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When Hitler was appointed Chancellor on 30 January 1933, his position appeared anything but secure: he led a coalition in which the NSDAP held only three of eleven posts, and the conservatives believed they could control him. Yet within eighteen months he had destroyed the parliamentary republic, annihilated all rival parties, purged his own movement, absorbed the offices of President and Chancellor, and bound the armed forces to himself by personal oath. And the state he built was stranger than its own propaganda claimed. It is tempting to imagine the Third Reich as the archetype of the smoothly functioning totalitarian machine, transmitting a single will without friction to every corner of national life; the reality was a tangle of overlapping party and state agencies, rival jurisdictions and personal empires, all competing for the leader's favour yet all ultimately subordinate to his will. This lesson examines two things together: how Hitler converted a minority chancellorship into an unchallenged dictatorship in 1933 to 1934, and how that dictatorship actually worked — its polycratic structure, its apparatus of terror, and the opposition it provoked. Throughout, the analytical task is to weigh legality against terror, and consent against coercion, and to grasp the central structural debate about whether Hitler was a "strong" dictator directing events or a "weak" one presiding over a chaos from which radicalisation emerged.
For a breadth study running to 1989, this lesson is the heart of the nature of government thread and supplies the essential contrast at the core of the whole course. The Nazi dictatorship — rule by terror, the Führerprinzip, the fusion of party and state, the destruction of the rule of law — is the negative benchmark against which the Federal Republic's later achievement will be measured: a stable parliamentary democracy with entrenched rights, an independent judiciary and a chastened relationship between citizen and state. Students who understand precisely how the Rechtsstaat (the state bound by law) was dismantled between 1933 and 1934, and how a lawless, polycratic terror state operated thereafter, will understand why the founders of the Federal Republic built the safeguards they did.
By the end of this lesson you will be able to:
This lesson belongs to Edexcel 9HI0 Paper 1, Option 1G (Route G): "Germany and West Germany, 1918–89" — a breadth study assessed by extended analytical essays (Sections A and B) and by the evaluation of historians' interpretations (Section C). In our teaching sequence it develops the nature of government thread, following the appointment of Hitler and underpinning everything that follows about the racial state, the war, and the deliberately different design of the post-war democracy.
Because Paper 1 rewards command of change over time and judgements about the nature and durability of change, keep asking how power was actually distributed and exercised, and how the dismantling of the rule of law here shaped the safeguards the Federal Republic would later build. (For the precise assessment weightings and question wording, consult the official Edexcel specification and sample assessment materials rather than any paraphrase.)
The consolidation was achieved through a combination of pseudo-legal manoeuvre and organised terror, compressed into nineteen months of extraordinarily rapid change.
| Date | Step | Significance |
|---|---|---|
| 28 Feb 1933 | Reichstag Fire Decree | After the Reichstag fire (blamed on the communists), Hindenburg was persuaded to sign a decree under Article 48 suspending civil liberties "until further notice"; it was never rescinded and became the permanent legal basis of the police state |
| 5 Mar 1933 | March election | Even amid terror, the NSDAP won only 43.9%, needing its DNVP allies for a bare majority — a telling failure that explains the turn to the Enabling Act |
| 23 Mar 1933 | Enabling Act | Transferred legislative power to the cabinet (in practice, Hitler) for four years; passed with the fatal support of the Catholic Centre Party in exchange for worthless assurances; only the SPD voted against |
| Mar–Jul 1933 | Gleichschaltung | The systematic elimination of every independent centre of power: the Länder brought under central control, the trade unions abolished (2 May), all rival parties dissolved or banned |
| 14 Jul 1933 | One-party state | The Law against the Formation of New Parties made the NSDAP the sole legal party |
| 30 Jun 1934 | Night of the Long Knives | SS squads murdered the SA leadership (Ernst Röhm) and settled old scores (Schleicher, Strasser); murder was retrospectively "legalised" |
| 2 Aug 1934 | Führer state | On Hindenburg's death Hitler merged the offices of President and Chancellor, taking supreme command of the armed forces, who swore a personal oath of loyalty to him |
Two features deserve emphasis. First, the Reichstag Fire Decree is arguably more important than the more famous Enabling Act, because it provided the permanent legal foundation of the terror apparatus and the suspension of civil rights that endured to 1945. Second, the role of the Centre Party in the Enabling Act is the analytical key: the Nazis could not have reached the two-thirds majority without it, and its capitulation — in exchange for promises promptly broken — exemplifies the wider failure of the non-Nazi parties and elites to resist while resistance was still possible. 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.
The Night of the Long Knives requires particular care. The SA under Röhm had swollen to some three million men, dwarfing the 100,000-strong army permitted by Versailles, and Röhm pressed for a "second revolution" and the absorption of the regular army into a revolutionary militia. Hitler needed the professional army and its conservative officer corps for the rearmament and war that were his real goals, and could not tolerate a rival power base; pressed also by Himmler and Göring, he struck. The murders (the official figure of around 85 dead was probably several hundred) were retrospectively declared lawful acts of "state defence" — the subordination of law to the leader's will made explicit. The episode cemented the army's alliance with Hitler on the eve of Hindenburg's death and marked the eclipse of the SA by the SS, which now emerged as the dominant instrument of terror.
