The seven months between the 30th of January and the end of July 1933 are the most consequential in the political history of twentieth-century Europe. In that period the National Socialist German Workers' Party — a single party that had received 33 per cent of the vote in the most recent free election — abolished, in legal forms, every other political party, every elected state government, every independent trade union, and most of the institutional structure of the Weimar Republic. It did this without holding a parliamentary majority. It did this without a coup d'état in the conventional sense. It did this with the cooperation of the conservative non-Nazi members of the cabinet, the consent of the Reich president, the active assistance of the police authorities in the largest German state, and the failure of every constitutional and trade-union organisation to mount the kind of resistance — a general strike, a parliamentary boycott, civil disobedience — that had stopped the Kapp Putsch in 1920. The seizure of power was carried out, in form, by parliamentary majorities. They were the last parliamentary majorities the Reichstag would pass.
The 30th of January
The cabinet sworn in on the morning of the 30th of January 1933 contained Hitler as chancellor, Franz von Papen as vice-chancellor, and three Nazis with portfolio: Wilhelm Frick at the Interior Ministry, Hermann Göring as minister without portfolio, and the same Göring as acting Prussian interior minister. The remaining ministers were conservatives drawn from the DNVP, the Stahlhelm, and Papen's circle of non-party technocrats. The arithmetic looked, at first, to favour the conservatives: eight ministers to three. Papen would later say he expected to "have Hitler in a corner" within weeks.
The arithmetic was misleading. The Interior Ministry controlled the police forces of the Reich. The Prussian Interior Ministry controlled the police of the largest German state — Prussia comprised two-thirds of the country by population, and included Berlin, the Ruhr, and most of Germany's industrial workforce. Within forty-eight hours of taking office Frick and Göring had ordered the dismissal of senior police chiefs across Prussia, replaced them with NSDAP loyalists or with SA officers, and authorised the SA to operate as auxiliary police. The structural advantage of the two ministries Hitler had taken — the violence-monopoly side of the state — outweighed the eight-to-three formal arithmetic of the cabinet immediately. Papen did not appreciate this, and never quite did.
The Reichstag fire
On the evening of the 27th of February 1933 — twenty-eight days after Hitler took office, and six days before the federal election he had immediately demanded — the Reichstag building in Berlin caught fire. A young Dutch council-communist called Marinus van der Lubbe was found on the premises with matches and firelighter cartridges. The fire destroyed the plenary chamber, the dome, and much of the southern wing. The cause of the fire has been argued for more than ninety years; the contemporary scholarly consensus, after the 2007 verdict overturning his German conviction, is that van der Lubbe was acting alone and was not, as the post-war Communist narrative insisted, framed by the NSDAP. But the question of who set the fire matters less than what was done with it.
The morning of the 28th of February, the cabinet — Hitler, Papen, Frick, Göring, and the rest — adopted the Reichstag Fire Decree, formally the Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of the People and the State. Hindenburg signed it under Article 48 within hours. It suspended, with the stroke of a pen, every constitutional civil liberty in the Weimar Constitution: freedom of expression, of the press, of assembly, of association, the privacy of post and telegraph, the inviolability of the home, and habeas corpus. It allowed the Reich government to take over the powers of state governments where "necessary to restore public security and order". It authorised the death penalty for arson, treason, and resistance to the state. The decree was issued as a temporary measure and was never rescinded. It would be the constitutional foundation of the Third Reich for the next twelve years.
Within forty-eight hours the Berlin Gestapo (founded by Göring three months earlier) and the SA had arrested approximately 4,000 Communist functionaries and Reichstag deputies, hundreds of Social Democrat trade-union activists, dozens of liberal newspaper editors, and the leadership of the pacifist and anti-fascist veterans' organisations. Roughly 20,000 political prisoners would be held in "protective custody" — Schutzhaft, a legal innovation with no statutory basis — by the end of March, mostly in improvised camps run by the SA in disused factories, barracks and warehouses. The first official concentration camp at Dachau, run by the SS, opened on the 22nd of March. The KPD was not formally banned; with its leadership in prison or in exile, the question was academic.
The March election and the Enabling Act
The federal election of the 5th of March 1933 was held under the Reichstag Fire Decree, with the KPD leadership in prison, with opposition meetings broken up by the SA, with the broadcast monopoly under NSDAP control, and with state-employed civil servants who had not declared NSDAP loyalty under threat of dismissal. Even under those conditions the NSDAP failed to take a majority. It got 43.9 per cent and 288 seats. With the 8 per cent of the DNVP (the cabinet ally) it had a small absolute majority. The SPD held 18.3 per cent, the Centre 11.2 per cent. The KPD, despite everything, still took 12.3 per cent of the vote and 81 seats — but those 81 seats were either in prison or in hiding, and would never be admitted to the chamber.
