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The Enabling Act: How Germany's Parliament Voted Itself Out of Existence
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
In March 1933, Hitler used legal procedure — not force — to dismantle the Weimar Republic and seize total power. This episode traces the Reichstag Fire, the Enabling Act, and the constitutional suicide of German democracy.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The most dangerous thing Hitler ever did wasn't invade Poland. It wasn't order the construction of the death camps.
President Paul von Hindenburg despised Adolf Hitler. That's worth holding onto.
Hitler moved fast. That's the key thing to understand about what followed.
Elections were held on March fifth, nineteen thirty-three, just days after the fire decree. They took place in an atmosphere of intimidation and violence.
From there, the process of Gleichschaltung began. The word translates roughly as coordination or synchronization, but the reality was the forced alignment of every institution in German life with Nazi control.
By mid-nineteen thirty-four, Hitler faced one remaining source of internal tension. The SA, the Sturmabteilung, the brown-shirted paramilitary that had provided the muscle of the Nazi movement through the street-fighting years, was becoming a problem.
Hindenburg died on August second, nineteen thirty-four. He was eighty-six years old and had been in declining health.
The question that follows is how. Not just how Hitler did it, but how the institutions around him allowed it.
What Hitler built in those eighteen months was not just a dictatorship. It was an administrative infrastructure capable of being turned toward any purpose he chose.
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