From democracy to dictatorship: 1933/34

At midday on 30 January 1933, President of the Reich Paul von Hindenburg appoints the chairman of the NSDAP, Adolf Hitler, Chancellor of the Reich. You have traced how this came about – the Great Depression, mass unemployment and the NSDAP’s electoral successes – in “Weimarer Republik, Weltwirtschaftskrise und der Aufstieg des Nationalsozialismus”. And do you remember Mussolini in 1922? Hitler, too, was appointed by the head of state – you know this pattern from “Who governs? Forms of state, democracy and dictatorship”. Here begins the story of what happened next.

Hindenburg, aged 85 and a former field marshal, had long resisted. His eventual decision to appoint Hitler was the result of efforts by conservative politicians such as Franz von Papen, who became Vice-Chancellor. Their reasoning was this: Hitler has the masses; we have the experience, the President of the Reich and the majority in the cabinet – only three of the eleven ministers belonged to the NSDAP. They would ‘hem Hitler in’ and use him for their own aims. It was a misjudgement with far-reaching consequences.

That evening, the SA (Sturmabteilung, the party’s force of thugs), the SS (Schutzstaffel, originally Hitler’s bodyguard) and other organisations marched through the Brandenburg Gate carrying torches. However, some of the familiar footage does not actually come from that evening: certain scenes were later re-enacted for a propaganda film. Even the first day was therefore also a staged propaganda event.

(Extension) One event, three perspectives: The Nazis themselves spoke of a ‘seizure of power’ (Machtergreifung) – as if they had fought their way to power entirely through their own efforts. Many historians today prefer ‘transfer of power’ (Machtübertragung) or ‘handover of power’: Hitler was appointed legally, with help from conservative elites. The neutral term ‘takeover of power’ (Machtübernahme) covers both. Remember all three – and pay attention to who uses which term.

On the evening of 27 February 1933, less than a week before the Reichstag election, the Reichstag is in flames. Marinus van der Lubbe, a 24-year-old Dutchman and former communist, is arrested at the scene; he is convicted of starting the fire and executed in 1934. Whether he really acted alone remains disputed among researchers to this day. What is certain is how the Nazi leadership used it: that same night, it accused the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) of preparing an uprising – and deliberately exploited the fire.

The very next day, 28 February 1933, Hindenburg signs the ‘Decree of the President of the Reich for the Protection of People and State’, known as the Reichstag Fire Decree. It is based on Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution – the emergency decree article that Brüning had already used to govern without parliament. The crucial sentence reads:

‘[…] Restrictions on personal liberty, on the right to freedom of expression, including freedom of the press, on the rights of association and assembly, interference with the confidentiality of letters, post, telegraph and telephone communications, orders for house searches and confiscations, and restrictions on property are therefore permissible even beyond the legal limits otherwise laid down for these purposes.’

— Reichstagsbrandverordnung, 28. Februar 1933, § 1

Read the sentence slowly and count how many rights it removes. In everyday language: fundamental rights – personal liberty, freedom of expression, the press and assembly, confidentiality of correspondence and the inviolability of the home – no longer apply. The consequences were immediate:

• People could be arrested without a trial. The Nazis called this ‘protective custody’ – a euphemistic Nazi term that made it sound as if those arrested were being protected.
• Thousands of communists and social democrats were arrested and abused in the first few weeks; some were murdered.
• In Prussia, the SA had already been allowed to act as ‘auxiliary police’ since 22 February; after the fire, it was deployed on a mass scale against political opponents – gangs of thugs with state permission.
• In March 1933, the first concentration camps (KZ) were established, for example at Dachau near Munich: detention camps outside judicial oversight, where political opponents were imprisoned, abused and sometimes murdered. These were not yet extermination camps – that term refers to the camps in occupied Poland which, from 1941/42 onwards, during the war, served primarily to murder people deliberately and as quickly as possible. A later module in this series explains the distinction in more detail.

Remember: The Reichstag Fire Decree was never repealed. It remained in force until 1945 – twelve years of an ‘emergency’ that remained the foundation of terror.

