1933

DEATH
OF A
DEMOCRACY
On 1 January 1933,
Germany was
a democracy with
a range of political
parties. By the end of
the year its parliament
was a rubber stamp
for Adolf Hitler’s will.
Frank McDonough

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 G
Previous spread: erman newspapers
Adolf Hitler and offered gloomy
Joseph Goebbels
at a campaign predictions for Adolf
rally, Berlin Hitler’s political
Sports Palast, prospects. The Social
31 November 1933.
Democratic newspaper Vorwärts ran
Right: Hitler
meets President an article on 1 January 1933 with the
Hindenburg after headline: ‘Hitler’s Rise and Fall’,
his appointment suggesting Nazi electoral popularity
as chancellor,
30 January 1933.
had peaked at the July 1932 national
Göring is poll. The Berliner Tageblatt noted:
behind Hitler. ‘Everywhere in the world people
were talking about – what was his
name: Adalbert Hitler. Later?
He’s vanished!’
Germany was in the middle of
a political crisis. During 1932 there
had been three chancellors: Heinrich
Brüning, Franz von Papen and
General Kurt von Schleicher. Each
failed to establish a government with
a majority in the Reichstag. They
were appointed by the 85-year-old
president Paul von Hindenburg,
using arbitrary powers granted to
him under Article 48 of the Weimar
constitution. He wanted to establish
a stable and popular right-wing
authoritarian government, which
excluded left-wing parties, but was
reluctant to appoint Hitler as his
chancellor.
Papen felt aggrieved about
Schleicher’s role in bringing down
his own government and wanted
to return to power. He realised he
needed the cooperation of Hitler
to do so. Political circumstances
brought this odd couple together.
Hitler and von Papen met a number
of times in January to discuss the
creation of a coalition government.
The pivotal day was 22 January,
when a meeting took place at the
palatial home of the rising Nazi
politician and wine merchant
Joachim von Ribbentrop. Also
present was Hindenburg’s son,
Oskar, and Otto Meissner, his state
secretary. Oskar, who was close to his
father, had shown little sympathy
for Hitler and National Socialism.
Hitler said he would not join
72 | History Today | February 2020
Schleicher’s cabinet, but would
accept a place in the coalition if
made chancellor. He held a private
discussion with Oskar in an adjacent
room, where Hitler told him that he
alone could save Germany from
civil war and crush the communist
threat. ‘In the taxi on the way back’,
Meissner recalled, ‘Oskar von
Hindenburg was very silent; the only
remark he made was that there
was no help for it, the Nazis had
to be taken into the government.
My impression was that Hitler had
succeeded in getting him under
his spell.’
On 23 January, Schleicher
met Hindenburg and told him the
only alternative to a Hitler-led
government was now a ‘military
dictatorship’. Hindenburg rejected
such an idea. On 28 January,
Schleicher resigned as chancellor.
Hindenburg summoned von Papen
and asked him to take the post, but
von Papen replied that Hitler was
now the only logical choice and
added a confident assertion: ‘Don’t
worry, we’ve hired him.’ As Otto
Meissner put it: ‘Papen finally won
him over to Hitler with the argument
that the representatives of the other
right-wing parties, which would
belong to the government, would
restrict Hitler’s freedom of action.’
Hitler appointed
At 11.30am on 30 January, Hitler
became chancellor of ‘A Government
of National Concentration’. Only two
other Nazis were in its cabinet. Hitler
gave an impromptu speech, vowing
to uphold the Weimar constitution.
He awaited a response, but all
Hindenburg said was: ‘And now
gentlemen, forward with God.’ Hitler
went to the Hotel Kaiserhof for
lunch. ‘We all had tears in our
eyes’, Goebbels noted in his diary.
‘We shook Hitler’s hand. He deserved
this. Enormous celebrations.’
The reaction to Hitler coming
to power was muted. The Sunday
February 2020 | History Today | 73
 Times commented: ‘Have President
von Hindenburg and his comrade
Herr von Papen got Hitler into a cage
before they wring his neck or are they
in a cage?’ The Frankfurter Zeitung
noted: ‘The make-up of the cabinet
shows that Herr Hitler had to accept
significant restrictions.’ The New
York Times thought Hitler had ‘no
scope for the gratification of his
dictatorial ambitions’.
