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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 the resulting dictatorship actually worked once established.
The consolidation and the structure that emerged from it belong together, because the manner of the takeover shaped the character of the regime. The dictatorship was built at extraordinary speed, by causes that were simultaneously legal and violent, and it produced not the streamlined totalitarian machine of its own propaganda but a tangle of rival agencies held together by the person of the leader and by an apparatus of terror. This lesson therefore carries the story from the Reichstag Fire to the Fuhrer state, and then examines the machinery of the police state that sustained the regime and the varieties of opposition it provoked.
The organising question is how Hitler converted a minority coalition chancellorship into an unchallenged personal dictatorship in only eighteen months, and how the structure of the resulting state — polycratic in administration yet monocratic in legitimacy — should be understood. As with every stage of this period, the elements can be weighed against one another in more than one way, and the strongest analysis integrates them rather than choosing a single explanation.
By the end of this lesson you will be able to:
This lesson belongs to OCR H505 Unit Y221 (Non-British period study): Democracy and Dictatorships in Germany 1919–1963, and covers the consolidation of Nazi power and the structure of the dictatorship. Within our own teaching sequence we combine the seizure of power with the nature of the Nazi state, because the character of the regime cannot be understood apart from the manner of its creation; this reflects our own pedagogical judgement rather than a transcription of the specification's ordering. (Refer to the official OCR specification for exact wording.)
Y221 is a period study assessed on AO1 only, examined by a two-part question: a shorter part (a) (around ten marks) requiring a comparative "greater importance" judgement, and a longer part (b) (around twenty marks) demanding a sustained analytical essay with a substantiated overall judgement. There is no source enquiry and no interpretations component. The second-order concepts to foreground here are causation (what enabled the consolidation), change (its extraordinary pace) and significance (which instruments and events were decisive). For this lesson that means being able to compare, say, the relative importance of legality and terror in the consolidation (a part (a) comparison), or to argue how far the Nazi seizure of power was achieved by legal means (a part (b) essay).
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 holds that he acted alone, although the Nazis 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.
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 protection against arbitrary arrest. It also authorised the central government to take over the powers of the federal states. 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 the standing legal foundation of the entire apparatus of terror. It is arguably more important than the more famous Enabling Act, because it provided the permanent legal basis of the police state that endured to 1945.
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 its 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, 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 |
| 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) assurances about the Church |
| SPD opposed | Alone, the Social Democrats voted against; their leader Otto Wels declared 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 Weimar constitution made, in effect, to commit suicide through its own legal mechanisms. The role of the Centre Party is the analytical key: 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 ('coordination' or 'bringing into line'). It proceeded with remarkable speed across the spring and summer of 1933.
| Date | Action |
|---|---|
| 7 Apr 1933 | Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service: Jews and opponents purged from the bureaucracy |
| Mar–Apr 1933 | The federal states (Länder) brought under central control; Reich Governors appointed |
| 2 May 1933 | The free trade unions abolished; workers compulsorily enrolled in the German Labour Front (DAF) |
| 10 May 1933 | Public burnings of 'un-German' books, orchestrated by the Nazi student organisation |
| Jun–Jul 1933 | The remaining parties dissolved themselves or were banned |
| 14 Jul 1933 | The Law against the Formation of New Parties declared the NSDAP the sole legal party |
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. The destruction of the trade unions on 2 May, the day after the regime had cynically celebrated a 'Day of National Labour', removed the organised industrial working class as an independent force. By the high summer of 1933 the political pluralism of Weimar had been extinguished and Germany was formally a one-party state.
One centre of disorder remained, and it lay within the Nazi movement itself. The SA (the brownshirts), under its chief of staff Ernst Röhm, had swollen to some three million men, dwarfing the 100,000-strong army permitted by Versailles, and Röhm pressed openly for a 'second revolution' and, more threateningly, the absorption of the regular army into a vast militia under his own command. This placed Hitler in a dilemma: he needed the professional army and its conservative officer corps for the rearmament and 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 Göring, who coveted the SA's eclipse, Hitler resolved to strike.
On 30 June 1934, SS squads carried out a wave of murders across Germany. Röhm and the senior SA leadership were shot; the regime also settled 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 — yet Hitler justified them retrospectively in a Reichstag speech declaring that he had become 'the supreme judge of the German people', a claim subsequently dressed in the form of a law. The Night of the Long Knives is analytically rich: it shows the subordination of law to the leader's will, it cemented the alliance between Hitler and the army on the eve of the final 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 Führer und Reichskanzler and assuming the headship of state and 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 personally — 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. 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.
| Stage | Date | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Hitler appointed Chancellor | 30 Jan 1933 | Head of a coalition cabinet with only three Nazi ministers |
| Reichstag Fire Decree | 28 Feb 1933 | Permanent suspension of civil rights; legal basis of the terror |
| March election | 5 Mar 1933 | NSDAP wins only 43.9% even amid coercion |
| Enabling Act | 23 Mar 1933 | Legislative power transferred to the cabinet |
| Gleichschaltung | Mar–Jul 1933 | States, unions and parties eliminated |
| One-party state | 14 Jul 1933 | The NSDAP the sole legal party |
| Night of the Long Knives | 30 Jun 1934 | SA leadership purged; SS ascendant; army reassured |
| Fuhrer state | 2 Aug 1934 | Hindenburg dies; Hitler merges the offices; army oath |
The dictatorship that emerged was not the streamlined totalitarian monolith of its own propaganda but a polycracy — a system of multiple, overlapping and competing centres of power. The old state bureaucracy continued alongside, and in rivalry with, a parallel structure of party organisations; new agencies were created without abolishing the old, so that responsibilities overlapped and clashed; and Hitler habitually granted the same task to more than one subordinate. The result was a welter of jurisdictions — ministries, party offices, the SS empire, the Four-Year Plan organisation, regional Gauleiter, special commissioners — whose boundaries were undefined and whose holders competed ceaselessly for resources, authority and the leader's approval.
At the apex of this confusion stood Hitler, but his style of rule reinforced rather than resolved 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, and rival 'chancelleries' competed to mediate it — most consequentially the Party Chancellery under Martin Bormann, who controlled Hitler's diary and the flow of paper and made himself an indispensable gatekeeper. This consolidation of personal and party power went hand in hand with the erosion of the rule of law: the career bureaucracy was purged and bypassed, the courts were nazified, and the People's Court (established 1934 for political offences) became a notorious instrument of terror. The contemporary legal scholar Ernst Fraenkel captured the resulting duality 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.
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: appointed head of the Bavarian political police in 1933, he gradually took control of the political police of the other states and in 1936 was made Chief of German Police, uniting the leadership of a party organisation with command of the entire state police apparatus. Beneath him, Reinhard Heydrich headed the SD and, from 1939, the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA).
| SS branch | Function |
|---|---|
| Allgemeine-SS | The 'general' SS: political surveillance and the administrative core |
| SD (Sicherheitsdienst) | The party intelligence service under Heydrich, gathering information on the population |
| Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei) | The secret state police, with powers of arrest and 'protective custody' |
| Totenkopfverbände | The 'Death's Head' units that guarded the concentration camps |
| Waffen-SS | The armed combat formations that fought alongside the army in the war |
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