Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

THE REICHSTAG FIRE 545in the sixteenth chapter of the Book of Numbers. When the sons ofKorah rose up against the authority of Moses and Aaron, they accusedthem of arrogating to themselves a special holiness, while according tothe law all Israel was equally holy; Moses, however, called the rebels —who desired nothing more than democratic worship — 'godless,' thusstigmatizing them in the public consciousness with a terrible namewhich even today has not lost its power. A mysterious fire broke out —allegedly falling from heaven. There followed ostracism and politicalmurder, falsified by an unscrupulous propaganda on the part of thevictors; Moses' government communique maintained, in the style of thetime, that the earth had opened up and swallowed the rebels, and, by thiswonder, 'ye shall know that the Lord hath sent me to do these works.'It was not easy for the National Socialists to find a new Korah. Asearly as January 30, to be sure, the Communists called a general strike,but no one took the strike order seriously, not even the Communiststhemselves, who wanted only to 'unmask' the cowardice and inactivityof their Social Democratic competitors.There were other, more serious possibilities of resistance in the Reich.The leadership of the Social Democratic Party had gone to Munich,where the Bavarian government, sharply hostile to the new NationalSocialist government in the Reich, carried on its business and hurledthreats at the national capital; other South German states showed adisquieting resistance to Berlin. The demarcation line of this zone ofresistance ran from east to west, along the Main River, turned north nearFrankfort and ran down the Rhine, dividing the West as well as theSouth from the rest of the Reich. In the West, the population wasCatholic, largely proletarian, and overwhelmingly opposed to NationalSocialism. These were the people who, by Goebbels's own account, haddriven him with curses from his native city. And this was the districtbarred to the Reichswehr, by the Treaty of Locarno, where armedresistance of the Iron Front would not have been hopeless.The National Socialist leadership waited eagerly for something toflare up somewhere. Papen and Hugenberg were worried enough toacquiesce to the first important limitation on the freedom of