Hitler's Rise to Power

In early 1933, Germany's political system was fractured. The Nazi Party had won 230 seats in the November 1932 elections-the largest single bloc in the Reichstag-but lacked a majority. Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher, a career military officer, held the chancellorship, but his position was precarious. President Paul von Hindenburg, the aging war hero who commanded constitutional authority, faced pressure from conservative politicians and industrialists who believed they could use Hitler as a tool to restore order and crush the left. On January 30, 1933, Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany. It was not a seizure of power. It was, technically, constitutional.

Hitler immediately began consolidating control. On February 27, 1933, the Reichstag building burned under circumstances that remain debated by historians. The Nazis blamed communists; a communist arsonist named Marinus van der Lubbe was arrested and later executed. Within days, Hitler convinced Hindenburg to sign the Decree for the Protection of the People and the State, suspending constitutional protections and civil liberties. Political opponents-communists, socialists, trade unionists-were arrested and detained in hastily opened camps. The legal framework for dictatorship had been erected faster than most observers expected it could be.

The March 1933 elections, held under these repressive conditions, gave the Nazi Party 288 seats. Combined with their conservative allies, Hitler secured enough votes to pass the Enabling Act on March 23, 1933, which granted him the power to enact laws without Reichstag approval. The vote was 441 to 94, with communist deputies already imprisoned or in hiding. This legislation effectively ended parliamentary democracy in Germany. Within weeks, all political parties except the Nazi Party were banned or dissolved. Trade unions were outlawed. The press was placed under Nazi control through the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, headed by Joseph Goebbels from 1933 onward.

By summer 1933, potential rivals within the Nazi movement itself were being neutralized. The SA-the paramilitary brownshirts led by Ernst Röhm-had grown to over two million members and represented a challenge to Hitler's authority. In June 1934, during what became known as the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler ordered the SS to execute Röhm and hundreds of other SA leaders. Hindenburg died on August 2, 1934, removing the last institutional check on Hitler's power. Hitler merged the offices of President and Chancellor, declaring himself Führer. The transformation from Chancellor to dictator had taken eighteen months. It happened through a combination of legal mechanisms exploited beyond their intended limits, systematic violence against political opponents, and the willing collaboration of conservative elites who believed they could control the radical movement they had empowered.