By the time Hitler began his rise to power, the German state, reconstituted after the war, possessed robust constitutional and legal structures that were designed to frustrate any attempt to undermine or circumvent democracy. Judges were independent, as were police and prosecutors. In fact, early in 1933, the provincial Nazi government in Prussia—the state that covered over half of Germany’s territory and included more than half of its population—was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. But the Nazis simply ignored this ruling, as they did the thousands of prosecutions brought by local and regional authorities against the storm troopers and others who had beaten up, imprisoned, and, in many hundreds of cases, murdered the party’s opponents.
The courts could safely be ignored, not least because Hitler’s government was able to govern by executive order after the burning down of the Reichstag, the national parliament building, on February 27–28, 1933. A lone, deranged Dutch anarchist was found guilty of setting the fire, but the Nazis portrayed it as a terrorist act by the Communist Party in a nationwide conspiracy to take power. The government declared a state of emergency, and Hitler exploited a provision in the Weimar Republic’s Constitution that permitted him to rule by decree in such times. Hitler would repeatedly renew the Reichstag Fire Decree all the way up to the end of his rule in 1945.
The Nazi seizure of power was carried out step-by-step through the first half of 1933, each step disguised as a seemingly legal act. On April 7, 1933, the government issued an executive order dismissing Jews and the regime’s political opponents from state employment. Many similar orders followed, culminating in a law to establish a one-party state and then, in the late summer of ’34, a law to declare Hitler dictator for life.
It was possible to do these things because Hitler had pushed a bill through the national legislature on March 23, 1933, that effectively disabled the parliament and devolved its power to make laws onto his cabinet. He was able to secure the necessary two-thirds majority by arresting Communist deputies who would have voted against it and by persuading the large Catholic Center Party to vote for it through a mix of promises and threats. Issuing from the government, these laws had the appearance of legitimacy, and almost no one stood up against them as they were put into effect.
Even after the legal profession and the judiciary had been purged of the Nazis’ opponents, there were still some judges who retained a modicum of honesty and independence. Hitler was furious when the Supreme Court, trying the alleged perpetrators of the Reichstag fire, acquitted all but one due to a lack of evidence. He rapidly set up a parallel apparatus of “Special Courts” crowned by a national “People’s Court,” all of them packed with committed Nazis. But the vast majority of the legal profession and law-enforcement agencies went along with the party anyway, even as the Nazis passed a raft of new treason laws and transferred the task of enforcing political conformity from the storm troopers and concentration camps to the police, the courts, and the prisons.
There were plenty of Germans who disapproved of these measures: Hitler didn’t attain supreme power on a wave of popular acclamation. On the contrary, in the last free elections of the Weimar Republic, the left-wing parties—the Communists and Social Democrats—won more votes and gained more seats in the national parliament than the Nazis did. But they were fatally divided, spending at least as much time fighting each other as they did trying to stop Hitler from establishing a dictatorship. Their rhetoric was feeble in comparison with his, their supporters less fanatical, their electoral propaganda less powerful and less sophisticated.
The concentration of political and legislative power in the cabinet didn’t last long. Beneath the surface appearance of normality, the cabinet was being marginalized as Hitler appointed his own cronies and disciples to new positions or pushed out his conservative coalition partners. The men who ruled Germany did not do so because they were constitutionally acting government ministers but because they were Hitler’s cronies: Goebbels, Göring, Heinrich Himmler, Robert Ley, and a handful of others.
Before long, the police and the Gestapo had been merged into Himmler’s SS, while regional Nazi Party leaders—Gauleiters— were bypassing the formally appointed state governors and administrators at every level. Senior civil servants were fired if they made any difficulties or were effectively supplanted by parallel appointees of the regime even if they conformed, as the vast majority of them did. German bureaucracy was famously punctilious, but under Hitler decisions were increasingly made on the hoof, by verbal order, leaving behind no paper trail.
