ABSTRACT
HITLER was appointed Chancellor on the 30th January, 1933. It is not the task of this book to go into the background of this appointment. When Hitler was appointed Chancellor by President Hindenburg, he represented less than one-third of the German people of voting age. Only two and a half months before his appointment there had been a general election in which Hitler’s party lost over two million votes. It is true the Nazi Party still remained the strongest single party, but two-thirds of the voters-and the poll had been uncommonly high-had voted against him. Some local and federal elections, with the exception of one that was held in a mainly agricultural district during the weeks preceding Hitler’s appointment, showed that the Nazis were losing still more ground. Thus Hitler’s appointment came as a great surprise to many Germans, who had begun to believe that the Nazi wave that had started in 1930 was beginning definitely to recede. Some intrigues in high quarters had apparently persuaded President Hindenburg to give Hitler the coveted post of Chancellor, which he had refused him only half a year earlier, at a time when Hitler represented a considerably higher proportion of the voters. The Conservative and Army circles that formed a coalition with Hitler believed that at last they had caught this dangerous demagogue and could easily make him innocuous in office. Although Hitler was Chancellor, only two other members of the Nazi Party obtained seats in the Cabinet, Frick, as Minister of the Interior, and Goering, as Minister without Portfolio and Commissioner for Air. All the other Cabinet Ministers were either Conservatives or Conservative-minded civil servants. In Prussia, too, the largest federal state of Germany, the majority of the Cabinet seats were held by Conservatives and civil servants. Only three portfolios, Interior, Education, and Justice, were given to Nazis. But the Conservatives had left out of account the extraordinary tactical skill of Hitler, who managed, as his first step, to lure them into a new general election, which he staged so cleverly that the Conservatives appeared merely as a rather unimportant appendage of the Nazis. The use which Hitler made of the Reichstag fire added to the helplessness of the Conservatives. The Nazis did not, even in this election, in which the by now well-known methods of Nazi terror were used for the first time, obtain a majority of votes and seats, and thus from a parliamentary point of view they seemed dependent on their Conservative allies, but they soon succeeded in extricating themselves from this bondage. By preventing a large number of the elected opposition candidates from taking their seats, the Nazi Party secured the majority which the voters had refused to give it, and the Conservative ministers soon perceived that they were the captives and that their majority of Cabinet seats availed them nothing. There had been no Nazi revolution before Hitler was appointed Chancellor, but the election safely over and Hitler firm in the saddle, with his closest friends in charge of the Police and Administration, the revolution took place at a time when it seemed quite unnecessary to the minds of the Conservatives, who still continued to think in parliamentary terms. It was not unnecessary to Hitler and
the Nazis, because this revolution made Hitler the supreme ruler of the country and took all real power out of the hands of the Conservative President Hindenburg and the Conservative majority in the Cabinet. The Conservatives realized that resistance to the Nazi demands would be useless. The revolutionary fervour of the movement would sweep them away and they would be treated just as they had allowed the opposition of the Left to be treated. Their only hope was, by acquiescing in the Nazi demands, to moderate them in detail, and in this, indeed, they succeeded for a time.