The single most important insight of modern scholarship on the Third Reich is that it was not a streamlined totalitarian monolith but a polycracy — a system of multiple, overlapping and competing centres of power. The old state bureaucracy continued alongside a parallel structure of party organisations; new agencies were created without abolishing the old; and Hitler habitually granted the same task to more than one subordinate, or appointed personal plenipotentiaries who cut across the chain of command. The result was a welter of rival jurisdictions — ministries, party offices, the SS empire, the Four-Year Plan organisation, regional Gauleiter, special commissioners — competing ceaselessly for resources, authority and the leader's approval.
At the apex stood Hitler, but his style of rule reinforced the chaos. He worked irregularly, disliked paperwork and committee government, was reluctant to adjudicate between his lieutenants, and increasingly absented himself from routine administration; after 1938 the cabinet effectively ceased to meet. The decline of the cabinet left not a vacuum but a contest, for access to the leader became the supreme political resource. The Party Chancellery under Martin Bormann, who controlled Hitler's diary and the flow of paper during the war, grew into a formidable power, an indispensable gatekeeper whose endorsement could make or break a policy or a career. This process went hand in hand with the erosion of the rule of law: the career bureaucracy was purged and bypassed; the courts were nazified, with the People's Court (Volksgerichtshof) established in 1934 becoming a notorious instrument of terror under Roland Freisler; and "protective custody" allowed imprisonment without trial. The contemporary legal scholar Ernst Fraenkel captured the result in his concept of the "dual state": a "normative state" of laws governing ordinary life persisted alongside a "prerogative state" of unrestrained discretionary violence wherever the regime's political and racial purposes were engaged, with the second always able to override the first.
If polycracy describes the regime's structure, terror describes one of its essential instruments, and here the dominant institution was the SS (Schutzstaffel) under Heinrich Himmler. Beginning as a small bodyguard, the SS expanded after the Night of the Long Knives into a vast, semi-autonomous empire that progressively absorbed the policing functions of the state. Himmler's decisive advance came through the fusion of party and state policing: from control of the Bavarian political police in 1933 he gradually took over the political police of the other states, and in June 1936 became Chief of German Police within the Interior Ministry — uniting the leadership of a party organisation with command of the entire state police apparatus, a textbook example of how the Nazi system dissolved the boundary between government and movement. Beneath him, Reinhard Heydrich ran the SD and, from 1939, the new Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), which welded the Gestapo, the criminal police and the SD into a single security empire answerable, in practice, only to the Führer.
A striking feature of the system, illuminated by Robert Gellately, is that the Gestapo was remarkably small — only some 32,000 officials for a population of around 66 million, and in many districts a mere handful of officers. It could exercise such pervasive control only because it relied heavily on denunciations volunteered by ordinary Germans, who reported neighbours, colleagues and relatives for political offences, racial "crimes" or private grudges. The implication is profound: the terror was not simply imposed by an external machine upon a cowed population but was sustained, in part, by the active participation of that population — evidence, Gellately argues, of significant popular complicity rather than universal victimhood. The concentration camps formed the other arm of the terror. Dachau, opened near Munich in March 1933, was the prototype and training ground for the camp system and its personnel; through the 1930s the camps held, alongside political prisoners, an expanding range of those the regime classified as "asocial" or racially undesirable — the homeless, the long-term unemployed, those labelled "work-shy" — and by 1939 the network held around 25,000 prisoners, serving purposes of punishment, deterrence, forced labour and persecution. During the war the system would expand monstrously and merge with the machinery of genocide. Terror was thus not a single instrument but a graduated apparatus, ranging from the surveillance of the SD and the arrests of the Gestapo, through "protective custody" without trial, to the People's Court's death sentences and the camps — the whole answerable in practice to the leader rather than to any law.
Against this apparatus, and against the regime's substantial popularity, organised opposition was extraordinarily difficult; it is best understood as a spectrum from open resistance, through non-conformity, to private grumbling.
| Group | Key actions | Limitations |
|---|---|---|
| The Churches | The Catholic encyclical Mit brennender Sorge (1937); the Protestant Confessing Church (Niemöller, Bonhoeffer); Bishop Galen's 1941 sermons against the T4 "euthanasia" programme | Largely defensive of Church interests; did not, in general, challenge the regime's racial policies |
| Youth | The working-class Edelweiss Pirates; the middle-class Swing Youth | Mainly cultural non-conformity rather than political resistance |
| The White Rose | Sophie and Hans Scholl and others — anti-Nazi leaflets in Munich, 1942–43; arrested and executed | Tiny in scale, but of enormous moral and symbolic significance |
| Conservatives and military | The Kreisau Circle; the July 1944 bomb plot led by Stauffenberg | Came late; many had earlier supported or served the regime |
| The left | Underground SPD and KPD networks; the "Red Orchestra" | Repeatedly broken up by the Gestapo; the labour movement had been destroyed in 1933 |
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