ABSTRACT
Hitler's first move as chancellor was to obtain a decree for the dissolution of the Reichstag and the calling of new elections on 5 March 1933. If the Nazis could be seen to win a parliamentray mandate, the task of political and constitutional manipulation would be that much easier. The dissolution was quickly followed by a decree giving power to ban public meetings and the press where they were deemed to undermine the security of the Reich. In
MINISTERIAL CONTINUITY, 1932-33
THE ARENA FOR THE MAKING OF AN AUTHORITARIAN NAZI STATE
effect, this became a blanket facility for silencing opposition in the run-up to the election and was most successfully applied in Prussia under Goering's interior ministryship and in those remaining Lander where National Socialist governments prevailed. Von Papen's Prussian coup of July 1932 had not entirely taken over the reins of administration and control, but this was completed in a presidential decree of 6 February 1933, whereupon police chiefs and other officials unsympathetic to the Nazi cause were replaced. The spreading' tentacles of Nazi control in Prussia gathered further momentum when on 22 February Goering set up an auxiliary police force drawn from the ranks of the SA, the SS and the Stahlhelm,. ostensibly to combat the excesses of political opposition. The relative moderation which characterised the Nazis' approach to their opponents in Hitler's first month of power was brought to a dramatic close when the Dutch communist van der Lubbe set fire to the Reichstag building on 27 February 1933. It was the
a
act of an individual, but the Nazis seized upon it as indicating a general communist uprising and draconian measures were demanded. By the Reichstag Fire Decree of the following day, all basic democratic rights enjoyed under the Weimar constitution were terminated and the Reich government was accorded special powers to override the Land governments in the event of their failing to observe the decree adequately. In Prussia, Goering did not hesitate to use the decree to make large-scale arrests of communists and any persons who co-operated with or supported them. Outside Prussia, arrests were more selective, but all German Communist Party (KPD) activities became illegal.
