CCEA GCSE History

Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933, when President von Hindenburg appointed him at the head of a coalition government. The Nazis were the largest party in the Reichstag but had no majority, and only two other Nazis sat in the cabinet beside Hitler. Within nineteen months he had removed every legal check on his power, and the stages by which he did it explain how a coalition chancellor became a dictator. ## The Reichstag fire On the night of 27 February 1933 the Reichstag building in Berlin was set on fire. A Dutch communist, Marinus van der Lubbe, was found inside and arrested. Historians still disagree about whether he acted alone or whether the Nazis had a hand in it, but Hitler and Göring at once presented it as the start of a communist uprising. The next day Hindenburg was persuaded to sign an emergency decree that suspended freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly and the privacy of letters and telephone calls. Police could now arrest people without trial, and several thousand communists were seized in the following weeks. The decree was never withdrawn, so it gave the regime a legal cover for terror until 1945. ## The election of March 1933 Hitler called an election for 5 March 1933 and campaigned with the full weight of the state behind him: the Communist Party was crushed, other parties had their meetings broken up by the SA, and the radio carried Nazi speeches. The Nazis won 43.9 per cent of the vote, which was a large…