Laws for the Protection of People and State

In May 2020, when I first drew comparisons between the state of emergency under which Germans lived through the 12 years of the Third Reich and the emergency period under which coronavirus-justified regulations were being imposed without parliamentary scrutiny on UK citizens in 2020, a member of the already forming cult of the COVID-faithful responded that doing so was ‘beneath contempt’. Then in September 2020, when I compared the bio-political horizon of the laws that had removed the human rights and civil liberties of German citizens with the laws doing the same in the UK, I was told of the dangers of doing so by the journalist Peter Hitchens, who warned me that ‘the vultures circling high in the sky and waiting to feast on your flesh will see it and dive down on you’. He was right, as in response the Architects Registration Board accused ASH of ‘antisemitism’ and initiated a 6-month investigation that threatened us with public censure, a fine or even removing our right to practice as architects. A year-and-a-half later, however, this comparison has become commonplace, although not without drawing down the wrath and demands for censorship and punishment from Zionists and other keepers of the sanctity of the ‘Holocaust’. Last December, the Conservative MP, Marcus Fysh, compared Plan B restrictions in the UK, and in particular the Government’s threat of ‘vaccine’ passports, to the restrictions on civil liberties in Nazi Germany; and this January the author and journalist, Naomi Wolf, published a three-part article that compared the willingness of ‘liberals’ in Western nations to comply with and enforce practices of discrimination since 2020 with the complicity of Germans with National Socialist rule in the early years of the Third Reich.

Although under a temporary suspension in the UK, the imposition of ‘vaccine’ passports as a condition of citizenship is now an enforced reality in most of the formally neoliberal democracies of the world, with some countries imposing fines for non-compliance and imprisonment for non-payment. A course of injection with experimental ‘vaccines’ is now mandatory for all adults in Austria and the same is planned in Germany; for all or some public-sector workers and users of public services in Australia, Canada, Croatia, Denmark, France, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine and the USA; for children in Lithuania; for the elderly in Greece and Russia and for the over 50s in Italy; and for entry to some or all public venues in Austria, the UK, Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Romania, Serbia, Switzerland, Sweden and the Ukraine. To various extents, those designated by their country’s latest amendments to regulations as ‘unvaccinated’ are now banned from so-called ‘essential’ shops, bars, restaurants, cinemas, museums and other public places, public transport, medical and dental care, education, applying for certain jobs and leaving the country, and in Canada protesters against ‘vaccine’ mandates have had their bank accounts frozen. Indeed, few of the predictions that were contemptuously dismissed as the rantings of conspiracy theorists in 2020 have failed to come true in 2022, where they are now equally hysterically proclaimed as necessary to the protection of the people and the safety of the state by the same members of the COVID-faithful, whose cult has grown to become the de facto Church of England, with the ecclesiastical endorsement of its dogma by the Archbishop of Canterbury. What was once denounced as impossible, ridiculous or obscene is now demanded by the same apologists, the same opportunists, the same organs of dissemination. Caught between virtue and terror, our collective memory of the past has been voluntarily erased for little more than the promise of rewarded compliance.

However, for those of us who believe our previously inalienable rights and freedoms should not be tossed aside at the first sign of a crisis, it is important not to be cowered, bullied and threatened into forgetting why it was thought necessary to inscribe those rights in European and International law after the Second World War. We have for some time now been living in a totalitarian world, which is rapidly leading us into a global biosecurity state that no longer even requires the justification of this manufactured health crisis to remove, with all the violence of the state, the last vestiges of democracy. The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill 2022, The Nationalities and Borders Bill 2022, The Online Safety Bill 2022, The Judicial Review and Courts Bill 2022, and the Human Rights Act Reform, all of which will be made into law this year by the worst Parliament in British history, are the ample evidence of this. But comparing the removal of the human rights and civil liberties of Jews in the Third Reich from 1933 with those of the ‘unvaccinated’ in the European Union since 2020 allows us to see what equivalent date and law we have reached today, and perhaps what the future holds for us unless we overthrow the governments imposing these laws for the protection of people and state.

On 28 February 1933, the Decree for the Protection of People and State (commonly known as the Reichstag Fire Decree) suspended most of the human rights of German citizens, including the rights of public assembly and of freedom of association, privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communication, freedom of expression and of the press, as well as habeas corpus.

Under the new interpretation of ‘protective custody’, the secret state police was empowered to take persons suspected of pursuing activities hostile to the State into custody without warrant, specific charge or judicial review of any kind. Incarcerated for an indefinite period of time in a concentration camp, this extra-legal practice was sometimes defended as being necessary for the protection of the individual. The Supreme Court failed to challenge or protest this loss of judicial authority.

On 21 March, 1933, the Malicious Practices Act made it illegal to speak against, question or criticise the Third Reich or its leaders, including making anti-Nazi jokes or ‘spreading rumours’ punishable by fines or imprisonment. This led to a vast number of denunciations of fellow Germans to the secret state police.

On 23 March 1933, the Law to Remedy the Distress of People and State gave the German Cabinet plenary powers to pass laws by decree, without parliamentary approval, and to override fundamental aspects of the Constitution. Given a 4-year lifespan unless renewed by the Reichstag, the Act was extended twice, in 1937 and 1941, and Germany was still legally under its emergency powers at the end of the Second World War.

On 7 April 1933, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service dismissed political opponents of the Third Reich (communists, social democrats and unionists), Jews and designated ‘non-Aryans’ from their positions, including teachers, professors, judges and other civil servants.

