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When Hitler was appointed Chancellor on 30 January 1933, his position appeared anything but secure. He led a coalition cabinet in which the NSDAP held only three of eleven posts, the conservative vice-chancellor Franz von Papen believed he could be 'framed' and controlled, and the Nazis had never won a majority in a free election. Yet within eighteen months Hitler had destroyed the parliamentary republic, annihilated all rival parties, purged his own movement of dissent, absorbed the offices of President and Chancellor, and bound the armed forces to himself by personal oath. This lesson examines how that consolidation was achieved — through a combination of pseudo-legal manoeuvre, organised terror, the complicity of conservative elites and a wave of popular acquiescence — and how historians have characterised the transition from coalition chancellorship to personal dictatorship. The analytical task is to weigh these elements against one another, and to grasp the second-order concepts of causation and change that the period demands: change of extraordinary speed, achieved by causes that were simultaneously legal and violent.
Key Question: How did Hitler convert a minority coalition chancellorship into an unchallenged personal dictatorship in only eighteen months, and how should historians weigh legality, terror, elite complicity and popular consent in explaining it?
Key Definition: Gleichschaltung ('coordination' or 'bringing into line') was the process by which the Nazis brought the institutions of the state, the parties, the trade unions, the professions and the organs of civil society under their control, eliminating every centre of independent power and creating the appearance — though, as historians stress, not always the reality — of a unified, totally coordinated state.
This lesson addresses the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship within Part Two of Option 2O: Democracy and Nazism: Germany, 1918–1945, the Paper 2 Depth study. It falls chronologically between the Nazi appointment to power (early 1933) and the consolidation of the Fuhrer state (mid-1934), and covers the specification content on the creation of the one-party state, the use of terror and legality, and the elimination of opposition.
On the night of 27 February 1933, in the middle of the election campaign Hitler had insisted upon as the price of taking office, the Reichstag building was gutted by fire. A young Dutch communist, Marinus van der Lubbe, was arrested at the scene and confessed; the balance of scholarly opinion, following the careful reconstruction of the evidence, holds that he acted alone, although the question has been endlessly debated and the Nazis themselves instantly blamed a communist conspiracy. What matters for the historian is less who started the fire than the use the regime made of it. Hitler persuaded the aged President Hindenburg to sign, the very next day, the Reichstag Fire Decree (the Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of People and State, 28 February 1933), invoking the President's emergency powers under Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution.
The decree 'suspended until further notice' the fundamental civil liberties guaranteed by the constitution: freedom of expression, of the press and of assembly; the privacy of post and telephone; the inviolability of the home; and the protection against arbitrary arrest. It also authorised the central government to take over the powers of the federal states where order was held to be threatened. In effect it created a permanent state of emergency, suspended the rule of law, and licensed 'protective custody' (Schutzhaft) — imprisonment without trial or judicial review. Crucially, the decree was never rescinded; it remained in force throughout the twelve years of the Third Reich and supplied, as historians have emphasised, the standing legal foundation of the entire apparatus of terror.
Exam Tip: The Reichstag Fire Decree is arguably more important than the more famous Enabling Act, because it provided the permanent legal basis of the police state and the suspension of civil rights that endured to 1945. A strong answer treats it not as a temporary emergency measure but as the foundational instrument of Nazi rule.
The election of 5 March 1933 was held under conditions that were anything but free: the Communist press was banned, opposition meetings were broken up, the SA roamed the streets, and the apparatus of the state was now in Nazi hands. Yet even so the NSDAP won only 43.9 per cent of the vote, and required the votes of its nationalist DNVP allies to command a bare Reichstag majority. This failure to win an outright majority even amid terror is among the most telling facts of the period, and it explains why Hitler turned at once to a device that would free him from dependence on parliament altogether.
The Enabling Act (the Law to Remedy the Distress of People and Reich, 23 March 1933) transferred legislative power, including the power to deviate from the constitution and to conclude treaties, from the Reichstag to the cabinet — in practice to Hitler — for four years. Because it altered the constitution, it required a two-thirds majority, which the Nazis secured by a combination of exclusion, intimidation and persuasion.
| Step | Detail |
|---|---|
| KPD eliminated | The 81 Communist deputies were arrested or in hiding and their mandates effectively annulled, removing a bloc certain to vote against |
| SA intimidation | The Kroll Opera House, where the Reichstag now met, was ringed by SA and SS men chanting threats |
| Centre Party won over | Decisive: the Catholic Centre Party voted in favour after receiving (worthless) verbal assurances about the rights of the Church and Catholic institutions |
| SPD opposed | Alone, the Social Democrats voted against; their leader Otto Wels declared that the party's honour could not be taken from it |
| Result | 444 votes for, 94 (the SPD) against |
With the Enabling Act the Reichstag voted away its own powers, and the constitutional foundations of parliamentary democracy were destroyed by ostensibly constitutional means. The structuralist historian Martin Broszat captured the paradox in observing that the Weimar constitution was, in effect, made to commit suicide — dismantled through its own legal mechanisms.
Exam Tip: The role of the Centre Party is the analytical key to the Enabling Act. The Nazis could not have reached two-thirds without it, and its capitulation — in exchange for promises that were promptly broken — exemplifies the wider failure of the non-Nazi parties and elites to resist while resistance was still possible.
