Protect Yourself...

On the morning of 22 February 1933, the people of Berlin woke to their Reichstag in flames, burning to the ground. To this day no one is certain who set the fire that destroyed the Reichstag, but Hitler knew who he would blame: The Communists. 

Within hours the Nazi press said that theReichstag fire had been set by the Communist. The fire itself was intended to act as a signal for Communist cells all across Germany to rise up and revolt, the Nazis claimed. That “families of police officers and government officals to be used as human shields” and “…for the destruction of all cultural values to occur—just as it had in Russia.” Once Hitler had successfully invented a Communist threat he used it swiftly and efficiently to crush any who opposed him. Within 24 hours of the fire, freedom of the press, expression and public assembly were suspended. Newspapers were banned, people were routinely arrested or shot. Barbarism quickly began to masquerade itself as official decree. Days after the fire thousands of Communists, all who had been labeled “enemies to the state” were arrested, interrogated and jailed. Many of them would later be sent to fledgling concentration camps. Radical and violent changes rippled all across Germany, and yet Hitler had justified them all in the name of public safety by using the West’s fear of Communism.