Many people are confused about how Hitler could have assumed nearly dictatorial power over Germany in 1933. I will try to give you an overview as I understand it.
After Germany lost World War I, the country was given a new Constitution 1918, largely shaped by a Jewish academic called Preuß. This democratic Constitution was the basis by which the Weimar Republic functioned - or, more correctly expressed, mal-functioned - lurching from crisis to crisis.
This "Preuß" Constitution had many provisions, granting the Chancellor (Prime Minister) of the moment sweeping powers using emergency decrees, which allowed the government to suspend civil liberties, invoke strict censorship, and suspend certain human and political rights because of some perceived emergency.
When Hitler came to power as Chancellor of Germany in 1933, he asked for, and was given, nearly unlimited powers through the "Enabling Act" that was part of the Weimar Constitution. Even though he asked for four years of unfettered rule as a de facto dictator, he promised the German people periodic plebescites where they could vote their approval or register their disapproval of actions of his government. During these first four Hitler years, the Germans overwhelmingly approved of his measures.
The Führer took over a country in ruins - physically and spiritually. There was no way to rescue it except by a strong hand. However, he always considered his "reign" or "term on his watch" as transitory. A modern, more sophisticated Constitution was to be evolved and voted on by the German nation as a whole when the time was ripe and the critical, even life-threatening problems of the nation were solved.
Hitler envisioned even a "Senate" - and in the Braune Haus (the National Socialist Headquarters in Munich) there was already in existence a "Senatssaal." Hitler was keenly aware of the American Constitutional set-up of careful checks and balances - and we may speculate how much of the American Constitution he might have copied, once order was restored in Germany. But this we'll never know. War came. Events overtook and demolished all plans. The rest is history.
Let us remember, however, that Hitler governed perfectly legally and constitutionally, empowered under this enabling legislation to the very end. Few people know that ***several days*** after the Enabling Acts came into force, world-wide Jewry declared war on Germany.
When the Allies bombed Hitler and his Third Reich out of office, they at first set up "military zones of occupation", then puppet states, which are in place to this day. The victorious powers did not replace the Weimar Constitution; they gave to these vassal states instead what is called a "Basic Law" - in German called a "Grundgesetz."
There is, tellingly, only one other state in the world with the same oddball arrangement, namely Israel. That statelet is also governed by a "Basic Law" - a situation which makes it clear who really is in charge in Germany.
Here are the Führer's own words from that distant time and place.
* In his speech in the Reichstag on 30 January 1934 Hitler said:
"Whatever decision may be taken some day by the nation and its leaders, there is one thing which they should never forget: The man who stands at the head of affairs in Germany is appointed by the German people and it responsible to them alone. I myself feel that I am merely commissioned by the nation to carry out those reforms which will enable it some day to take the final decision regarding the definite constitution of the Reich. (...)
"I have never for a moment regarded the task that became mine otherwise than as a commission entrusted to me by the whole of the German people, even if millions, either consciously or unconsciously, were then not clear about this fact or if they did not wish to accept it as the truth. (...)
"(J)ust as the National Socialist Movement had its origins exclusively in the people, so we too, as the Government, have never thought otherwise than as the people, with the people, and for the people."
* On the effect of the Enabling Law [much like an Emergency Measures Act) Hitler spoke in his address to the representatives of German Agriculture delivered in the Herrenhaus on 5 April 1933; he said:
"The nation must not imagine that, because the Reichstag can no more restrict our decisions, the nation itself no longer needs to take part in the shaping of our destiny. On the contrary, we wish that the German people at this very time should concentrate once more and cooperate actively in support of the Government. The result must be that when we appeal to the nation once more, in four years' time, we shall not appeal to men who have been asleep, but will find ourselves faced by a nation that has fully awakened in the course of these years from its parliamentary trance and has realized the knowledge necessary to understand the eternal conditions of human existence."
* On 11 December 1933 Hitler addressed the National Socialist members of the newly elected Reichstag:
"Traditions of the past which were not valuable for the people's future cannot be regarded by us as binding: the Movement must feel itself to be the founder of a new tradition in our people's life...The possibilities which are ours today may perhaps not return for hundreds of years. We shall all one day be together weighed in the balances and together we shall be judged. Either we shall together stand this test or history will condemn us together. History must one day be able to speak of us as a generation of men who, bold, courageous, resolute, and tough, thought only of their people. (...)
"The leaders of the Party must be in everything a model for the people. . . From every one of us it must be expected that he should be a fighter - brave, forthright, daring, and true - true to the last breath. As I have kept true to the Movement so I ask of everyone that he should be true to me. Then we shall go forward into history as a community of sworn men who leave the history of the present to enter the history of the future.
"If this Reichstag does its duty, then in four years' time we can with assurance and confidence appeal once more to the people. I am convinced that then it will give us a new and still more complete voice of confidence. (...)
"Of this Reichstag it must one day be said that it had been the youngest, the most courageous, and the boldest, and that it had solved the great problems set by history - the problems on which the centuries had suffered shipwreck."
* Hitler himself described National Socialist Government as "the dictatorship of the entire community"; thus in his speech to the Labour Front delivered in Berlin on 10 May 1933 Hitler said:
"A new authority must be set up and this authority must be independent of temporary political fluctuations and, above all, of those fluctuations which allow narrow, selfish, and material interests to predominate. The State must be led by a real authority and one which is not dependent on any one class. The leaders must be such that every citizen can trust them and be sure that they do not wish for anything but the happiness and the good of the German nation; they must be able to say with right that they are completely independent. (...)
"We do not regard any class as being of paramount importance; such distinctions disappear during the course of centuries, they come and go. What remains is the substance, a substance of flesh and blood, our nation."
* In his speech to the Reichstag on 20 February 1938 Hitler said:
"This new Reich shall belong to no class, it shall belong to no one group of men, for it shall belong to the whole German people. This Reich will endeavor to make it easier for the German people to find its path of life on this earth; it will seek to fashion for it a fairer existence. What I have called into life in these years cannot claim to be an end in itself - all can and will be transient."
* In an interview with Anne O'Hare McCormich, reported in the New York Times of 10 July 1933, Hitler said, speaking of his programme:
"Parties were in the way of such a programme. They have disappeared. Parliament has obstructed my reforms. It has disappeared also. In Germany and elsewhere parliaments have proved themselves utterly incapable of dealing with the preposterous developments in the last ten years.
"Remember, I am prescribing only for Germany, not for the world, and no outside criticism will deflect me from the course I have mapped out.
"Cromwell...secured England in a crisis similar to ours, and he saved it by obliterating Parliament and uniting the nation."
(For the simplest and most condensed overview of Hitler's seizing of power, see the booklet, Hitler: Madman or Genius? $10. Ordering info: irimland@cts.com)
Tomorrow: Hitler on Women
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Thought for the Day:
"The fight against Germany has now been waged for months by every Jewish community, on every conference, in all labor unions and by every single Jew in the world. There are reasons for the assumption that our share in this fight is of general importance. We shall start a spiritual and material war of the whole world against Germany. Germany is striving to become once again a great nation, and to recover her lost territories as well as her colonies. But our Jewish interests call for the complete destruction of Germany."
(Vladimir Jabotinsky in Mascha Rjetsch, January 1934)