ABSTRACT

In the cabinet of national concentration there were only two Nazi ministers, Wilhelm Frick and Hermann Gring, but they held key positions. The state secretary in the Ministry of the Interior, Hans Pfundtner, although sympathetic to the Nazis, was not a party member; the minister of justice, Franz Grtner, was a nationalist, and his state secretary had been in office since 1924. The Prussian Landtag had rejected a Nazi motion for dissolution, as had the three-man executive board, with Otto Braun and Konrad Adenauer voting against the Nazi president of the Landtag, Hans Kerrl. Both the Nazis and KPD made the maximum use of the situation. The Nazis decided not to ban the KDP outright, for fear that the Social Democratic Party (SPD) would pick up a large number of extra votes. In fact the Reichstag fire decree was to be one of the most important steps towards the creation of the Nazi dictatorship.