taunted with threats of his imminent execution.

He was also
starved—given only water to drink and the occasional piece
of stale breadto eat. Nonetheless, many of those who
had welcomed Hitler’s promise to restore “order” to
Germany were not unhappy to see concentration camps
established—and consequently they put an inaccurate
gloss on events. “In Dachau he [i.e., Hitler] collected
all the people—really the professional criminals,” says Karl
Boehm-Tettelbach, then a young air force officer.
“And they were there in Dachau, in that working
camp, and people didn’t object too much at this.”7
Others rationalisedthe suffering as a necessary
consequence of a “revolution.” “At the moment
we thought it [the establishment of camps like
Dachau] was necessary,” says Reinhard Spitzy. “We knew
this was a revolution. But look here, I studied the
French Revolution. How many people have been killed by
guillotine—40,000 have been killed by guillotine in France
… That means that in all revolutions—and we
thought we had a revolution— blood is running
… That the Nazi revolution killed some people, I think
that’s normal, there was nevera revolution in the world
without killing.”8 Hitler was careful to demonise the
Communists as the biggest and
most immediate threatto the new “national community” which
the Nazi revolution wished to establish. And in this
respect he was helped by a Dutch Communist
called Marinus van der Lubbe, who set fire to
the German parliament—the Reichstag—on 27 February
1933.The destruction of this iconicbuilding increased the
fear amongst the German population of a possible
Communistrevolution and thus served to justifythe Nazis’
oppression of their political opponents. The convenient
timing of van der Lubbe’s actions—a week before
elections called by Hitler—has led a number of
historians to believe that the Nazis conspired to
 create the fire themselvesand that van der Lubbe
did not act alone, but there is no conclusive
evidence for this conspiracy theory. Certainly the
unsystematic actions of the Nazisafter the fire do
not suggest that they knew aboutit beforehand. However,
the Reichstag fire did lead—the very next day—to the
hurried adoption of one of the most restrictive legislative
measures the Nazi state ever imposed: the decree of
the ReichPresident for the Protection of People and
State. Article 1 of the decree suspended basic
human rights—such as the right to a free press and
peaceful assembly— whilst Article 2 allowed the
ReichGovernment, via the Nazi Interior Minister Wilhelm
Frick, to take over the police powers of the
individual German states in order to “restore
security.” Five days later, on 5 March 1933,the
Germans voted in the last general election to be
held for more than a dozen years. Despite a
massive propaganda effort,despite fear of a Communist
uprising, despite Hitler’s “appeal to the nation,”
despite all of this and more,the Nazisdid not
manage to gain the support of a majority of
the German electorate. Fifty-six per cent of the
German people voted for other political parties. The
fact that most Germans still did not want the Nazis
represented a huge challenge for Adolf Hitler. He
had already privately announced that the election
would not make him change the composition of
his Cabinet, nor would it remove him from
power. Instead, he pushed forward with an attempt
to pass an Enabling Law in the new Reichstag. This
would allow him to issue decrees without referral
to President Hindenburg underArticle 48—but he
needed a two-thirds vote in the Reichstag in order
to pass the necessary legislation. In particular, the Nazis
needed the support of the Catholic Centre Party,
 and in his speech to the new Reichstag
representatives on 23
March 1933—with the meeting held in the Kroll Opera
House as a result of the Reichstag fire—Hitler was
deliberatelyconciliatory to them, saying that his
government “regards Christianity as the unshakeable
foundation of the morals and moralcode of the nation.”9
Hitler believed nosuch thing, but he recognised that for
purely political reasons he had to make this
assertion. He had acted in a similar way before.
After his release from Landsberg prison he had
demonstrated his understanding of thepower of
Christianity in German politics when he had expelled
the Gauleiter of Thuringia, Artur Dinter, from the Nazi
party.Against Hitler’s wishes, Dinter had wanted to
promote his own Aryan religion Geistchristentum—a
heretical version of Christianity that excluded the Old
Testament from the Bible and violently attacked the Jews.
But, at thetime, Hitler needed the support of the
Minister President of Bavaria, a member of a
Catholic party—so Dinter had to go.10 In 1933,just
as it had years before, Hitler’s ploy of telling
the German Catholics what they wanted to hear
worked. Members of the Catholic Centre party—whowere
also all too well aware