Hitler Becomes Chancellor

In January 1933, Adolf Hitler, leader of the Nazi Party, was appointed Chancellor of Germany by President Paul von Hindenburg. The appointment was legal, made under the Weimar constitution, yet within roughly a year and a half it had led to the destruction of German democracy and the creation of a one-party dictatorship. It set the stage for the persecution of millions, the Second World War, and the Holocaust.

The Weimar Republic, founded after Germany's defeat in the First World War, had been burdened from the start by resentment over the Treaty of Versailles, the hyperinflation of the early 1920s, and deep political polarization. The Great Depression struck Germany especially hard, pushing unemployment to millions and discrediting the parties in power. The Nazis, who had been a fringe movement in the 1920s, gained dramatically by combining nationalism, antisemitism, anticommunism, and promises of national renewal. By July 1932 they were the largest party in the Reichstag, though they never won an outright majority in a free national election.

Parliamentary deadlock led Hindenburg to rely on emergency decrees and a series of short-lived chancellors. Conservative politicians around him, including Franz von Papen, came to believe they could control Hitler by bringing him into a coalition cabinet where Nazis were a minority. Hindenburg, who reportedly disliked Hitler, ultimately agreed. This calculation proved badly mistaken.

Hitler moved quickly. In February 1933, a fire gutted the Reichstag building; the Nazis blamed communists, and historians still debate whether the arsonist, a Dutch communist named Marinus van der Lubbe, acted alone. The government used the crisis to issue a decree suspending civil liberties and to arrest political opponents. After elections in March, the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act, which allowed the cabinet to make laws without parliament. Trade unions were dissolved, other parties were banned or forced to disband, and states were brought under central control. In mid-1934 Hitler purged the SA leadership in the Night of the Long Knives, and when Hindenburg died that August he combined the offices of chancellor and president as Führer.

The consequences were catastrophic. The regime built a police state, with the Gestapo and concentration camps, and began excluding Jews from public life, formalized in the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. It rearmed in defiance of Versailles and pursued territorial expansion that led to war in 1939. The collapse of Weimar remains a prominent case study in how democratic institutions can be dismantled from within, using legal procedures, emergency powers, and the miscalculations of political elites.