The Nazi Seizure of Power and the Enabling Act

The Depression and the presidential cabinets

The Wall Street crash of October 1929 brought down a German economy that had only just recovered on American loans. With the burden of First World War reparations on top, unemployment soared; at its peak in 1932–1933 the rate reached 30 per cent, with nearly six million out of work. By the summer of 1932, 40 per cent of organised labour was unemployed or on short time. The crisis laid bare the political weaknesses of the Weimar Republic. Faith in the centrist parties that had run its governments collapsed, and voters began to scatter to the extremes. 1 2

After the 1928 election a five-party grand coalition under the Social Democrat Hermann Müller had governed; it collapsed on 27 March 1930. President Hindenburg appointed the Centre Party's Heinrich Brüning as chancellor. To balance the budget and revive exports Brüning chose deflation: tight credit and a rollback of wages and salaries. When the Reichstag rejected his budget in July, he enacted it by a presidential emergency decree under Article 48 of the constitution. The Reichstag overturned the decree by 236 votes to 222, with Social Democrats, Communists, Nazis and part of the German National People's Party voting together, and on 18 July Hindenburg dissolved it. 3 1

The election of 14 September 1930 changed the political landscape. The Social Democrats lost ten seats but remained the largest party with 143 of 577, while the Nazi Party leapt from 12 seats to 107 and the Communists gained 23 to become the third-largest party. Brüning's government lost its majority and, backed by the president, became the first of three "presidential cabinets" that governed by emergency decree rather than through parliament. The Social Democrats tolerated Brüning to keep the Nazis out of power, but his deflationary measures made the economy worse and earned him the nickname "Hunger Chancellor". 3 4 1

Street war and a divided labour movement

Street violence grew with the elections. Battles between the Communists' Red Front Fighters' League and the Nazi SA became routine, and by the end of 1931 the SA counted 47 dead and the Red Front about 80. Prussia re-enacted its ban on the Brownshirts in March 1931. On 11 October that year Hugenberg's German National People's Party, the Nazi Party, the leadership of Der Stahlhelm and the Pan-German League met at Bad Harzburg and founded the Harzburg Front, a "national opposition" against the Brüning government. On 16 December the Social Democrats, with the General German Trade Union Federation (ADGB) and the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold, formed the Iron Front to defend the republic on the streets. 5 6 7

Yet the two workers' parties that might have resisted the Nazis each saw the other as the main enemy. In 1928 the Sixth Congress of the Comintern proclaimed the "Third Period" of capitalism and named social democracy the communists' main enemy. Stalin had called social democracy "the moderate wing of fascism" as early as 1924, saying the two were "not antipodes" but "twins". In Germany the "Bloody May" of 1929, when the Berlin police under Social Democratic control fired on Communist workers demonstrating on May Day, and the ban on the Red Front Fighters' League were taken as proof of "social fascism". On the Social Democratic side Kurt Schumacher in 1930 called the Communists "red-lacquered doppelgangers of the Nazis", and in Prussia the Communists joined the Nazis in an unsuccessful referendum to bring down the Social Democratic state government. 8

The Communist Party under Ernst Thälmann branded the Social Democrats "social fascists", and a joint anti-Nazi front of the two parties became impossible. There was dissent within the communist movement itself. In March 1932 Leon Trotsky wrote that "should fascism come to power, it will ride over your skulls and spines like a terrific tank" and that only a fighting unity with the Social Democratic workers could bring victory. The united front he meant was tactical joint action, "march separately, but strike together", not a withdrawal of criticism of the Social Democracy. The historian Theodore Draper later counted the theory of social fascism and the practice based on it among the chief factors in the victory of German fascism in January 1933. 9 8

One affair showed what the Nazis were preparing behind their legal course. On 25 November 1931 Wilhelm Schäfer, who had left the Hessian Nazi Party, handed the Frankfurt police coup plans written by Werner Best, a judge and Nazi Party member. The draft, known as the Boxheim Documents, assumed a communist revolt after which the SA would take over state power, all political opponents would be imprisoned "preventively" in concentration camps to be set up at once, and resistance would be punished with death. The Hessian interior minister Wilhelm Leuschner wanted the party prosecuted for high treason and banned, but under the policy of "taming" the Nazis pursued by Groener and Schleicher, Best was acquitted for lack of evidence in October 1932. 10