Reichstag Fire
Hitler’s first act as chancellor was to
call a general election, hoping to gain
enough votes to pass an Enabling
Act, which would legally dispense
with the Reichstag. The key election
slogan was ‘Build with Hitler’.
During the campaign, Hitler flew
on a speaking tour to 17 cities.
An event that proved hugely
advantageous to Hitler’s plans was
the Reichstag Fire, which began
on the evening of 27 February.
The person charged with the crime
was Marinus van der Lubbe, an
unemployed working-class Dutch
communist. On 18 February, van der
Lubbe arrived in Berlin after walking
all the way from the Netherlands and
was seen in a shop on Müller Strasse
buying four boxes of firelighters.
He started his haphazard arson
campaign at three other government
buildings in the German capital on
25 February: the welfare office in
the Labour Ministry building,
Schönenberg Town Hall and the
Imperial Palace. He evaded arrest
each time. His fourth target was
the Reichstag building.
Security there was lax. Van der
Lubbe climbed a wall, broke
a window and was soon on the first
floor. A theology student heard
breaking glass as he walked past and
noted the time: 9.30pm. Seeing a
person with a burning object in his
hand through the window he ran to
alert a policeman. Van der Lubbe,
stripped to the waist, dripping with
sweat, was arrested soon after.
74 | History Today | February 2020
Most of Hitler’s political
opponents, foreign journalists and
many historians believed the Nazis
were behind the fire: a pretext
to justify the end of democratic
government. The finger of suspicion
pointed at the Nazi President of the
Reichstag, Hermann Göring; an
underground passage connected his
official residence to the Reichstag.
He certainly had the motive,
means and opportunity, but
conclusive proof has not been found.
In Mondorf internment camp near
Luxembourg, in the summer of 1945,
Göring confided to Schwerin von
Krosigk, a former German Finance
Minister: ‘I would have been proud
to have set the Reichstag on fire,
but I was innocent of that crime.’
Van der Lubbe’s story, that he
acted alone, remains the most
plausible conclusion.
The Reichstag Fire gave Hitler
the opportunity to crush both the
Communists and the socialist Left.
A day after the fire the cabinet agreed
to introduce the Decree of the Reich
President for the Protection of
People and State, known as the
Reichstag Fire Decree. It suspended
most of the civil rights granted under
the Weimar constitution, including
free speech, a free press, the right to
assemble, imprisonment without
trial and the secrecy of telephone
calls and post. The Reich Minister of
the Interior was granted the power to
seize control of any state government
unable to keep order. The decree
provided the fundamental quasi-
legal basis for the abolition of the
Weimar state and its swift
transformation into a dictatorship.
Violence against the Left
escalated dramatically. On 3 March,
Ernst Thälmann, the Communist
Party (KPD) leader, was arrested.
He spent the next 11 years in solitary
confinement, before his execution
on 18 August 1944, on Hitler’s order,
in Buchenwald concentration camp.
During 1933, over 100,000 political
Hitler, flanked by prisoners were detained in what
von Papen (to his were called ‘wild’ concentration
right), Franz Seldte
and Göring at the camps located in the larger cities.
opening of Berlin’s The Stormtroopers (Sturmabteilung,
Evangelical Church, SA), led by Ernst Röhm, ran more
March 1933.
than 240 such camps in Berlin alone
during the early months of Nazi rule.
Conditions were brutal. It is hard to
establish how many people were
killed during this orgy of violence;
perhaps between 500 and 1,000.
It was six months before these ‘wild’
concentration camps were closed.
Last democratic election
In the election of 5 March 1933,
the Nazi Party secured 43.9 per cent
of the votes, up 10.8 per cent from
November 1932. In most histories of
the Third Reich, the term ‘only 43.9
per cent voted Nazi’ is frequently
mentioned to describe the Nazi
electoral performance. Yet in the
context of German national elections
since 1918 it was an exceptional
result. The Nazi Party recorded the
highest vote by any German political
party in any democratic election
from 1919 to 1932. It was 6.7 per cent
more than the result gained by the
Nazi Party in July 1932; its 17.2
million votes were way ahead of the
13.7 million achieved by the Nazi
Party in the 1932 election, the second
highest number of votes. This huge
increase came almost entirely from
voters who had not voted in the
previous election. They seemed
quite happy to sanction the end
of democracy.
