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 The decree was never withdrawn, so it gave the regime a legal cover for terror until 1945.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 increase but still short of a majority. With the support of their nationalist coalition partners they held a majority of seats, but Hitler wanted far more than that, because he needed a two-thirds majority to change the constitution.

The Enabling Act

The Enabling Act was put to the Reichstag on 23 March 1933. It allowed Hitler's government to make laws without the Reichstag's approval, and even laws that went against the constitution, for four years. The communist deputies had been arrested or driven into hiding and so could not vote. SA men crowded the hall and the streets outside, and the Nazis made promises to the Catholic Centre Party about the position of the Church. The Act passed by 444 votes to 94, with only the Social Democrats voting against. After this the Reichstag had no real power, because the Chancellor no longer needed it.

Gleichschaltung

Gleichschaltung, usually translated as "coordination", was the Nazi policy of bringing every part of German life under Nazi control. It was carried out in a few months through a series of measures.

• In April 1933 the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service removed Jews and political opponents from the civil service, and teachers and university staff were dismissed in the same way.
• In May 1933 the trade unions were closed, their offices were occupied and their funds were seized. Workers were put into a single organisation, the German Labour Front.
• In July 1933 all political parties apart from the Nazi Party were banned or dissolved themselves, and a law made Germany a one-party state.
• In January 1934 the state parliaments were abolished and the regional governments lost their independence to Berlin.

By the end of 1933 there was no organised legal opposition left in Germany, and the people who had run unions and parties were in prison, in hiding or in exile.

The threat from Röhm and the SA

The Sturmabteilung (SA), also called the Brownshirts, had been the Nazis' street fighters since the 1920s and was led by Ernst Röhm. By 1934 it had millions of members, far more than the regular army, which was limited to 100,000 men by the Treaty of Versailles. Röhm wanted the SA to become the main army of Germany, with himself in command, and many SA men expected a "second revolution" that would give them jobs and social change. This frightened the army generals, whose support Hitler needed, and it also worried industrialists and conservatives, who disliked SA violence. Röhm therefore threatened Hitler from two sides: he was a rival for control of the armed forces, and his men made the regime look disorderly.

The Night of the Long Knives

Hitler decided to act against the SA leadership. Between 30 June and 2 July 1934 the SS, under Himmler, along with the Gestapo and Göring's forces, arrested and shot Röhm and other SA leaders. The purge was also used to kill other people Hitler wanted out of the way, including the former chancellor General von Schleicher and his wife, and the Nazi Gregor Strasser. At least eighty-five people were killed, and the real figure was probably higher. The government announced that it had crushed a plot, and a law legalised the killings after the event.

The consequences were large. The army was pleased that the SA had been cut down and so stayed loyal. The SS, now independent of the SA, grew into the most powerful force in the state. Ordinary Germans saw that Hitler would kill his own supporters if they stood in his way, and that no court would stop him.

The death of Hindenburg and Hitler becomes Führer

President von Hindenburg died on 2 August 1934. A law passed the day before, to take effect on Hindenburg's death, combined the offices of President and Chancellor, and Hitler took the title Führer and Reich Chancellor, meaning "leader". Because the President was commander of the armed forces, Hitler became head of the army too, and the army officers and soldiers were made to swear an oath of loyalty to Hitler personally rather than to the constitution or the state. A plebiscite was held on the change, and a large majority was reported in favour, though the vote was held in an atmosphere of intimidation.

By August 1934 Hitler held every post that could have stood in his way and had no rival. This is why Germans in the later 1930s lived under a dictatorship in which one man's decisions made law.

Significance for the German people

The people most immediately affected were those who lost their jobs, their organisations or their freedom: trade unionists, communists, socialists, Jewish civil servants and others who had worked in public life. For many other Germans the first year brought little visible change, and some welcomed the order that followed years of political violence and unemployment. What had changed in law was that the rights of a citizen, such as a fair trial and a free press, no longer existed, and that anyone could be arrested on the word of the police.