In a lengthy article in The Atlantic, historian Timothy W. Ryback analyzes how the rise of the Nazis transformed the Weimar Republic into a bloodthirsty dictatorship, using legal tools originally designed to protect the democratic system.
By Mirko Racovsky
On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of the Weimar Republic, marking the beginning of one of the fastest and most dramatically effective processes of dismantling a democracy in modern history. In less than two months, The Nazi regime transformed a constitutional system into a dictatorship, using the same legal mechanisms designed to protect the democratic system.
In a long article for The Atlantic, the historian Timothy W. Ryback explains how this process, far from being inevitable, reveals the vulnerabilities of a political system incapable of containing those who seek its destruction from within.
The political context: a shaky democracy
The Weimar Republic, established after the World War I, faced a number of structural weaknesses. Its constitution, with 181 articles, governed 18 federated states, but political fragmentation and the inability to form stable coalitions They made her vulnerable to the maneuvers of a leader determined to exploit her failures.
Adolf Hitler, leader of the National Socialist Party (NSDAP), had already tried to seize power by force in 1923 with the failed Munich coup, the Brewery Putsch.
Later, he adopted a different strategy: destroy the system from withinIn 1930, before the Constitutional Court, he swore to respect the law while He planned to transform the government according to his will once in power.
Ryback, author of several books on Hitler's Germany, the most recent Takeover: Hitler's Final Rise to Power (Hitler's Final Rise to Power), states that in the years leading up to his appointment, Hitler dedicated himself to destabilizing the political system. His party, which In 1930 it had only 12 seats in the Reichstag (seat of the German parliament), grew to 230 seats in 1932, becoming the largest force, although far from an absolute majority.
The rise to power and the first steps
On January 30, 1933, Hitler took office as chancellor. From his first day, he began to consolidate his control over the government.
Although the Nazis only had the 37% of the seats in the Reichstag, Hitler set out to pass an Enabling Act (enabling act), what would allow him to rule by decree and eliminate the separation of powers.
He faced resistance from the social democrats and communists, who controlled 38% of the Reichstag, which made the required two-thirds majority mathematically impossible. However, Hitler used a combination of political manipulation, repression and propaganda to achieve their goal.
The Reichstag fire and the repression of the opposition
On February 27, 1933, the Reichstag was set on fire. Although the circumstances of the fire are still a matter of debate, The Nazi regime immediately blamed the communists, using the event as a pretext to implement repressive measures.
President Paul von Hindenburg, under pressure from Hitler, signed the Fire Decree of the Reichstag the February 28.
This decree suspended fundamental rights such as freedom of the press, expression and assembly, and allowed mass arrests without trial.
In the following weeks, Thousands of communists, social democrats and political opponents were arrested or forced into exile..
Electoral manipulation and consolidation of power
On March 5, 1933, Germany held elections in a climate of intimidation and violence. The Nazis won 44% of the votes, a significant increase, but still insufficient for an absolute majority. However, with the communists outlawed and their seats annulled, Hitler gained the necessary control of the Reichstag.
On March 23, 1933, the Reichstag approved the Enabling Act, which gave Hitler dictatorial powers.
This act, which formally destroyed the democratic structures of Weimar, was made possible by the manipulation of the political system and the intimidation of the deputies present.
Systematic repression and the first concentration camps
With full control of the government, Hitler began a campaign of systematic repression. Political opponents were arrested and sent to camps such as Dachau, established in March 1933.
At the same time, the regime began to centralize power in Berlin and eliminate the autonomy of the federated states.
Hermann Goering, as Prussian Interior Minister, reorganized the state police and used the brown shirts (Sturmabteilung) as an auxiliary force to suppress any form of dissent.
Propaganda and the symbolism of power
On March 21, 1933, Hitler used the so-called Potsdam Day as a propaganda tool to gain the support of conservative elites and project an image of national unity.
Dressed soberly, he appeared alongside President Hindenburg, who was wearing his military uniform, at an event designed to symbolize continuity between the old regime and the new.
Shortly after, Joseph Goebbels was appointed Minister of Propaganda, consolidating the regime's control over the media and eliminating any vestige of a free press.
Historical reflections: a contingent process
Although Hitler's rise is now seen as inevitable, historians point out that Several key decisions could have changed the course of history.
Hindenburg's initial reluctance to appoint him chancellor, strategic mistakes by opposition parties and a lack of cohesion among conservatives played a crucial role in facilitating his path to power.
The case of Hitler is an emblematic example of How an enemy of the democratic system can use its own legal mechanisms to destroy it.
His rise and consolidation of power in less than two months underscore the importance of protecting democratic institutions from those who seek to dismantle them.
Hitler did not dismantle any democracy in Germany, but an oligarchy of parties. That is why he was able to seize power. If in Germany there had been political representation, separation of powers and judicial independence - as in the US - a dictator would never have appeared. And if in Spain there were not the depraved Juancarlist party oligarchy, a Perro Sanchinflas would not be in power, for example, or a Bukele in El Salvador, a desecrator of graves and a trampler of the Salvadoran constitution, which is nothing more than a granted letter, which says in one of its articles that he can only be president for one term, to give another example of the many that there are.
You are far too generous with your description of America.
That's the way it's SUPPOSED to work. Instead, It's rapidly imploding on itself from all the abuses of unchecked power abd influence. HELP!
Separation of powers doesn't seem to be saving the US.
