Tuesday March 31st 1933

[560SEC]

1933 vs 2001

http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...59923762628848

[AlfredJPruffock]

The Cabinet at its meeting this afternoon decided on the text of the Enabling Bill which it will submit to the Reichstag.

If this bill is passed, the Hitler Government will be endowed with absolute dictatorial powers.

The Act will enable the Cabinet to legislate and to make laws even if these "mark a deviation from the Constitution", except that the Reichstag and the Reichsrat must not he abolished.

But as these will be put out of action for four years, this provision will not inconvenience the Government, which will even have full powers at the end of four years to alter the electoral system by decree.

The rights of the President formally remain unaltered, but the laws will be promulgated on the Cabinet's initiative alone.

The President would lose all his functions except that of Chief of the Army, but this function, too could probably be abolished by a decree, which would place the army, the last potential opponent of the dictatorship, under the Cabinet's control.

In that case the President would simply become a figurehead.

Military expenditure: As the Budget would be settled by decree, and as the figures would not need to be made public, there would be no extra-Governmental control of public finances, and the Government would be free to increase military and naval expenditure without the least publicity.

Observation from the Pruffock Observatory

They say you can boil a live frog in a pot by gradually turning up the heat. He will not jump out, because he can't tell the temperature's changing.