1932: from the presidential election to the Prussian coup

The presidential election of 1932 was a three-way race between the incumbent Hindenburg, backed by the republican parties, Hitler, and the Communist Thälmann. In the run-off on 10 April Hindenburg won with 53.0 per cent against Hitler's 36.8 and Thälmann's 10.2. Three days later the Brüning government banned the SA and the SS as the main source of political violence, and the violence fell sharply at once. But the ban stood in the way of Kurt von Schleicher, the army's political general, who wanted to bring the Nazis into an authoritarian government. On 8 May, in return for promising to dissolve the Reichstag and lift the ban, he obtained Hitler's promise to support a new government, and he forced his mentor Wilhelm Groener out of the defence and interior ministries. 5 11

On 30 May Hindenburg dismissed Brüning, the first Weimar chancellor removed at the president's request rather than by parliament. His successor was Franz von Papen, an aristocratic renegade from the Centre Party, whose "Cabinet of Barons", hand-picked by Schleicher, had almost no support in the Reichstag. The Papen government dissolved the Reichstag on 4 June and lifted the ban on the SA and SS in mid-June. Within a month clashes across the country had left 99 dead and 1,125 injured. On 17 July, in the working-class district of Altona near Hamburg, 7,000 SA men marched through "Red Altona" and clashed with Communist supporters and the police; eighteen people were killed. This was the Altona Bloody Sunday. 11 4 2 12

Papen used Altona as his pretext. On 20 July an emergency decree of Hindenburg removed the government of Prussia, Germany's largest state, ruled since 1920 by a coalition of Social Democrats, the Centre and the Democrats under the Social Democrat Otto Braun, and made Papen Reich Commissioner. A second decree the same day transferred executive power in Prussia to the defence minister Schleicher and restricted fundamental rights. This was the Prussian coup, or Preußenschlag. The deposed government refused to resist with the Prussian police or the Reichsbanner, and judged a general strike unfeasible amid mass unemployment; the Social Democratic chairman Otto Wels saw it the same way. It took the legal road of a complaint to the State Court, and Goebbels wrote in his diary the next day: "The Reds have missed their great hour. It will never come again." 13 14

The State Court's judgement partly vindicated both sides. The decree was constitutional in so far as it made the chancellor Reich Commissioner and let him temporarily take over the powers of the Prussian ministers, but it could not deprive the deposed ministry of the right to represent Prussia in the Reichstag and the Reichsrat. The Reich government overrode the judgement and had no intention of returning power to the legitimate government once the commissioner's work was done. The court capitulated to the facts that had been created and in effect tolerated a breach of the constitution; the legal historian Michael Stolleis called the judgement a landmark in the constitutional history of the Republic's downfall. By weakening the federal constitution, the coup paved the way for Hitler's centralisation of the Reich the following year. 13

Two elections and 30 January

In the election of 31 July the Nazi Party won 37.3 per cent and 230 of 608 seats and became the largest party for the first time, the largest seat total of any party in Weimar history. Together the Nazis and the Communists held a majority, so no majority coalition could be formed without one of them. Hermann Göring became president of the Reichstag, and Hitler, demanding the chancellorship, refused the vice-chancellorship Papen offered. In August five SA men who had murdered a Communist at Potempa in Upper Silesia were sentenced to death under the new law on political violence. Hitler defended them in public; their sentences were commuted, and they were freed in the amnesty of 1933. 2 5

When 84 per cent of deputies backed a Communist motion of no confidence, the Papen government dissolved the Reichstag again. In the election of 6 November the Nazis fell to 33.1 per cent and 196 seats; their loss is given as 34 or 35 seats depending on the source. The Social Democrats won 121 seats (20.4 per cent) and the Communists 100 (16.9 per cent), regaining their plurality in Berlin. When Papen pressed for rule without parliament, Schleicher persuaded Hindenburg to drop him and on 3 December became chancellor himself. He tried to tame Hitler with a Querfront, a "cross-front" that would split Gregor Strasser off from the Nazi Party and draw in the trade unions, but the plan failed. 15 5 11