Armed with the Enabling Act, the regime set about the systematic elimination of every independent centre of power, a process given the revealing name of Gleichschaltung. It proceeded with remarkable speed across the spring and summer of 1933, dismantling the federal structure, the trade unions and finally the parties themselves.
| Date | Action |
|---|---|
| 7 Apr 1933 | Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service: Jews and political opponents purged from the bureaucracy; a 'second revolution' of personnel |
| Mar–Apr 1933 | The federal states (Lander) brought under central control; their governments dissolved and Reich Governors (Reichsstatthalter) appointed |
| 2 May 1933 | The free trade unions abolished, their offices occupied and funds seized; workers compulsorily enrolled in the new German Labour Front (DAF) |
| 10 May 1933 | Public burnings of 'un-German' books in university towns, orchestrated by the Nazi student organisation |
| Jun–Jul 1933 | The remaining parties dissolved themselves or were banned: the SPD outlawed, the DNVP, Centre and others wound up |
| 14 Jul 1933 | The Law against the Formation of New Parties declared the NSDAP the sole legal party; Germany was now formally a one-party state |
The federal dimension deserves emphasis, because it reversed a structure that had defined Germany since unification: the historic autonomy of the states was abolished and replaced by Nazi-appointed governors answerable to Berlin, a centralisation completed in January 1934. The destruction of the trade unions on 2 May, the day after the regime had cynically celebrated a 'Day of National Labour' on 1 May, removed the organised industrial working class as an independent force. By the high summer of 1933 the political pluralism of Weimar had been extinguished.
One centre of disorder remained, and it lay within the Nazi movement itself. The SA (the brownshirts), under its chief of staff Ernst Rohm, had swollen to some three million men, dwarfing the 100,000-strong army permitted by Versailles, and Rohm pressed openly for a 'second revolution' — a genuinely radical social upheaval and, more threateningly, the absorption of the regular army into a vast revolutionary militia under his own command. This ambition placed Hitler in a dilemma. He needed the professional army and its conservative officer corps for the rearmament and the future war that were his real goals, and he could not tolerate a rival power base; the generals, for their part, demanded that the SA be curbed. Pressed also by Himmler and Goring, who coveted the SA's eclipse for their own ends, Hitler resolved to strike.
On 30 June 1934, SS squads carried out a wave of murders across Germany. Rohm and the senior SA leadership were shot; the regime also seized the opportunity to settle old scores, killing the former chancellor General Kurt von Schleicher and his wife, the Nazi dissident Gregor Strasser, and others wholly unconnected with the SA. The official figure was around 85 dead, but the true total was probably several hundred. There was no judicial process whatever; the killings were murders by any legal definition. Hitler then justified them retrospectively in a Reichstag speech, declaring that in the hour of danger he had been responsible for the fate of the nation and had therefore become 'the supreme judge of the German people' — a claim subsequently dressed in the form of a law that declared the killings to have been lawful acts of state defence.
Exam Tip: The Night of the Long Knives is analytically rich. It shows the subordination of law to the leader's will (murder retrospectively 'legalised'); it cemented the alliance between Hitler and the army on the eve of the Blitz of consolidation; and it marked the eclipse of the SA by the SS, which now emerged as the dominant instrument of terror.
The consolidation was completed within weeks. On 2 August 1934 President Hindenburg died, removing the last figure with any independent constitutional authority and the only man to whom the army had owed allegiance. Hitler at once merged the offices of President and Chancellor in his own person, taking the title Fuhrer und Reichskanzler ('Leader and Reich Chancellor') and assuming the headship of state and the supreme command of the armed forces. On the very day of Hindenburg's death, the entire officer corps and every soldier was required to swear a new oath of personal loyalty — not to the constitution or the nation, but to 'Adolf Hitler, Fuhrer of the German Reich and people' — a personalisation of allegiance whose consequences would weigh heavily on the later military resistance. A plebiscite on 19 August, conducted under the usual conditions, recorded some 90 per cent approval for the union of the offices.
graph TD
A[30 Jan 1933<br/>Hitler appointed Chancellor] --> B[28 Feb 1933<br/>Reichstag Fire Decree]
B --> C[5 Mar 1933<br/>Election: NSDAP 43.9%]
C --> D[23 Mar 1933<br/>Enabling Act]
D --> E[Mar-Jul 1933<br/>Gleichschaltung]
E --> F[14 Jul 1933<br/>One-party state]
F --> G[30 Jun 1934<br/>Night of the Long Knives]
G --> H[2 Aug 1934<br/>Hindenburg dies; Fuhrer state]
By August 1934 the transformation was complete. In nineteen months a minority chancellor in a coalition cabinet had become an absolute dictator combining party leadership, headship of state and supreme military command, with no legal constraint upon his will and no surviving institution capable of resisting it.
The consolidation of Nazi power is exceptionally rich in evaluable sources, and the most instructive single type is the text of a law or decree — for example the Enabling Act of 23 March 1933, treated here as a representative legal-document source. How should a historian assess its value to an investigation of how the Nazis established their dictatorship?
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