Apart from the political causes that this article focuses on, there remains the secret ingredient of the fascists and Nazis, which is violence, especially in the streets, at first with groups that could well be called terrorists or paramilitaries made up of ex-soldiers, ultra-nationalists and military personnel, etc., using aggression and murdering democrats, communists, etc. Later, the Nazi party was organized, with the secret police that was in the hands of the very efficient Nazi criminal Reinhard Heydrich. This prominent Nazi figure began his criminal career as head of an espionage section of Himmler's SS during Hitler's rise to power. The SS then displaced the SA as the elite of Nazism and integrated the SA into the SS after the assassination of its leaders and the most socialist, almost communist, sector of the Nazis, the main one being the violent and ambitious Ernst Röhm, eliminated in this first great purge with the excuse of being a pervert, since he proudly boasted in public about his homosexuality and was known for his sexual preferences by the new young Nazis who joined, very proudly, the SA. Heydrich participated in the invasion of Poland and in what can be considered the beginning of the Jewish Holocaust with the lesser known mass shootings of the Einsatzgruppen, Nazi SS who murdered Jews and other groups of civilians en masse while the Nazi armies and their allies invaded Eastern Europe. He also participated in the Wannsee conference where the Nazi hierarchy decided on "the final solution" for the extermination of all the Jews in Europe. Finally, two Czech soldiers sent clandestinely by England were in charge of eliminating the man who became the Nazi in charge of governing Czechoslovakia, as can be seen in the recent film “The Man with the Iron Heart” (2017), or in the previous “Operation Anthropoid” (2016).
Paradoxically, the Nazi Party was transformed from its somewhat more socialist or communist beginnings to end up being a traditionalist and messianic party, grouped around Hitler, therefore with all the Nazis copying or forced to copy the mediocre Corporal Hitler. In a well-known interview with the main leader of the Nazi socialist or communist sector, Otto Strausser, who after fleeing Nazi Germany and escaping the assassination attempts of the Gestapo became a politician in the democracy of West Germany, “[I met Hitler] in the autumn of 1920, at the time when I was a student at the University of Economics and Law in Berlin. My brother Gregor, then a pharmacist in Landshut, invited me to his house one day to meet two important people. At that time, my brother was already head of the Free Corps of Lower Bavaria, one of the numerous paramilitary organizations opposed to the Treaty of Versailles that was to be signed. His assistant was Heinrich Himmler, who was responsible for gathering the scattered members of the organisation and the weapons, in order to keep them in good condition. I went to Landshut, where my brother informed me that General Ludendorff and a certain Adolf Hitler were waiting for him. Ludendorff wanted to initiate the regrouping of all the paramilitary associations and for this purpose he was going to talk to my brother, so that he could put his group under his command. Hitler, who was his "political adviser", would accompany him, because they thought that without political preparation no coup would be successful. Hitler had to take on this task, because his public meetings were already attended by a large audience.”… “My impression was totally negative. Hitler could not specify his thoughts and had no clear plan, or else he did not want to reveal it. In my opinion, at that time and later, Hitler had no political programme, he only wanted power, that was all. Any programme that would bring him to power would have suited him. His intuition made him understand that the union of nationalism and socialism, the two forces of the XNUMXth century, was the path that would lead him to power.”… “He only believed in anti-Semitism, if we can call that a political concept.”
Otto Strasser, the leader of that famous "fascist left", with the help of his brother Gregor, was on the verge of stealing the leadership of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) from the future dictator Hitler. Apparently, the German Nazis went from being more of a provocateur of a popular revolution, and also strangely of a socialist ideology, the ideology that is perhaps most likely to be found in today's neo-Nazis, even in the neo-Nazis and in the most disturbed Spanish Falangists or fascists, many of whom pretend to be free thinkers very similar to anarchists, at least this can be the case in fascists and Nazis with some minimum culture, and they transformed themselves into something more like a criminal organization or a violent sect with its followers forced to blind obedience or to be simple pawns of their leaders.
“The Strasser brothers’ influence on the shaping of German National Socialism was so great that Otto used to boast that it was his brother Gregor who, in 1924, suggested to Hitler that he write his memoirs. He would say dismissively that the sole purpose was to keep Adolf entertained and to free his fellow prisoners in Landsberg from having to listen to his “endless monologues.” Adolf, however, loved the idea and set to work immediately. And to the chagrin of the Strassers, according to Ian Kershaw’s celebrated biography of the dictator, “they must have been bitterly disappointed when he began reading out what he had written to a literally captive audience on a daily basis.”
The gestation of “Mein Kampf” (My Struggle) therefore began under the influence of the interviewee, who was part of the first organisations to adopt the swastika in Germany and joined the Freikorps, a paramilitary and fascist organisation that spread terror throughout the country, before joining the Nazi party shortly after its creation. He and his brother soon became the leaders of the organisation alongside Hitler, with whom they shared the country to extend their influence: the latter in the north and west, especially in Berlin, and the future dictator in the south and east.
Then came the differences and the attacks and Hitler began to see his leadership threatened, so he began to remove the Strassers from the most important positions in the party. The brothers, however, never stopped in their efforts to make Nazism turn towards more socialist positions. An example of this is the discussion that Otto had with him, in Berlin, following a critical article that he had published, in which he established the difference between the ideal, which is eternal, and the leader, who is only its servant.
According to Alan Bullock in “Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives” (Kailas, 2016), these were Hitler’s words: “All this is nonsense. In essence you are saying nothing more than giving all members of the party the right to decide what the ideal should be, even to decide whether the leader is faithful or not to the so-called ideal. That is democracy of the worst kind and there is no place among us for such conceptions. For us the leader and the ideal are one and the same thing, and every member of the party must do what the leader orders. You yourself were a soldier… And I ask you: are you willing to submit to this discipline or not?”