In the days following the election,
Nazi activists seized power in all
the German federal states. Before
5 March, only Prussia, Hamburg,
Hesse and Württemberg had
Nazi-dominated local governments.
Afterwards, the states of Bremen,
Lübeck, Shaumberg-Lippe, Hessen,
Baden and Saxony all went Nazi in
quick succession. The Nazis no
February 2020 | History Today | 75
Hitler on the
campaign trail in
a plane piloted by
Göring, September
1933. Von Papen,
bottom left,
facing camera.

76 | History Today
February 2020 | History Today | 77
 longer had to wait for conservative
nationalists to invite them into office.
This ‘revolution from below’ was led
by the SA. The sequence of events
in each region followed a familiar
pattern: public buildings were
occupied; local Nazi leaders
demanded control of the police; then
the SA occupied government offices.
The Reich Interior Minister,
Wilhelm Frick, would then invoke
emergency measures, appointing
Reich commissioners to take charge.
These were usually local Nazi
Gauleiters. Civil servants and the
police were powerless to stop it.
Cultural revolution
Hitler appointed Joseph Goebbels
as the Minister for the People’s
Enlightenment and Propaganda
on 13 March. His aim was not merely
to spread Nazi ideas but to bring
culture under Nazi direction. He
swiftly brought the press, radio, film,
theatre, music, the visual arts,
literature and all other cultural
organisations under Nazi control.
The purge of culture was more
extensive than in many other areas
of German society.
The removal of Jews and the Left
from culture were central priorities.
As universities were state funded, it
proved relatively easy to purge them
of Jews and left-leaning academics.
By September 1933, 313 professors
had been dismissed. There was
a clear-out of Jewish classical
musicians, while leftist newspapers
disappeared quickly, followed by the
Catholic press. On 29 March 1933,
Goebbels held a reception for
newspaper publishers and told them
they should act as ‘a piano on which
the government can play’.
All figures in the literary world
who were deemed ideologically
unsuitable were cleared out. Many
fled abroad. It has been estimated
that 2,500 novelists and playwrights
left Germany in 1933 and, of the 12
bestselling authors of the Weimar
78 | History Today | February 2020
period, the works of seven were
banned. On 10 May, ceremonial book
burnings of ‘un-German’ authors
took place throughout Germany.
On 14 July, Goebbels created the
Reich Film Chamber, which oversaw
the coordination of the film industry.
It vetted scripts and purged the
industry of Jewish and left-wing
actors, writers and directors.
Some actors and directors left for
Hollywood, but the exodus of film
stars was not as extensive as is often
supposed: of the 75 most popular box
office stars in Germany in 1932, only
13 emigrated after Hitler came to
power and hardly any for ideological
reasons. There was a similar purge
in radio broadcasting.
As Hitler despised modern art,
the work of artists branded Entartete
(‘degenerate’) was removed from art
galleries. During 1933, 27 gallery and
museum curators were dismissed.
The Reich Chamber of Art vetted the
work of all artists, sculptors and
architects. Artists who were officially
sanctioned produced art which
tended to portray family scenes
in rural settings or physical beauty
in the classical style.
End of democracy
Democracy in Germany effectively
came to an end on 23 March with the
passing of the Enabling Act. ‘The
Law for Removing the Distress of
People and the Reich’ passed by 441
votes to 94, attaining the required
two-thirds majority. All votes against
came from the SPD. The votes of
the Centre Party were crucial.
The Enabling Act provided
the key legal basis for Hitler’s
dictatorship. In just one day, he had
dispensed with the president’s
authority to issue emergency decrees
and made himself independent of
the Reichstag. The cabinet now had
no power to restrain him. There
would be no more openly democratic
elections either. Initially the Act
was limited to four years, but it was
Marinus van der
Lubbe, suspected
of starting the
Reichstag Fire,
is questioned
at the Supreme
Court, Leipzig,
October 1933.
extended in 1937 and 1941 and in
1943 Hitler declared it perpetual.
The Reichstag became primarily
a venue for Hitler’s speeches.
