ROGER D HARRIS and SARA FLOUNDERS challenge propaganda against the blockaded socialist island
90 years ago – a key moment in the rise of the Nazis
JOHN ELLISON assesses the significance of the Reichstag fire, for which communists were blamed in the early days of Hitler’s dictatorship
FRAME-UP: Firemen work on the burning Reichstag, 1933
Marx and Engels incorporated in their writings a critique of the way that capitalism destroys the environment but it is only in the last half century that environmental concerns have become an integral part of the fight for socialism, writes the Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School
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The HS2 debacle exposes what happens when public infrastructure is handed to private contractors – especially when set against China’s state-led high-speed rail success, says CARLOS MARTINEZ
ON FEBRUARY 27 1933, 90 years ago, Berlin’s parliament building, the Reichstag, was set alight, less than a week before polling in national elections was due.
National Socialist Party leader Adolf Hitler, appointed chancellor four weeks earlier by president Paul von Hindenburg, seized the moment to declare total war on democratic processes and political opponents, and in the hope of maximising electoral support for the Nazi party.
In Britain, the next day, Labour’s Daily Herald reported the fire, “said to have started in five or six places at once,” and the cause of which was “a complete mystery.”
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