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Following the raid, the Nazis announced (falsely) that they’d found evidence of seditious material. Two days later, Hermann Göring, Minister of the Interior and one of Hitler’s closest compatriots, ordered a raid on Communist headquarters. On February 22, Hitler used his powers as chancellor to enroll 50,000 Nazi SA men (also known as stormtroopers) as auxiliary police. Meanwhile, the Nazis seized even more power, infiltrating the police and empowering ordinary party members as law enforcement officers. March 5 was set as the date for another series of Reichstag elections in hopes that one party might finally achieve the majority. In January 1933, Hindenburg reluctantly appointed Hitler as chancellor on the advice of Franz von Papen, a disgruntled former chancellor who believed the conservative bourgeois parties should ally with the Nazis to keep the Communists out of power. The Nazis aligned with other right-leaning factions and gradually worked their way up to 33 percent of the vote-but were unable to reach a full majority. Faced with political chaos, President Paul von Hindenburg dissolved the Reichstag again and again. The economic unrest of the early 1930s meant that no single political party had a majority in the Reichstag, so fragile coalitions held the nation together. By 1930, the Nazis won 18.3 percent of the Reichstag vote and became the second largest party after the Social Democrats, while the Communist party also grew to ten percent of the vote. The sudden slump caused massive social upheaval, which the Nazis exploited to gain further political traction. and Europe into an economic tailspin and shooting the number of unemployed up to 6 million people in Germany ( around 30 percent of the population). But then the Great Depression hit, sending the U.S. The treaty forced Germany to accept responsibility for World War I, pay huge remunerations, transfer territory to their neighbors and limit the size of the military.ĭespite its considerable growth, the Nazi party won only 2.6 percent of the vote in the 1928 election. The Nazis denounced the Weimar Republic and the “November criminals,” politicians had signed the Treaty of Versailles. He rose to the head of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazis), and by 1928 the group’s membership exceeded 100,000. The president retained the power to dismiss his cabinet and the chancellor, dissolve an ineffective Reichstag, and, in cases of national emergency, invoke something known as Article 48, which gave the president dictatorial powers and the right to intervene directly in the governance of Germany’s 19 territorial states.įollowing a stint in jail for his failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, Hitler poured his energy into attaining power through legal channels. It called for a president elected by direct ballot, who would appoint a chancellor to introduce legislation to members of the Reichstag (who were also elected by popular vote). Germany’s first experiment with liberal democracy was born of the 1919 Weimar Constitution, established after the conclusion of World War I. But the true story of the climactic event is far more complicated than the headlines suggest. ![]() It’s become a kind of political shorthand-a reference so familiar that New York Times columnist Paul Krugman only had to use the word “fire” in the headline of an inflammatory column about the Trump administration to call up images of national chaos and power grabs. Bush, a comparison of President Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler, or numerous pundits invoking the incident to foment fear over President Donald Trump’s next potential executive order, the German arson is an irrepressible political motif. Whether it’s a congressman referencing the fire to question President George W. Whenever citizens and politicians feel threatened by executive overreach, the “Reichstag Fire” is referenced as a cautionary tale. Since then, it’s become a powerful political metaphor. ![]() ![]() It was the canary in the political coal mine-a flashpoint event when Adolf Hitler played upon public and political fears to consolidate power, setting the stage for the rise of Nazi Germany. At least, that’s what happened in Germany on February 27, 1933, when a sizeable portion of the parliamentary building in Berlin, the Reichstag, went up in flames from an arson attack. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and where there’s fire, conspiracy theories are sure to follow.
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