Only seven laws were passed by
the Reichstag before 1939.
Underpinning Hitler’s rule
was terror administered by two
organisations set up in 1933.
On 26 April, Göring established the
Gestapo (Die Geheime Staatspolizei,
or ‘Secret State Police’) in Prussia,
under the first Gestapo Law. He
defined its role in the following way:
‘Its task is to investigate all political
activities in the entire state that pose
a danger to the state.’ It was an
outgrowth of the Prussian Political
Police. The detectives of that
organisation were state employees
who were assigned to work for the
Gestapo. Contrary to popular myth,
the Gestapo was not an all-powerful
Orwellian style ‘Thought Police’;
it was under-resourced and
overstretched and did not have
enough staff to spy on everyone.
Most Gestapo investigations began
with a tip-off from the public.
To make up for its shortage of staff
the Gestapo targeted its resources
against clearly defined opposition
groups, most notably communists,
religious dissidents, Jews, foreign
workers and a loosely defined group
of ‘social outsiders’.
The Gestapo was given the
power to arrest political dissidents
using a ‘Protective Custody’ order.
These ‘enemies of the state’ were
supposedly being ‘protected’ from
the population. Protective custody
ran in parallel with the existing
criminal justice system.
The destination for a person
defined as a danger to the state
was the concentration camp
(Konzentrationslager, or KL). These
were run not by the state, but the
Nazi SS (Schutzstaffel, or ‘Protection
February 2020 | History Today | 79
80 | History Today | February 2020
Left: Ernst Röhm, Squadron’). At a press conference in
the leader of the Munich on 20 March, the SS leader
SA, in his office
in Berlin, 1933. Heinrich Himmler announced the
Above: members first camp, at Dachau, on the
of the SA (left) and outskirts of Munich. It was opened
SS post a notice
because Himmler wanted to bring
on a Jewish shop
urging its boycott, some order to the chaos of the ‘wild’
1 April 1933. SA-run camps, where inmates did
not serve a specific sentence and
could be held for days, weeks, even
years. Those deemed ‘re-educated’ or
‘no longer a danger to the National
Community’ were released.
Jewish persecution
Antisemitism was rife among the
rank and file of the Nazi Party.
It was clear that under Hitler’s rule,
Jews were going to suffer severe
persecution. In the first week
after Hitler came to power, Nazi
stormtroopers, taking the law
into their own hands, attacked
synagogues and beat up Jews.
In the last days of March, a fresh
wave of anti-Jewish demonstrations
occurred. Jewish shops had their
windows smashed and Orthodox
Jews were singled out for public
humiliation and beatings. It has been
estimated that, by the end of June
1933, 43 Jews had been murdered
by stormtroopers.
In the first openly antisemitic act
of Hitler’s new government, a
one-day boycott of Jewish shops and
businesses, took place on 1 April
1933. Many Jewish shop-owners
avoided trouble by closing for the
day, though some First World War
veterans opened their shops and
wore their medals. Sir Horace
Rumbold, the British ambassador,
concluded the boycott had not been
popular with public. Hitler realised
that high-profile economic attacks
on Jews, while Germany was still
in a weak international position,
only encouraged negative
publicity abroad.
February 2020 | History Today | 81
Further reading A less openly confrontational
l Richard J. Evans, approach was required. This was
The Coming of the
Third Reich: How achieved through orderly acts of
the Nazis Destroyed government legislation, drafted by
Democracy and non-Nazi civil servants. In this way
Seized Power
Hitler’s government was able to
(Penguin, 2004)
l Henry Turner, gradually erode the legal status of
Hitler’s Thirty Jews and diminish their position in
Days to Power: society without recourse to violence.
January 1933
(Bloomsbury, 1996) This process began on 7 April when
l Jeremy the Law for the Re-establishment of
Noakes and a Professional Civil Service was
Geoffrey Pridham
passed, allowing the purging of Jews,
(eds), Nazism:
A Documentary non-Aryans and political opponents.