Papen, ousted, sought revenge. On 4 January 1933 he met Hitler in secret at the Cologne house of the banker Kurt von Schröder; in November twenty-two representatives of industry, finance and agriculture had already petitioned Hindenburg to appoint Hitler chancellor. Schleicher, refused when he asked for a dissolution and de facto dictatorship, resigned on 28 January. On 30 January Hitler was appointed chancellor. The only Nazi ministers were Hitler, Wilhelm Frick at the interior ministry and Göring as minister without portfolio and Prussian interior minister; Alfred Hugenberg, head of the German National People's Party, took economics and agriculture, and Papen became vice-chancellor. The conservatives believed they could "tame" Hitler, and even the Social Democrat Schumacher dismissed him as a "piece of decoration" in the government. That night the SA and the SS held torchlit parades through Berlin. 16 5 11 17

The Reichstag fire and the March election

On taking office Hitler had the Reichstag dissolved and new elections set for 5 March. The Decree for the Protection of the German People, signed by Hindenburg on 4 February, let the authorities ban meetings and seize publications to hinder opposition campaigning. In Prussia the interior minister Göring had 50,000 members of the SS, the SA and Der Stahlhelm sworn in as auxiliary police to "monitor" the vote. The campaign was fought amid SA violence aimed at the Communists and the left, trade unionists, the Social Democrats and the Centre Party. 18 19

Shortly after nine on the night of 27 February the Reichstag building caught fire. Inside it the police arrested the Dutch council communist Marinus van der Lubbe. The Nazi leadership presented the fire as the signal for a Communist uprising, and the next day Hindenburg signed the Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of People and State under Article 48, known as the Reichstag Fire Decree. It suspended personal liberty, freedom of expression, of the press, of assembly and of association, the privacy of post and telephone, and protection against house searches and confiscation. Promulgated as a temporary emergency measure, it remained in force until the end of Nazi Germany in 1945. 20 18

The police, now under Nazi control, carried out mass arrests of Communists, including all the Communist Reichstag deputies. Ernst Torgler, chairman of the Communist parliamentary group, surrendered to the police on 28 February, and the party, outlawed in all but name by the Reichstag Fire Decree, was completely banned from 6 March. In the election of 5 March the Nazis won 43.9 per cent, short of a majority on their own, but together with the 8 per cent of the German National People's Party they held 52 per cent of the seats. Even under conditions that were far from fair, a majority of German voters never voted for the Nazi Party. 20 21 19 22

Van der Lubbe and Torgler, together with the Bulgarians Georgi Dimitrov, head of Comintern operations in Western Europe, Vasil Tanev and Blagoy Popov, were tried for arson and attempting to overthrow the government before the Reich Supreme Court in Leipzig from 21 September to 23 December. The regime broadcast the trial widely as a propaganda stage, but the four communists were acquitted. In London the exiled Communist Willi Münzenberg organised a countertrial and published The Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire and Hitler Terror, spreading the theory of a Nazi plot. Van der Lubbe, who maintained that he had acted alone, was sentenced to death and guillotined on 10 January 1934. Historians generally hold that he set the fire, and Richard J. Evans calls the Nazi-plot view a conspiracy theory. Germany pardoned him posthumously in 2008. 20 23

The Enabling Act

On 21 March the new Reichstag held its opening ceremony at Potsdam, the heart of the old Kingdom of Prussia and of Bismarck's empire, on the anniversary of the first imperial Reichstag of 1871; on this "Potsdam Day" the handshake between Hindenburg and Hitler symbolised the "marriage of the old grandeur and new power". The Enabling Act, which Hitler had announced in cabinet on 7 March, would let the government enact laws for four years without the Reichstag, including laws deviating from the constitution. As a constitutional amendment it needed two thirds of all members present and two thirds of those voting. The Reichstag president Göring changed the rules of procedure so that the 81 absent Communist deputies were not counted towards the quorum. 24 22

