven by jihadist ideology; they have claimed a total of ninety-five lives. "The death toll has been quite similar to other forms of political-and even non-political-violence Americans face today," a recent report from the New America foundation summarized. The report referred only to domestic terrorism and mass shooting incidents, but many more Americans have died at the hands of the state: In the first four months of this year, the use of deadly force by police claimed three times as many lives. These killings, extrajudicial by definition, are a symptom of the state of exception, which has turned the police into a military force. As a nation we insist on being united in fear of the one-in-millions chance of a particular kind of violence. That we seem so certain of the outlines of the Reichstag fire to come reveals the fact that it has already occurred.

Among the victims of the sixteen-year-old state of exception are hundreds of individuals identified, prosecuted, and sentenced under emergency rules. Since the war on terror began, the United States has prosecuted an average of forty terrorism cases per year, about half of them on the basis of informant operations. Convictions that result from such cases-and convictions result almost without fail, usually as the result of a plea bargain-fetch higher sentences because of something known as the terrorism adjustment in federal sentencing guidelines. The adjustment went into effect following the World Trade Center bombing of 1993 but was used most widely after 9/11. This was a law passed by Congress, yet it created an exceptional category of crime that could not be addressed by normal law. One example is the prosecution of two Iraqi refugees who were tried in Bowling Green, Kentucky, for allegedly intending to help insurgent fighters battling U.S. forces back home. The men were convicted of terrorism, even though the accusation against them-that they aided fighters confronting an army-doesn't fit standard definitions of terrorism. They were sentenced to life in prison, in the case of a man arrested at the age of twenty-three, and forty years behind bars, for the one who cooperated with the prosecution. This was the case that Trump aide Kellyanne Conway presumably had in mind when she conjured the memory of the Bowling Green Massacre-something that never happened but, according to the logic the country has applied over the past decade and a half, could have happened.

A key characteristic of the most frightening regimes of the past hundred years is mobilization. This is what distinguishes the merely authoritarian regimes from the totalitarian ones. Authoritarians prefer their subjects passive, tending to their private lives while the authoritarian and his cronies amass wealth and power. The totalitarian wants people out in the square; he craves their adulation and devotion, their willingness to fight and die for him. Mobilization was just as important an element of Hitler's 1933 consolidation of power as his crackdown. Victory rallies, national holidays, and parades demonstrated, even forced, the unity of a nation. In Germans into Nazis, historian Peter Fritzsche makes no mention of the Reichstag fire but devotes a chapter to the May Day parade of 1933, a daylong, citywide spectacle "carefully choreographed to .?.?. demonstrate the national sense of purpose that was now said to animate the German people."

To totalitarianism watchers, Trump's campaign rallies, which segued into his victory rallies, including his "America First" inauguration, have looked familiar and perhaps more worrisome than an imaginary future fire. To historians of the twenty-first century, however, they will likely look like logical steps from the years of war rhetoric that preceded them, not quantum leaps. A nation can be mobilized only if it knows its enemy and believes in its own peril.

It is not clear how many Germans attended that May Day parade because the spirit moved them and how many were compelled by fear or force. Four and a half decades later, in "The Power of the Powerless," the Czech dissident Václav Havel described an individual who "lives within a lie," the lie of the official ideology, without consciously accepting or rejecting it. Totalitarianism robs a person of the very ability to form an opinion.

Fear has a way of catapulting citizens into the inside of a lie. Following the apartment-building bombings of 1999, Russians huddled together, forming neighborhood patrols, eyeing strangers and neighbors alike with suspicion, and then threw their support behind the recently appointed prime minister, Vladimir Putin. In one of his first public statements, the unknown, gray little politician promised to hunt down terrorists and "rub them out in the outhouse," rhetorically trampling the foundations of the justice system.

Americans, too, have finely honed instincts for banding together in the face of an attack. Within hours of the September 11 attacks, 150 members of Congress gathered on the Capitol steps and sang "God Bless America." Some of them held hands. The strongest country on the planet was making a spectacle of fear and resolve. The following day, a train traveling between Boston and New York was stopped because passengers had been alarmed by the presence of a Sikh man; he was removed. Two days later, enabling legislation-bills on war powers and the state of emergency-were passed.

