A fascinating, detailed article in The Atlantic (Jan. 8, 2025) discusses Hitler's rise to power:
How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy in 53 Days
He used the constitution to shatter the constitution.Ninety-two years ago this month, on Monday morning, January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed the 15th chancellor of the Weimar Republic. In one of the most astonishing political transformations in the history of democracy, Hitler set about destroying a constitutional republic through constitutional means. What follows is a step-by-step account of how Hitler systematically disabled and then dismantled his country’s democratic structures and processes in less than two months’ time—specifically, one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours, and 40 minutes. The minutes, as we will see, mattered.
Hans Frank served as Hitler’s private attorney and chief legal strategist in the early years of the Nazi movement. While later awaiting execution at Nuremberg for his complicity in Nazi atrocities, Frank commented on his client’s uncanny capacity for sensing “the potential weakness inherent in every formal form of law” and then ruthlessly exploiting that weakness. Following his failed Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923, Hitler had renounced trying to overthrow the Weimar Republic by violent means but not his commitment to destroying the country’s democratic system, a determination he reiterated in a Legalitätseid—“legality oath”—before the Constitutional Court in September 1930. Invoking Article 1 of the Weimar constitution, which stated that the government was an expression of the will of the people, Hitler informed the court that once he had achieved power through legal means, he intended to mold the government as he saw fit. It was an astonishingly brazen statement.
“So, through constitutional means?” the presiding judge asked.
“Jawohl!” Hitler replied.
By January 1933, the fallibilities of the Weimar Republic—whose 181-article constitution framed the structures and processes for its 18 federated states—were as obvious as they were abundant. Having spent a decade in opposition politics, Hitler knew firsthand how easily an ambitious political agenda could be scuttled. He had been co-opting or crushing right-wing competitors and paralyzing legislative processes for years, and for the previous eight months, he had played obstructionist politics, helping to bring down three chancellors and twice forcing the president to dissolve the Reichstag and call for new elections.When he became chancellor himself, Hitler wanted to prevent others from doing unto him what he had done unto them. Though the vote share of his National Socialist party had been rising—in the election of September 1930, following the 1929 market crash, they had increased their representation in the Reichstag almost ninefold, from 12 delegates to 107, and in the July 1932 elections, they had more than doubled their mandate to 230 seats—they were still far from a majority. Their seats amounted to only 37 percent of the legislative body, and the larger right-wing coalition that the Nazi Party was a part of controlled barely 51 percent of the Reichstag, but Hitler believed that he should exercise absolute power: “37 percent represents 75 percent of 51 percent,” he argued to one American reporter, by which he meant that possessing the relative majority of a simple majority was enough to grant him absolute authority.
He believed that an Ermächtigungsgesetz (“empowering law”) was crucial to his political survival. But passing such a law—which would dismantle the separation of powers, grant Hitler’s executive branch the authority to make laws without parliamentary approval, and allow Hitler to rule by decree, bypassing democratic institutions and the constitution—required the support of a two-thirds majority in the fractious Reichstag.
The process proved to be even more challenging than anticipated. Hitler found his dictatorial intentions getting thwarted within his first six hours as chancellor. At 11:30 that Monday morning, he swore an oath to uphold the constitution, then went across the street to the Hotel Kaiserhof for lunch, then returned to the Reich Chancellery for a group photo of the “Hitler Cabinet,” which was followed by his first formal meeting with his nine ministers at precisely 5 o’clock.
Hitler opened the meeting by boasting that millions of Germans had welcomed his chancellorship with “jubilation,” then outlined his plans for expunging key government officials and filling their positions with loyalists. At this point he turned to his main agenda item: the empowering law that, he argued, would give him the time (four years, according to the stipulations laid out in the draft of the law) and the authority necessary to make good on his campaign promises to revive the economy, reduce unemployment, increase military spending, withdraw from international treaty obligations, purge the country of foreigners he claimed were “poisoning” the blood of the nation, and exact revenge on political opponents. “Heads will roll in the sand,” Hitler had vowed at one rally.
Hitler had campaigned on the promise of draining the “parliamentarian swamp”—den parlamentarischen Sumpf—only to find himself now foundering in a quagmire of partisan politics and banging up against constitutional guardrails. He responded as he invariably did when confronted with dissenting opinions or inconvenient truths: He ignored them and doubled down.
As President Hindenburg waited to receive Hitler on that Monday morning in January 1933, Hugenberg clashed with Hitler over the issue of new Reichstag elections. Hugenberg’s position: “Nein! Nein! Nein!” While Hitler and Hugenberg argued in the foyer outside the president’s office, Hindenburg, a military hero of World War I who had served as the German president since 1925, grew impatient. According to Otto Meissner, the president’s chief of staff, had the Hitler-Hugenberg squabble lasted another few minutes, Hindenburg would have left. Had this occurred, the awkward coalition cobbled together by Papen in the previous 48 hours would have collapsed. There would have been no Hitler chancellorship, no Third Reich.
In the event, Hitler was given a paltry two cabinet posts to fill—and none of the most important ones pertaining to the economy, foreign policy, or the military. Hitler chose Wilhelm Frick as minister of the interior and Hermann Göring as minister without portfolio. But with his unerring instinct for detecting the weaknesses in structures and processes, Hitler put his two ministers to work targeting the Weimar Republic’s key democratic pillars: free speech, due process, public referendum, and states’ rights.
The article continues at length with this fascinating story. Does any of that sound at least somewhat familiar? Can you see how fragile a democracy is and how many ways an authoritarian demagogue can attack it? Just another few minutes of squabbling might have averted the Hitler chancellorship, the rise of his Third Reich and World War 2. A seemingly small thing, a short enough squabble, that could not have had predictable consequences.
An upcoming post will be about unpredictable events in the US Revolutionary War that had major consequences for the outcome.