Hitler made sure that the armed forces were on his side by giving them massive increases in funding and a huge new armaments program. In 1935, he introduced a draft that forced millions of young men into military service. His program for making Germany great again included a new aggressive attitude in international affairs. He sent the army into the Rhineland, occupied Austria, and annexed Czechoslovakia, before invading Poland and launching a European and, eventually, a world war. All along, the Soviet Union was targeted as Germany’s main external foe, even if, for tactical reasons, Hitler concluded a temporary nonaggression pact with Stalin in August 1939.
Hitler’s seizure and remaking of the state was buttressed by a wholesale reorganization of the education system and an effort to redefine German culture. Many, if not most, of Germany’s leading scholars and scientists were forced to leave the country, either because they were Jewish and so regarded as non-Christian foreigners, or because they were opponents of the regime (or, indeed, as in the case of Albert Einstein, both). The intellectual quality of German universities, which had led the world in research before 1933, plummeted. It has never fully recovered.
Hitler didn’t care. For him, education was a matter of practical instruction; it had nothing to do with the transmission of pure knowledge, let alone the traditional humanistic values that had underpinned the German educational system since the early 19th century. Before Hitler took over, a fifth of all university students were enrolled in the humanities; by the eve of the war, that portion had been cut in half, in a student body that was itself shrinking rapidly, from a total of 104,000 in all universities in 1931 to just under 41,000 in 1939. By this time, fully half of all students were taking degree courses in medicine, its importance boosted by the Nazis’ focus on racial research and eugenics.
The regime’s assault on culture ex tended to its policy toward the arts, which were “coordinated” by Goebbels in a Reich Chamber of Culture that ended funding for modern painting, sculpture, and music, and banned allegedly subversive artists from working. Almost all of Germany’s major artists and writers left the country, turning it into a cultural desert. The mostly second-rate artists and writers who stayed behind had little choice but to propagate “German” art and culture, and their work was often unimaginative, conformist, and dull. Theater and cinema put out trivial productions aimed at a broad popular audience: costume dramas, musicals, and other forms of light entertainment. Outright propaganda films were relatively rare, though these are the ones remembered today. There were no game shows or reality TV in Hitler’s day, but if there had been, Goebbels would have loved them.
The main objective of Nazi education and culture was not, however, to distract people from issues of political importance; it was to instill a new sense of patriotism. Pupils were made to salute the flag before school every morning, and the religious assembly that opened the school day was turned into a festival of obeisance to Hitler. All children had to join the Hitler Youth or its female equivalent, the League of German Girls, where they sang patriotic songs and performed military exercises and drills. History lessons were turned into a celebration of German heroes from the past. Geography was Nazified in order to justify German claims on other parts of Europe. Math students were required to do calculations based on the number of “racially inferior” people in the population.
Such exercises pointed to the fact that the regime constantly targeted minorities as a way of mobilizing popular approval and support. The Nazis may have dominated state power, but this wasn’t the kind of dictatorship that depended solely on repression, important though it was. Like many other modern dictatorships, it wanted to appear popular, not least because this strengthened its hand in negotiations with foreign powers. Regular elections and referendums were put to the voters, and they routinely delivered majorities of 99 percent in favor of whatever the government proposed— results achieved by depriving known or potential opponents of the vote, by manipulating the electoral process, and by directly or indirectly intimidating the great mass of people into supporting Hitler’s government.
A key part of the process was the vilification of political opponents. The Communist Party, a mass movement that had gained 100 seats in the national legislature in the last free elections of the Weimar Republic, was suppressed, accused of preparing a violent revolution. The moderately progressive Social Democrats, who enjoyed even more widespread support, were damned as “November traitors,” a reference to the November revolution in 1918 that overthrew the kaiser’s regime. They were also maligned by the Nazis for having signed the ignominious peace treaty with the Allies at Versailles.
I hope you don't do that to your neighbors. My neighbors would have booted you out of the neighborhood!