Trump does not have to declare war-this has already been done-or even proffer an assessment of the danger. But he has already shown that he can deftly use the coercive power of the state of being at war-this is, possibly, the only political tool of which the president has instinctive mastery. During his first address to a joint session of Congress, Trump orchestrated more than two minutes of applause for the widow of a fallen Navy SEAL. It was 125 seconds of naked cynicism that left no one in the audience any choice but to stand and applaud. The following day Breitbart falsely claimed that several top Democrats had refused to do so. This was a preview of the coercion by national unity that we talk about when we talk about the Reichstag fire, but it was also reminiscent of the early weeks and months following 9/11, when Bill Maher and Susan Sontag were shamed for breaking rhetorical ranks.

In Russia, it took many years for Putin to consolidate power, and it wasn't until 2012 that his regime assumed its current retro-totalitarian character. Over the years, the use of terrorist attacks to justify successive crackdowns has grown familiar and gradually transformed the country's thinking. The lack of logical connections between events and their ostensible consequences, along with the general degradation of the judicial system and law enforcement, eroded all trust in the government-to the extent that every time a terrorist attack occurred, many Russians assumed that the government, no matter what it said, was behind it. When a bomb went off in the St. Petersburg Metro in April, killing fourteen people, journalists and Russia watchers instantly assumed that the Kremlin had organized the attack in order to detract attention from or to stifle emergent anti-corruption protests.

Over the years many Russians, including me, have come to believe that the apartment-building bombings in Moscow and elsewhere were organized and carried out by the FSB, the intelligence agency, in order to shore up Putin's power grab. There has never been a transparent and satisfying investigation of the blasts, but the available evidence stacks up in favor of this theory.

When we talk about the Reichstag fire, we speak not only about an event that precipitates a state of exception and launches coercive national mobilization but also of a conspiracy. Many Germans were certain that the Reichstag fire was set by the Nazis themselves. So much evidence supported this theory that for decades after the Second World War a Nazi conspiracy was the historians' consensus. During the same period, it was generally accepted that the Kirov murder was a secret-police assassination. But when all the available information on the Kirov murder was excavated in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was no proof to back up the conspiracy theory: It is now believed that Kirov was killed by his assistant's jealous husband. In the 1960s, reporting cast doubt on the theory that the Nazis burned down the Reichstag, but in the 1990s, a new wave of evidence suggested they may have been involved after all. Historians continue to debate the issue. (A young Dutch Communist was apprehended at the scene, tried, and sentenced to death by beheading.) It is certainly too early to exonerate Putin and the FSB for the apartment bombings, but the Russian autocrat may eventually be proved to have simply seized an opportunity, as he has done many times since. For now, though, we do not know enough, and this paucity of information, too, is one of the signs of an autocracy.

Autocracies thrive on and engender fear, ignorance, and-their combined product-conspiracy theory. Writing in his diary in January 1934, the linguist Victor Klemperer assessed a genre of joke. "Conversations in heaven are popular. The best one: Hitler to Moses: But you can tell me in confidence, Herr Moses. Is it not true that you set the bush on fire yourself?" The joke shows Hitler and the satirist sharing a conspiratorial worldview: The person telling the joke believes that the führer set the Reichstag fire and also that Hitler sees the world through the lens of his own deception. Everyone is both a conspirator and a conspiracy theorist.

The September 11 attacks, like all unimaginable events, spawned conspiracy theories. Trutherism spread far and wide; its younger cousin, birtherism, grabbed hold of a smaller but more vocal constituency. By the time Trump was elected president, America was living through an epidemic of conspiracy thinking. Some were convinced that Hillary Clinton ran a child-sex ring from a pizza shop in Washington; others that every recently dead Russian man was connected to Trump's election victory. No one now seems to believe that most things are what they seem: usually, a mess.

When we talk about the Reichstag fire, we talk about the consequences of a catastrophic event. But in our case, these consequences-a legal state of exception, a sense of living under siege, popular mobilization, and an epidemic of conspiracy thinking-are already in place. Indeed, they are the preconditions of our current predicament. Trump used the conspiracy thinking and the siege mentality to get himself elected. Once president, he used the state of exception to begin lobbing missiles, dropping bombs-nothing less than the so-called Mother of All Bombs. Mobilization, the popular sense of being together in constant battle, ensured that Trump's first forays into war looked good on TV. At the same time, Trump overestimated the power given to him by the siege mentality. When he attempted to ban Muslims from entering the United States, for example, he encountered great popular and institutional resistance.