5 March 1933: an election that was no longer free

As early as 1 February, at Hitler’s request, Hindenburg had dissolved the Reichstag and called new elections for 5 March: Hitler’s government, made up of the NSDAP and the German National People’s Party (DNVP), a conservative party, had no majority in the old Reichstag, and Hitler wanted to gain one through the election. The Reichstag election took place amid the wave of arrests. Opponents of the NSDAP were barely allowed to hold meetings, many of their newspapers were banned, and SA guards stood outside polling stations. Even so, the NSDAP won 43.9 per cent – a large share, but no majority of its own. Only together with the DNVP did it hold just over half the seats. Incidentally, the series of election results you know from the Weimar module (2.6 per cent in 1928, 18.3 per cent in 1930, 37.3 per cent in July 1932) had not continued to rise without interruption: in the new election of November 1932, the NSDAP had fallen back to 33.1 per cent. Now, in March 1933 and amid terror, it reached 43.9 per cent.

21 March 1933: the ‘Day of Potsdam’

The opening of the new Reichstag became a spectacle: at the state ceremony in the Garrison Church in Potsdam, by the tomb of the Prussian kings, Hitler appeared not in party uniform but in a dark morning coat, and bowed before the elderly Hindenburg in uniform. The message to the middle classes, the military and the nobility was: old Prussia and the ‘new Germany’ are joining forces here – you can rest easy. The new Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, organised the accompanying programme; the ceremony was broadcast on the radio.

23 March 1933: the Enabling Act

Two days later, in Berlin’s Kroll-Oper (the Reichstag building had been gutted by fire), the Reichstag voted on the ‘Law to Remedy the Distress of People and Reich’ – the Enabling Act. Its central provisions were:

‘Laws of the Reich may be enacted by the Reich government as well as through the procedure laid down in the Reich Constitution. […] Laws of the Reich enacted by the Reich government may deviate from the Reich Constitution […].’

— Ermächtigungsgesetz, Art. 1 und 2 (vom Reichstag am 23. März beschlossen, am 24. März 1933 verkündet)

The government could therefore make laws without parliament – even laws that changed the constitution. Because this affected the constitution, a two-thirds majority was required. How that majority was achieved shows what ‘legal’ meant here: the 81 KPD members of parliament had been arrested, had fled or had been excluded, and several members of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) were also absent. SA and SS men surrounded the Kroll-Oper and stood in the aisles. The result was 444 votes in favour, 94 against. Only the SPD voted against it. Its chairman, Otto Wels, said in the last free speech in the Reichstag:

‘You can take our freedom and our lives, but not our honour.’

— Otto Wels, Reichstagsrede, 23. März 1933

The Catholic Centre Party and the middle-class parties voted in favour – some out of fear, others because Hitler had made them promises that he did not keep.

Remember: With the Enabling Act, parliament gave up its own powers – through its own votes in favour, but under pressure and threats. The separation of powers had ended: those who made the laws also implemented them. The Act was initially valid for four years and was extended – until 1945.

‘Gleichschaltung’ is a Nazi term borrowed from electrical engineering: all components are to be connected to the same current. In political terms, it meant that every organisation, every authority and every club was to be placed under the NSDAP or reorganised according to its rules. This happened within a few months in 1933:

• The federal states: The state governments were removed; Hitler sent a Reich governor to each state to govern according to his instructions. The federal state became a centrally controlled state.
• The trade unions: On 1 May 1933, the regime celebrated the ‘Day of National Labour’ with the workers – on 2 May 1933, the SA and SS occupied trade union offices, arrested officials and confiscated their assets. The trade unions were replaced by the German Labour Front (DAF), a compulsory organisation run by the party.
• Books: On 10 May 1933, students in many university towns publicly burned works by authors considered ‘un-German’ (‘un-German’ was Nazi language for anything that supposedly did not fit the German people) – including Erich Kästner, Heinrich Mann and Kurt Tucholsky.
• The parties: The SPD was banned in June, and the other parties dissolved themselves under pressure. The Law Against the Formation of New Parties of 14 July 1933 made the NSDAP the only permitted party. As a result, in the Reichstag election on 12 November 1933, there was only one list of candidates, the NSDAP’s single list – there was no longer any choice. After that, the Reichstag consisted almost entirely of NSDAP members and no longer had anything to decide: a sham parliament that merely approved government decisions.
• Press, radio, culture and clubs: Newspapers were banned or taken over, radio was placed under the Ministry of Propaganda, and clubs from chess clubs to choirs were brought into line or banned.

