A COMMENT ON TIMOTHY SNYDER + REICHSTAGSFIRE

 . SNYDER 

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/02/26/reichstag-fire-manipulating-terror-to-end-democracy/

Professor Snyder’s salutary reminder how governments can take dictatorial control ought not to have left out Hitler’s icing of the cake of his assumption of complete power, the "Night of the Long Knives",

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Long_Knives

which ought, actually, not feature such a darkly romantic label but be known as the "Days of preventive, competitive, vengeful mass executions & murder" and  was acually enacted during the course of a long weekend & was what led Brecht to draw the accurate parallel between Chicago style gangster execution for his "The Evitable Rise of Artuto Ui," and has been an event close to my heart since the grandfather on my mother's side, Werner von Alvensleben 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_von_Alvensleben

not only topped  Hitler’s hitlist but was featured by Hitler’s speech that sought to justify these events; namely, that “a certain Herr von A.” had been about to have the Potsdam garrison 

http://www.preussenweb.de/potsdam2.htm

have him Hitler depose as part of a coup. 

 No such coup unfortunately was in the works, nor was Colonel a.d. von A,, ex-go-between Chancellor Schleicher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Schleicher

& Hitler, in the positiont to do anything of the kind, but Opa A. had made a joke to that effect, as he had made fun of Hitler, the one time that he had H. for lunch, clowning around, instead of poisoning him, about H.’s evident ambition, reminding Hitler, to his chagrin, of Napoleon’s fate at the gates of Moscow - a lunch of which I came to know that his wife, my grandmother, subsequent to the lunch saying “that she just as soon not have the gentleman for lunch again.” Hitler, at the time that the “Long Knives,”  certainly had all the reasons in the world to be paranoid that justified vengence for any number of matters might be near, as paranoia characterized Hitler’s life. 

Opa A. was fortunate to have one of the organizers of the murder spree, Count von Helldorf, who himself was executed subsequent to the 20th of July attempt on Hitler’s life

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf-Heinrich_Graf_von_Helldorff

suggest that he spend the weekend at his hunting lodge, whereupon he was arrested and condemned to death, a sentence that was commuted to a life sentence which, however, appears to have allowed occasional stretches of freedom, for otherwise he would not have been present at my 4th birthday and Christmas & provided the occasion for the most major of my screen memories in my memoir Screen Memories

http://artscritic.blogspot.com/2016/11/screen-memory-i.html

 or re-appear two weeks after VE 1945, liberated by the American army, after four different concentration camps stints, at our place outside Bremen, apparently spry & full of jokes, although, having been tortured, he refused to take off his shirt before his wife or his daughters. But my favorite story among many features the time that he was beaten at Buchenwald. The KaPo asked him whether he, Herr von A. still classified people, whereupon Opa replies yes he did, and that there existed three classes;there was the class of those who were in jail, there was the class of those who had been in jail, and then there was the third class of those who were going to jai, and “to that third class, my dear fellow” is the one to which you belong - where the “my dear fellow” is the one time that aristocratic disdain seems justified, as it is to the spawn of Roy Cohn & McCarthy who calls himself President of the United States.

-- 

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