Here lies our best hope for reversing the effects of the next Reichstag fire: American civil society is strong-far stronger, paradoxically, than it was before the election. And something remains of what Hannah Arendt observed in a letter from 1946:

People here feel themselves responsible for public life to an extent I have never seen in any European country. For example, when all Americans of Japanese descent were locked up willy-nilly in concentration camps at the beginning of the war, a genuine storm of protest that can still be felt today went through the country.

What struck Arendt was the spontaneous and active expression of solidarity on the part of ordinary Americans who "declared that if something like that could happen, they no longer felt safe themselves."

The comparison to contemporary protests may not be entirely straightforward. Leading arguments rested on the impossibility of religious discrimination; popular protest relied on a general sense of injustice and the rational argument that banning the entry of people from seven majority-Muslim countries would do little to protect Americans from terrorism. But by pointing to the ineffectiveness of the proposed ban, some of these arguments unwittingly reinforced the idea that Americans can make themselves safer by shutting out some part of the world.

Most recent protests share a fundamental flaw: They project the assumption that things were fine until America inexplicably elected Trump. The women's marches, the immigrants' marches, the scientists' marches, the protests in defense of the Affordable Care Act and freedom of speech, and the earliest of the protests, which simply expressed outraged disbelief at the results of the election, all serve the purpose of staking out the current norms and vowing to defend them. It's hard to argue with the urge; all indications are that the current norms are far preferable to the reality of the near and distant future. Yet most of the protests live within a lie-the fiction that the threats of the Trump presidency are not only grave but also new. His war against the national press is a grotesque blowup of many years' worth of growing regimentation of access, concentration of power, and government opacity. Trump's war on immigrants builds on the mass deportations of the Obama years, which were themselves built on the siege mentality of the Bush years. Trump's casual bomb-throwing is enabled by the forever war begun nearly sixteen years ago.

To confront the threat we face, it is not enough to advance the rational argument that an American has a lesser chance of dying in a terrorist attack carried out by a refugee than of being struck by lightning. Nor is it enough to focus on the grave injustice of tarnishing immigrants as potential criminals and Muslim refugees as potential terrorists. It is most certainly not enough to revel in the beauty, intelligence, and wit of the many people who have come out to protest Trump's attacks on humanity and its planet. There is, in fact, no room for self-congratulation in the actions we need to take.

To be worthy of the lofty name "resistance," the opposition to Trump must aim to break the country's post-9/11 trajectory. It must question the very premise of the war on terror, challenge the very fact of a perpetual state of emergency, and confront not only the Trump presidency but the legacy of the Bush and Obama Administrations. Organizations such as the A.C.L.U. have been doing this for years. The Trump presidency has not only, paradoxically, brought the group millions of dollars, it has also, potentially, rallied millions of people to the cause. Now is the time to stop waiting for the Reichstag fire and start battling the consequences of the one we already had-Trump and the legal and public conditions that are enabling his presidency.

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When each day brings more news than we are used to seeing in a week, and the kind of news that only the most catastrophic imagination can accommodate, we find ourselves talking about the Reichstag fire. Time feels both accelerated and slowed down, and so we imagine that we have been talking about the fire for years.

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Did you know that red is the first color that humans perceive, after black and white? It's the color that babies see first before any other, and the first that those suffering from temporary color blindness after a brain injury start to see again. Red's dominance is even reflected in how colors are defined: although different societies developed their names for colors at different times and in different ways, almost all of them named them in the same order. With only a few exceptions, the order of labelling colors was generally black first, white second, red third, and then green, yellow and blue.

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Red also made waves on the pre-historic art scene. Caves across the world, from Africa to Asia to Europe, bear traces made during the Paleolithic era. Drawings of animals, vessels, and people were made from painting red ochre on the cave walls, like this painting of a thylacoleo (an extinct species of lion) from the Djulirri rock art site in Northern Australia. More than 11,000 paintings have been found stretched over the site. Dated to 11,000 BCE, this naturalist animal painting may be the oldest surviving painting discovered there.