Reader, Vol.1: Jewish civil servants, academics and
The Rise to schoolteachers were fired or forced
Power, 1919-1934
(Exeter University
into early retirement. Paragraph III
Press, 1983) of the Law stipulated the enforced
retirement of all officials of ‘non-
Aryan’ descent. This was the first
specifically antisemitic law passed
since German unification in 1871.
Hindenburg intervened in favour
of Jewish war veterans: ‘If they were
worthy of fighting and bleeding
for Germany’, Hindenburg wrote
in a letter to Hitler, ‘they must be
considered worthy of continuing
to serve the Fatherland in their
profession.’ Hitler, keen to placate
Hindenburg, agreed to exclude from
the legislation Jews who joined the
civil service since 1914 and any
Jew who lost a father or son in the
First World War.
End of political parties
The inevitable next stage on
Hitler’s road to dictatorship was the
destruction of all political parties bar
the Nazis. In 13 days, from 22 June to
5 July, all other German political
parties, except the Nazi party,
vanished. On 6 July, in a speech
to Reich governors, Hitler said:
‘The political parties have now been
abolished. This is an historical event,
the meaning and implication of
which has not been completely
understood.’ But, he warned:
‘Revolution is not a permanent state,
it must not develop into a lasting
state. The full spate of revolution
82 | History Today | February 2020
must be guided into the secure bed
of evolution.’ In a speech in Dresden
on 13 July, Franz von Papen, the man
who promised to have Hitler
squealing in the corner when he
came to power, admitted defeat:
Who among us thought it possible
that the irresistible force of National
Socialism would completely subdue
the whole German Reich in four
short months. The political parties
have been dissolved, the institutions
of a parliamentary democracy
have been abolished by the stroke
of a pen and the Chancellor possesses
powers not even accorded to the
German Kaisers.
On 14 July 1933, the Law Against the
Establishment of Political Parties
decreed that the Nazi Party was the
only legal political party. Germany
was now a one-party state controlled
by a single leader.
On 14 October, Hitler took
his first major gamble in foreign
affairs. In a live radio broadcast,
he announced Germany was
leaving the League of Nations
and withdrawing from the world
disarmament negotiations. He
pinned the blame for these decisions
on the western Allies, particularly
France, for refusing to grant
Germany equal rights. Hitler needed
to leave the League of Nations, in a
step by step revision of the Versailles
Treaty, to proceed unilaterally in
foreign affairs.
Hitler asked the German
public to endorse his dramatic
move in a national referendum.
On 12 November, 43.5 million voters,
representing 96.1 per cent of all those
registered, turned out to vote. Of
these, 95.1 per cent overwhelmingly
approved of Hitler’s decisions,
with just 4.9 per cent or 2.1 million
registering disapproval and some
750,000 recording invalid votes.
The list of Nazi Party Reichstag
deputies was approved by 92.11 per
Nazi book burning, cent, totalling 39.7 million voters.
Berlin, May 1933. The turnout was 95.3 per cent.
Even in Dachau concentration camp,
2,154 out of 2,242 inmates voted
for the Nazi Reichstag list.
By the end of the dramatic year
of 1933, Hitler had destroyed
German democracy and reduced the
Reichstag to a rubber stamp for his
desires. There were no longer a free
press, elections or imprisonment
without trial. Political opponents
had been purged from culture,
the civil service, the police, education
and the arts. The process of
removing Jews from key positions
in society was already underway.
The Gestapo and the concentration
camps, the underpinnings of the
terror system, were up and running.
End of political parties
Despite all this, Hitler’s power at
this point was by no means secure.
The president retained the
constitutional power to dismiss him
if he so wished. Conservatives still
dominated the judiciary and the
higher echelons of the civil service.
The German army retained the
power to overthrow him. Within
the Nazi Party, Ernst Röhm, the
radical leader of SA, now wanted
Hitler to move on to a ‘second
revolution’, which Nazified the
police, the civil service and the army.
Writing in the SA monthly journal,
Röhm commented: ‘The national
uprising has thus far travelled part
of the way up the path of German
Revolution.’ He promised the SA
‘would not tolerate the German
revolution falling asleep’.
In Hitler’s Germany there
was no chance of that. As the SA
would discover.
Frank McDonough is author of
The Hitler Years: Triumph 1933-
1939 (Head of Zeus, 2019).
February 2020 | History Today | 83
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