Something happened seventy-three years ago today — one of those milestones that’s immediately recognized as an historic event, but whose real significance is not understood until years later.

On February 27, 1933, less than a month after Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, someone set fire to the Reichstag building in Berlin, where the German parliament met.

There is a popular myth about the Reichstag fire which is almost certainly untrue: that the Nazis themselves set the fire to clear the path for a Hitler dictatorship. In fact, a mentally disturbed communist named Marinus van der Lubbe probably set the fire, acting on his own. But the Nazis saw the fire as a great opportunity. Using emergency powers, they banned the Communist party, revoked civil liberties and gave Hitler the authority to rule by decree. Once he had that power, he never gave it up. The emergency never ended.

When a court acquitted several Communist party leaders of a role in the fire, Hitler stripped the courts of much of their authority and established a special tribunal called the Volksgerichtshof to handle “political crimes.”

George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, we all saw historic parallels to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor nearly sixty years earlier. Now, in hindsight, and having witnessed four and a half years of the Bush Administration’s response to those attacks, I think there are lessons to be learned from a different historical parallel.

Don’t forget Pearl Harbor, but do remember the Reichstag fire.