Hitler’s First Six Months in Power

Jason Dawsey

ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-SIX DAYS: In a mere 166 days, just over five months, Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers Party (or Nazi Party) destroyed what remained of a constitutional, parliamentary system and transformed Germany into a one-party fascist dictatorship.

For comparison, it took fellow fascist Benito Mussolini some four years to fully exclude and suppress his political opposition (and Mussolini still had to deal with King Victor Emmanuel III, something Hitler never had to face).

This timeline of those 166 days, designed for socialists seeking to understand this history and draw lessons from it, shows how Hitler consolidated power so rapidly.

Facing a divided, though still formidable, German workers movement (the Social Democratic Party of Germany-SPD, the Communist Party of Germany-KPD, and a massive trade-union apparatus), a population beleaguered from the Great Depression (employment had reached 30% nationally), and several different authoritarian governments since 1930, Hitler, usually with at least the tacit approval of the conservative, aristocratic President Paul von Hindenburg, a former army field marshal, unleashed an onslaught of new laws, policies, and institutions.

This torrent, backed by unrelenting paramilitary violence, overwhelmed anti-fascist elements in Germany between January and July 1933.

Writing from exile in Turkey in November 1931, Leon Trotsky had warned the German Left, the only serious progressive force capable of stopping Hitler:

“The coming to power of the National Socialists would mean first of all the extermination of the flower of the German proletariat, the destruction of its organizations, the eradication of its belief in itself and in its future. Considering the far greater maturity and acuteness of the social contradictions in Germany, the hellish work of Italian fascism would probably appear as a pale and almost humane experiment in comparison with the work of the German National Socialists.”(1)

As prescient as he was on several occasion about developments in Germany (in late 1938, he contended that the dreadful events in Germany and German-annexed Austria surrounding the Night of Broken Glass bespoke the “physical extermination of the Jews”),Trotsky’s call for Social Democrats and Communists to form a united front against the Nazis never materialized.

Every day that passed in the weeks and months after January 30, 1933 saw Hitler grow stronger. Counterrevolutionary night had descended on Germany.

Colossal Failure, Epochal Results

“Fateful,” “catastrophic,” and “apocalyptic” are among the first words to arise when confronting this short yet vital period of modern history. The colossal failure of the German Left to unite against a truly existential threat was a world-historical disaster for socialists. This timeline documents the epochal results of that failure.

While the aim of revolutionary socialists has been to transform bourgeois democracy into socialist democracy, the history of the Third Reich demonstrates that bourgeois democracy can be replaced with something far worse. The intent of this timeline is to buttress efforts to defend and expand democracy along socialist lines.

Over the last several decades, scholars have produced a bevy of works on this subject. Here I have turned to a series of works that were formative for my understanding of Nazism.(2) Among other timelines, Tim Kirk and Robert Moeller are still very instructive.(3)

January 28: Kurt von Schleicher, who had been a general in the Army and had once served as Minister of Defense, resigns as chancellor, the last non-Nazi to hold this office until 1949 (Schleicher was murdered by the Nazis during the infamous Night of the Long Knives in the summer of 1934).

January 30: President Paul von Hindenburg appoints Adolf Hitler chancellor, with conservative and former chancellor Franz von Papen as vice-chancellor. Only two Nazis held positions in this cabinet: Wilhelm Frick as Minister of the Interior and Hermann Goering as Minister Without Portfolio (Goering is also Minister of the Interior in Prussia, the largest of the German states). Conservatives like von Papen foolishly believe they can control Hitler. Nazi propaganda celebrates the event as the “Day of the National Revolution.”

January 31: The SPD’s newspaper Vorwärts (Forwards) reaffirms that Social Democrats must stand “on the ground of constitutional and legal principle.” This appeal for party members not to engage in actions that will help the National Socialists is soon coupled with a rejection of a general strike (which would play into the hands of the KPD) and any alliance with the Communists.

February 1: With the approval of President Hindenburg, the Reichstag in place when Hitler becomes chancellor is dissolved, at Hitler’s request, and new elections set for March 5.

February 2: Despite a call, jointly issued on January 29 with a radical contingent of the trade-union movement for a “united front to take action against the general assault of fascism,” the KPD reiterates the “social-fascism” thesis, the dominant position of the Communist International — that the Social Democrats are a greater menace to the working class than the Nazis.

Targeting the Left

February 3: At the invitation of Minister of Defense Werner von Blomberg, a Hindenburg appointee and also a general in the Reichswehr (the German armed forces), Hitler speaks to a gathering of military leaders at the home of General Kurt Freiherr von Hammerstein-Equord, head of the Army.

The occasion was a birthday celebration prepared for Foreign Minister Kostantin von  Neurath. Hoping to gain support from the Army, Hitler calls for the elimination of Marxism in Germany, the destruction of democracy, repudiation of disarmament talks held in Geneva, expansion of the armed forces, and general conscription. The armed forces are to be above politics.