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World leaders have used red clothing as a way to showcase their power for hundreds of years. This portrait of Princess Elizabeth I before her accession as Queen shows a young woman preparing to assume her position as a powerful monarch. Her richly decorated red dress and red coif (close-fitting cap) send an unequivocal message of the young woman's political and moral strength. After the fall of the monarchy, the color red was then taken up by Revolutionaries around the world to symbolize new liberties and freedoms: from French Revolutionaries and their red phrygian caps, to the Bolshevik, Cultural, and Cuban Revolutions.

Courage, sacrifice, and love or anger, danger, and war? The color red can be associated with the happiest feelings as well as with the worst. Being the color that elicits the strongest reactions, it is no surprise that its symbolism can lie on both ends of the spectrum. So next time you're held up at a red stoplight (in this case the red is a symbol of danger), think about the color's revolutionary history (and maybe love too).

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In fact, in Canada, there are approximately more than five million citizens who live below the poverty line. Fortunately, the federal government is equipped with tools that create measurable and positive changes to reduce poverty significantly. With all of these, Play Against All Odds aims to work on a more strategic federal course of action, including fund increasing and mechanisms accountability to further engage with government authorities.

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Play Against All Odds is a progressive and national organization composed of people who are moved by their faith to take the necessary action for environmental and social justice by optimizing Canada's public policies. Our devotions focus on these three vital policy fields: Climate Justice Refugee...

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Our Vision Play Against All Odds seeks to foster societal growth and development through maintaining creational integrity and changing faulty practices as our faithful application to God's teachings about justice and love. We look forward to a world wherein citizens, societal organizations,...

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Although the world has seen many changes over the centuries, including technological advancements and new trends are constantly arising wherever you might be, a considerable percentage of the world's population is still living in poverty. In fact, billions of people around the world are considered below the poverty line level.
So, what can be done to reduce this? In this article, you'll discover how to alleviate poverty and how industrial hemp and cannabis-derived products like ...

Who is the low socioeconomic status? These are adults that are unemployed or do not have sufficient educational attainment. They are usually classified like this as those with blue-collar jobs. This category of people lives below the poverty level in the United State.
According to research, this group of the U.S population is also identified to have an increased rate of tobacco usage and cigarette smoking than the general population.
Adverse Effect of Cigarette and Tobacco Use
For many decades now there has been an outcry from the health sector on how harmful ...

Integration barriers discover the challenges and limitations of the current socio-economic status of refugees in Canadian society integration. As you will see in this report, Abdille Halima uncovers some discrimination forms encountered by immigrants and refugees, especially regarding finding sources of income. This report actually gathers quantitative and historical data of the refugees' experiences.
More often, people in Canada consider themselves as accepting, nonjudgmental, and compassionate towards other members of the society despite their race, religion, and ethnic differences. Yes, some people really practice "...

There has always been a profound knowledge and wisdom in indigenous lectures about the relationship among all creations. A lot of indigenous individuals perceive nature with the utmost respect. For them, nature is something they have to preserve, appreciate, and foster.
It is also of ultimate essence to a lot of indigenous individuals and groups to protect relationships among animate and inanimate Creation aspects. Respecting these vital relationships and connections is crucial for economic and ecological integrity, holistic pandemic recovery, and peaceful relations with indigenous individuals and groups.
Unfortunately, the ...

The purpose of 2020 Poverty trends is to serve as a quick guide or reference for advocacy and education. Thus, we invite researchers and readers to reflect on the actual poverty cases and the realities of Canada's systemic oppression. Canada's set of implementations and laws are required legally to preserve its citizens' rights by granting them adequate education, quality health care, and living standard. However, it is unfortunate that these have not come to reality yet among a significant percentage of Canada's population.
Below is the list of ironic facts about Canada's system:

Yes, we ...

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Skip to content In fact, in Canada, there are approximately more than five million citizens who live below the poverty line. Fortunately, the federal government is equipped with tools that create measurable and positive changes to reduce poverty significantly.

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We have tested thousands of people and they were systematically wrong about all this. Upgrade your worldview Gapminder is an independent educational non-proﬁt ﬁghting global misconceptions. FEATURED BY: The UN's SDG Moments 2020 was introduced by Malala Yousafzai and Ola Rosling, president and co-founder of Gapminder.

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How did Hitler rise to power? - Alex Gendler and Anthony Hazard