The first business of the new Reichstag was the Enabling Act — formally the Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Reich — which transferred legislative power from the Reichstag and the Reichsrat (the upper house) to the cabinet for four years. Because the Enabling Act amended the constitution, it required a two-thirds majority of those present. The arithmetic: the NSDAP plus DNVP plus splinter conservatives plus the BVP could just reach two-thirds with the Centre Party's support. The Centre would be decisive. The Centre Party was a confessional Catholic party with a fifty-year political tradition of negotiated coalitions; its leader, the prelate Ludwig Kaas, sought a written assurance from Hitler that the cabinet's emergency powers would respect the autonomy of Catholic schools, the religious orders, and the existing concordats with the German states. Hitler gave the assurances verbally; the written guarantees were promised but never issued. The Centre voted yes anyway. On the 23rd of March 1933, in the Kroll Opera House in Berlin (the burned-out Reichstag being unusable), the Enabling Act passed by 444 votes to 94 — the SPD being the only party to vote against, in a famous and courageous speech by its chairman Otto Wels.
The Enabling Act gave the cabinet power to legislate without the Reichstag or the Reichsrat, including the power to deviate from the constitution. It was extended in 1937 and again in 1939 and 1943; from the end of March 1933 to the end of the regime, no further Reichstag legislative act of any consequence was passed. The Reichstag survived as a ceremonial chamber that approved declarations of war and heard Hitler's speeches; it never legislated again.
The dismantling of the parties
The dismantling of the rest of the German political and civil-society apparatus proceeded across April, May, June and July 1933, generally through some combination of legal decree under the Enabling Act, SA street violence, and voluntary self-dissolution by parties unwilling to risk the alternative. The chronology is dense:
The 31st of March: the Gleichschaltungsgesetz ("co-ordination law") dissolved all state legislatures and re-formed them in proportions matching the March federal vote, with the SPD's seats abolished outright. The 7th of April: the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service authorised the dismissal of "non-Aryan" and politically unreliable civil servants — the first racial-discriminatory legislation of the regime. The 2nd of May: SA units occupied trade-union offices across the Reich; the trade unions were dissolved the next day and a state-run "German Labour Front" announced. The 10th of May: the Social Democratic Party's offices were occupied, its assets seized; on the 22nd of June the SPD was banned. Between the 21st of June and the 5th of July the DNVP, the State Party (the remnants of the liberal DDP), the People's Party (the DVP), the BVP, and the Centre Party all dissolved themselves rather than face forcible suppression. The Centre's dissolution, on the 5th of July, was negotiated as part of the concordat which the Vatican signed with the German government on the 20th of July — Cardinal Pacelli (later Pius XII) negotiating on behalf of the Holy See, Papen for the Reich. The 14th of July: the Law against the Formation of New Parties made the NSDAP the only legal party in Germany and criminalised the formation of any other. Within twenty-four weeks of taking office Hitler had become the head of a one-party state.
The autumn assessment
By the end of July 1933 the constitutional architecture of Weimar Germany no longer existed. The federal states had been brought under direct Reich control through the appointment of Reichsstatthalter — Reich governors with authority to override state legislatures. The trade unions were gone, the parties were gone, the press was substantially co-ordinated through forced editorial appointments and licensing restrictions, the universities were beginning a wave of dismissals that would expel approximately a quarter of the German professoriate within twelve months (including 11 future or past Nobel laureates), and roughly 100,000 Germans — political opponents, Jewish professionals, communists, and conscientious objectors — were either in concentration camps or had fled into exile. The cabinet still contained non-Nazis: Papen as vice-chancellor, Konstantin von Neurath at Foreign, Franz Seldte at Labour. They were, in functional terms, decoration.
Two further consolidations remained. The SA — the brown-shirted street-fighting force of two million members which had brought the party to power and which expected, in the summer of 1933, to be rewarded with the absorption of the Reichswehr into a "people's army" under its own chief of staff, Ernst Röhm — needed to be subordinated; the Reichswehr, with the Junker officer corps and Hindenburg behind it, would not accept Röhm's terms. That confrontation, resolved with the murders of the 30th of June 1934, is the subject of the next chapter. And the presidency, on which the constitutional architecture still nominally rested, needed to be merged with the chancellorship: that would happen on the 2nd of August 1934, on Hindenburg's death.
The seven months from January to July were the period in which the seizure was made irreversible. The two further consolidations of 1934 — Röhm and Hindenburg — were not surprises; they were the completion of an arc whose direction had been set by Easter 1933.
End of Chapter II