Within half a year, hardly any legal institution remained through which dissent could have been organised publicly.

The ‘Röhm-Putsch’

By 1934, the SA under Ernst Röhm had grown to several million members. Röhm wanted more: the SA was to become a people’s army and replace the Reichswehr. This brought him into conflict with the generals – and with Hitler, who needed the army for his plans. From 30 June to 2 July 1934, Hitler had the SS murder the SA leadership; Röhm himself was shot in his cell. At the same time, the regime used the opportunity to kill other opponents, including former Chancellor of the Reich Kurt von Schleicher and Erich Klausener, the head of Catholic Action in Berlin. Researchers estimate that several dozen to around 200 people were killed. Nazi propaganda called the murders the ‘Röhm-Putsch’ – as if Röhm had planned a coup. There was no evidence of this.

On 3 July 1934, the government passed a law consisting of a single sentence:

‘The measures carried out on 30 June, 1 and 2 July 1934 to suppress attacks involving high treason and treason against the country are lawful as acts of state self-defence.’

— Gesetz über Massnahmen der Staatsnotwehr, 3. Juli 1934

The law declared the murders lawful after the event. The state itself had killed – and made the killing legal. For the generals, the middle classes and many civil servants, this was no cause for protest but for relief: the SA, which they saw as a nuisance, had been stripped of its power.

2 August 1934: Führer and Reich Chancellor

On 2 August 1934, President of the Reich Hindenburg died. The day before, the government had already used the powers granted by the Enabling Act to pass a law merging the offices of President of the Reich and Chancellor of the Reich. From then on, Hitler called himself ‘Führer and Reich Chancellor’. That same day, the soldiers of the Reichswehr (the name of the republic’s army; from 1935 it was called the ‘Wehrmacht’) swore a new oath – no longer to the constitution, but to Hitler personally. A referendum, held when free expression had long since become impossible, later confirmed this with around 90 per cent of the vote.

The Führer principle

The Nazi state operated according to the Führer principle: commands from the top down, obedience from the bottom up. At every level there was a ‘leader’, appointed from above, who gave orders to those below – from the Reich governor to the local branch leader (the party leader in a town), from the factory director (‘factory leader’) to the Hitler Youth leader. There were no longer any free elections, any checks on power or any legal dissent. The Führer’s will stood above every law. The diagram shows you how this state was structured.

The Nazis placed great importance on making everything look ‘legal’: Hitler was appointed rather than taking power in a coup; the Reichstag Fire Decree was based on an article of the constitution; the Enabling Act had the required two-thirds majority; and the murders of June 1934 were covered by a law. Historians call this ‘a veneer of legality’:

Formally (the appearance)	In practice (the reality)
Appointment by the President of the Reich under the constitution	Pressure from conservative elites who wanted to use Hitler
Emergency decree under Article 48	An ‘emergency’ that lasted twelve years and permanently undermined the constitution
Two-thirds majority for the Enabling Act	Members of parliament arrested or forced to flee, SA and SS in the chamber, threats
Law on ‘state self-defence’	Murder declared lawful after the event

A veneer of legality therefore means that the legal formalities were observed, but the content of the laws and the way they were passed broke with everything that defines the rule of law – a state that itself respects laws and fundamental rights. These were replaced by terror, breaches of the law and the exploitation of loopholes in the constitution.

This is why it is worth returning to the terms from the introduction about 30 January 1933: anyone who says ‘seizure of power’ adopts the Nazis’ own portrayal of themselves as having ‘fought’ their way to power. Anyone who says ‘transfer of power’ emphasises the responsibility of those who gave Hitler power. Both are part of the story of 1933.