Reaching two thirds required the votes of the Catholic Centre Party. Hitler negotiated with its chairman, the priest Ludwig Kaas, and on 22 March they agreed: Kaas would support the law in return for assurances of the party's continued existence, Catholic civil liberties and schools, and the retention of civil servants affiliated with the party. The former chancellor Brüning wanted the bill rejected but agreed to vote for it to keep the party united. On 23 March SA men lined the inside and outside of the Kroll Opera House, the Reichstag's temporary home since the fire. Kaas spoke in favour without the written guarantee he had been promised; it never arrived. 22 4

Only the Social Democrat Otto Wels spoke against. Defying intimidation, he declared: "The Weimar Constitution is not a socialist constitution. But we stand by the principles enshrined in, the principles of a state based on the rule of law, of equal rights, of social justice. In this historic hour, we German Social Democrats solemnly pledge ourselves to the principles of humanity and justice, of freedom and socialism. No Enabling Act gives you the power to destroy ideas that are eternal and indestructible." The vote was 444 to 94, all of the 94 Social Democrats, with 26 Social Democratic deputies arrested or in hiding; even with every one of them present the bill would have passed with 78.7 per cent. That evening the Reichsrat assented unanimously without debate, and Hindenburg signed the law. 22

Gleichschaltung

The Enabling Act completed what the Reichstag Fire Decree had begun and turned Hitler's government into a legal dictatorship. On 22 March Himmler opened the first concentration camp at Dachau, northwest of Munich, for Communists, Social Democrats and other opponents. On 31 March the Provisional Law on the Coordination of the States with the Reich dissolved every state parliament except the Prussian one and ordered them reconstituted from the 5 March vote, leaving out the Communist seats. On 7 April the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service drove Jews and Communists out of public service. The Nazis called these measures Gleichschaltung, the bringing of the whole of society into line. 22 25 21 26

The state governments fell just as easily. On 30 January 1933 the Nazis led only four of the seventeen Länder: Anhalt, Oldenburg, Mecklenburg-Schwerin and Thuringia. Immediately after the election of 5 March the central government set about taking over the rest. The pattern was the same everywhere: pressure on the non-Nazi state government to put a National Socialist in charge of the police, threatening demonstrations by the SA and SS in the big cities, the swastika raised over town halls, the capitulation of the elected government with hardly any resistance, and a Reich Commissar imposed on the pretext of restoring order. The "unrest" had been created by the Nazi organisations themselves, and there were no "communist acts of violence endangering the state" of the kind the decree of 28 February invoked. Despite the semblance of legality, the seizure of the states' powers was a plain breach of the constitution. 21

The labour movement fell with almost no resistance. The General German Trade Union Federation under Theodor Leipart still represented about 3.5 million workers in 1932, but after the regime came in it declared itself politically "neutral", and on 28 April it agreed to unify with the Christian and liberal unions into a single national labour organisation. Leipart even welcomed the government's plan to make May Day a public holiday, the "Day of National Labour", for the first time. Goebbels, however, had written in his diary on 17 April: "On 2 May the trade union offices will be occupied." The day after the May Day parades the SA occupied union offices across the country, seized their funds and arrested their leaders, and Robert Ley became head of the German Labour Front set up in their place. On 10 May more than 25,000 volumes of "un-German" books were burned on the Opernplatz in Berlin. 21 27 28

The parties disappeared one after another. The government seized the assets of the Social Democrats and banned the party on 22 June. Wels went into exile in the Saar and then in Prague, where he founded the party's exile leadership, the Sopade; Schumacher was arrested in July and spent ten years in camps. Even the allied German National People's Party dissolved itself on 27 June, and Hugenberg left the cabinet. The State Party (28 June), the Bavarian People's Party and the German People's Party (4 July) and the Centre Party (5 July) followed. The Law Against the Formation of Parties of 14 July made the Nazi Party the only legal party in Germany. Hitler had kept his campaign promise to "sweep these thirty parties out of Germany". 21 14 29 17 22