On 11 April 1933, the First Ordinance on the Implementation of the Civil Service law extended the terms of this ban on political opponents and non-Aryans to doctors, nurses, lawyers, notaries, tax consultants and musicians, all of whom were dismissed from their positions.

On 3 July 1934, the Law on the Unification of Health Care took what had been under the jurisprudence of individual German states into centralised federal legislation and administration, under which doctors administered treatment according to the principles of National Socialism, which superseded the Hippocratic oath to ‘first do no harm’.

On 19 August 1934, in a national referendum, 90 per cent of the German electorate approved the merger of the offices of Chancellor and President, making Adolf Hitler both head of government and head of state. This merged office was designated as the ‘Führer’, whose word now became law.

On 15 September 1935, the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour banned Jews and other non-Aryans from marital and sexual relations with ‘citizens of German or related blood’.

On 15 September 1935, the Reich Citizenship Law deprived German Jews of their citizenship, and with it their political rights, and instead made them ‘subjects of the state’. This was defined as ‘a person who enjoys the protection of the state and in consequence has specific obligations towards it.’

On 18 October 1935, the Law for the Protection of the Hereditary Health of the German People required all prospective marriage partners to obtain from the public health authorities a certificate of fitness to marry. These were refused to anyone with a contagious disease.

On 14 November 1935, the first supplemental decree to the Nuremberg Laws defined ‘Jews’ not as members of a religious or cultural community but as a race defined by hereditary. This is a definition retained today by both the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and the State of Israel.

On 14 December, 1937, the Decree for the Preventive Suppression of Crime by the Police allowed the arrest and confinement in concentration camps of anyone engaging in asocial or criminal behaviour without requiring evidence of a specific criminal act. ‘Asocial’ was defined as anyone whose attitude did not fit with that of the racial community, including gypsies, prostitutes, pimps, tramps, vagrants, beggars, hooligans and the long-termed unemployed, whose identities were obtained from labour exchanges.

On 11 July 1938, the Ministry of the Interior banned Jews from attending health spas in order to remove the risk of infection from a people defined by National Socialist medicine as vectors of disease both physical and moral.

On 23 July 1938, Jews were ordered to apply for Identification Cards which had to be shown to police or officials on demand. These were marked with a red letter ‘J’. On 17 August, Jews without Government-approved forenames were ordered to add the name ‘Israel’ (for males) or ‘Sara’ (for females) to their own.

On 3 October 1938, the Decree on the Confiscation of Jewish Property regulated the transfer of assets from Jews to non-Jews, forcing the former into penury and homelessness.

On 12 September 1938, Jews were banned from attending cinemas, concerts and the opera. Like the ban on health spars and sexual relations, this was a biosecurity ‘measure’ that reduced the former citizenship of German Jews to the bare life of ‘subjects of the state’.

On 12 November 1938, the Decree on the Exclusion of Jews from German Economic Life banned Jews from owning businesses, selling goods or services or having a trade, forcing them into bankruptcy, unemployment and poverty.

On 15 November 1938, the Ministry of Education banned Jewish children from attending public schools. This biosecurity ‘measure’ was justified as a means to protect Aryan children from the risk of infection not only by the bodies but also by the beliefs of Jews, which culturally were dismissed as ‘Bolshevik’ and religiously as ‘anti-Christian’.

On 28 November 1938, the Ministry of the Interior restricted freedom of movement and travel for Jews, who were only permitted to leave the Third Reich with 8 per cent of the monetary value in Reichsmarks of their savings and possessions.

On 1 September 1941, Police Regulations on the Labelling of Jews prohibited Jews in the Third Reich who had reached the age of 6 from ‘showing themselves in public without a Jewish star.’ It was additionally forbidden for Jews ‘to leave the area of their community without having a written permit from the local police’. The punishment for intentionally or negligently contravening these Regulations was a fine of up to 150 Reichsmarks or imprisonment for up to 6 weeks.

On 24 April 1942, Jews throughout Greater Germany were prohibited from using public transport.

Between the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935 and the outbreak of World War Two in September 1939, more than 120 laws, decrees and regulations imposing over 400 legal restrictions were enacted by the Third Reich on the justification of protecting the health of the German People and the security of the German State.

These constituted an epidemiological discourse no less legitimate under German law for being entirely manufactured by National Socialist doctors and scientists: of protection from disease and remedy when infected, and of identifying the infected and imprisoning (and finally exterminating) the diseased.

Measurement of the face to fix identity wasn’t unique to Nazi ethnographers and physicians, but they pioneered its use to impose a biosecurity state, in which the human subject is reduced to its biological body in order to limit and control its movements and actions. Bodies have no rights, only obligations.

The ‘Holocaust’ to which the Third Reich is reduced by those who want to erase its history was preceded by 8 years of laws that so completely deprived Jews of their rights that, by the time it was implemented in 1941, no act committed against them could be considered a crime.

Those who denounce comparisons between the erasure of human rights in today’s Europe and Nazi Germany are not only finding consolation in the fact that life in the biosecurity state is not yet as bad as in the Third Reich, but are closing their eyes to how totalitarian states are constructed in law.

Over the past 2 years, under a politically-declared emergency period that continues to this day, 570 coronavirus-justified Statutory Instruments have been made into law in the UK. 408 were only laid before Parliament for approval after they were made. 162 were laid by the Department of Health and Social Care, 148 of which were made under the unlawful exercise of powers conferred by the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984.

Simon Elmer
Architects for Social Housing