The Night of the Long Knives and the Führer state

After the seizure of power the greatest threat lay inside the Nazi movement. Ernst Röhm, leading an SA of more than three million men, called for a "second revolution" to redistribute wealth and wanted the SA to absorb the 100,000-man professional Reichswehr. The generals saw this as the destruction of the army, whose supreme command still lay with Hindenburg. On 17 June 1934 Vice-Chancellor Papen voiced the conservatives' demands in a speech at Marburg University warning of the threat of a "second revolution". On 29 June the defence minister Werner von Blomberg published an article in the party paper declaring that the Reichswehr stood behind Hitler. 30 31

In the early hours of 30 June Hitler led SS men and police to the hotel at Bad Wiessee and personally arrested Röhm and the SA leadership. Edmund Heines, the Breslau SA leader, was shot on the spot. Goebbels, back in Berlin, telephoned Göring with the codeword Kolibri, and the execution squads went to work. Sepp Dietrich's Leibstandarte shot SA generals in the courtyard of Stadelheim Prison in Munich, and on 1 July the Dachau commandant Theodor Eicke and his adjutant Michael Lippert handed Röhm a pistol to kill himself; when he refused, saying "If I am to be killed, let Adolf do it himself", they shot him in his cell. The SS and its Security Service and the Gestapo under Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich carried out most of the killings. Among the dead were the former chancellor Kurt von Schleicher and his wife, Gregor Strasser, Gustav Ritter von Kahr, who had crushed the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, Papen's associates Edgar Jung and Herbert von Bose, and Erich Klausener of Catholic Action. 30 11

At least 85 people died, and some estimates run from 700 to 1,000; more than a thousand were arrested. The courts and the cabinet swept aside the prohibition on extrajudicial killing after the fact, and in his speech to the Reichstag on 13 July Hitler called himself "the administrator of justice of the German people". When Hindenburg died on 2 August, the Law Concerning the Head of State, passed by the cabinet the day before, merged the presidency with the chancellorship. On the initiative of Blomberg and Walter von Reichenau the soldiers swore allegiance not to the constitution but to Hitler in person. In the referendum of 19 August the official "yes" vote was slightly under 90 per cent, but 18.5 per cent voted no in Berlin, and just under 20 per cent in Wedding, the former Communist stronghold. 30 32 33 34

Assessment

The Nazis called 1933 the "seizure of power" (Machtergreifung) and dressed it as a revolution, though Hitler himself preferred "take-over of power" (Machtübernahme), suggesting a transfer within the existing constitution. The Nazis did not take power by armed coup. The way was opened by presidential cabinets that bypassed parliament with emergency decrees, by the Prussian coup, and by conservative elites who believed they could tame Hitler. Alan Bullock held that the heaviest responsibility lay with the German right, which made Hitler its coalition partner. Whether Brüning was "the last bulwark of the Weimar Republic" or "the Republic's undertaker" is debated to this day. 5 4

For the socialist movement 1933 was a defeat that showed the cost of a divided working class. The Comintern's theory of social fascism led the Communists to attack the Social Democrats before the Nazis, while the Social Democratic leadership clung to legality and gave up resistance even in the face of the Prussian coup. Soon after Hitler took office Thälmann proposed a joint general strike of Communists and Social Democrats, but the Social Democrats rejected it. Leaders of both parties ended up in the camps, and Thälmann, after eleven years in solitary confinement, was shot in Buchenwald in 1944. At its Seventh Congress in 1935 the Comintern, on Dimitrov's report, abandoned social fascism for the popular front. Wels's speech against the Enabling Act is remembered as the moment that marked the end of the Weimar Republic. 8 13 9 14

A statistical analysis of 2008 found that Weimar voting behaviour was consistent with democratic elections in other times and places. The unemployed and those at risk of unemployment turned disproportionately to the Communists and sometimes the Social Democrats, while the working poor who were hurt by the depression but not at risk of losing their jobs, such as self-employed shopkeepers, professionals and domestic employees, especially in Protestant regions, voted disproportionately for the Nazis. The debate over who set the Reichstag fire goes on, but there is broad agreement that the Nazi leadership exploited it at once as a legal basis for dictatorship. The power won through the Enabling Act led to rearmament and a war of aggression that ultimately cost the lives of one tenth of Germany's own population. 5 18 22