Hitler’s two-hour speech convinces many of the military figures present that he was a person with whom they could work. Hammerstein-Equord’s daughters, Marie-Therese and Helga, both Communists, work to ensure that the Stalin regime receives a transcription of Hitler’s remarks.

February 4: Hindenburg, pushed by Hitler, passes the Decree for the Protection of the German People. The decree, targeting the Communists, permits Reich Minister of the Interior Frick to bar public meetings and ban publications deemed threatening to the state and public order. Frick also gains the authority to suppress strikes in “essential” economic areas.

February 11: Hitler fills in for President Hindenburg (who was ill) and gives the opening address at the International Automobile and Motor-Cycle Exhibition in Berlin.

Hitler tells leaders of Germany’s auto industry that the manufacture of automobiles would be central to German economic recovery. There would be tax relief for the industry, and he promises a major program of road construction.

So began the image of Hitler, carefully cultivated by Nazi propaganda, as the “Autobahn-builder.” The Nazis would soon appeal to their supporters with the prospect of mass car ownership.

February 20: Hitler and Goering meet with leading German industrialists at Goering’s official residence. Among them is Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, head of the powerful Krupp company (iron and steel) and chairman of the Reich Association of German Industry.

Hitler, who has agreed to describe his economic policies, warns that force would be used if the Communists were not defeated at the polls on March 5. Goering tells the businessmen that the latter may be the last election in Germany for a century.

February 22: In Prussia, members of two Nazi paramilitary organizations, the SA (Sturmabteilung or Stormtroopers) and SS (Schutzstaffel or Protection Squads), as well as the right-wing veterans’ organization, the Stahlhelm, are made “auxiliary police.” The justification for this move by Goering is the supposed rise in violence by left-wing groups.

February 24: Police in Berlin raid the KPD’s offices in the Karl-Liebknecht Haus, named for Karl Liebknecht, the German socialist politician and leader of the German Revolution of 1918-19, who had been murdered by right-wing paramilitary troops in January 1919.

Police falsely claim that they find materials advocating a Communist insurrection in Germany. Without providing any evidence, Goering tells the press the KPD plans to assassinate politicians, execute their families, and storm public buildings as part of a revolutionary overthrow of the state.

The Reichstag Fire

Ernst Thälmann, leader of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), campaigning for president, 1932. (Bundesarchiv Bild 102-12940)

February 27: The Reichstag burns. This act of arson is attributed to Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch-born communist. The 24-year-old van der Lubbe hailed from a working-class family and had been active in the Communist Party’s youth wing until 1931.

Only having been in Berlin for about a week, he sets fire to the Reichstag to rouse people to fight the Hitler-led government, which he identifies as an oppressor of the working class and a warmongering regime. Van der Lubbe, who insisted he acted alone, would be tried, convicted, sentenced to death, and beheaded in January 1934.

The Reichstag Fire presents the Nazis with the pretext to move swiftly and ruthlessly against the KPD, justifying the repression as saving Germany from Marxist revolution.

February 28: In response to the Reichstag Fire, Hindenburg issues the Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of the People and the State (also known as the Reichstag Fire Decree).

The Decree permits a massive curtailment of civil liberties guaranteed by the Weimar Constitution, including free expression of opinion, freedom of assembly and association, freedom of the press, and the right to privacy (“postal, telegraphic, and telephonic communications”), and makes it easier for police to search houses and for the authorities to confiscate property.

Criminalized are any attempts to promote “disobedience” of the Reichstag Fire Decree, with punishments ranging from fines or imprisonment, to, if “violation causes the death of a person,” the death penalty. In addition, the Reichstag Fire Decree mandates capital punishment for crimes, such as high treason or arson, which had previously been punished under the German Criminal Code with life in prison.

It allows execution or lengthy prison sentences even for acts of “serious rioting” or “serious disturbance of the peace” where the perpetrators are armed. A Nazi reign of terror against the German Left, especially members of the KPD and its larger body of supporters, ensues. Arrest, incarceration, torture, and, on occasion, murder become regular instruments of subjugation.

March 1: The First Decree for the Restructuring of Health Insurance permits the Reich Minister of Labor to exert control over the system of health insurance and to put his own officials into place.

On March 23, SA men move against clinics administered by the Berlin Health Insurance League (VKB), seizing medical records and beating or taking into custody physicians. Kurt Bendix, a socialist and director the VKB’s program of sex counseling, is arrested before being released a few days later.

Most of the 200 doctors working for the VKB lose their positions under the new civil service laws (see below) and 38 VKB clinics in Berlin are shut in 1933.

March 3: Communist leader Ernst Thälmann, a member of the Reichstag from 1924 to 1933 and the KPD’s candidate for president in 1925 and 1932, is arrested. The Nazis never release Thälmann (he is executed in Buchenwald concentration camp in August 1944). Despite the repression, many Communists cling to the illusion that the Hitler regime will not be able to hold power for very long.

The March Election

March 4: In a speech given in and broadcast from the East Prussian city of Königsberg (the present-day Russian enclave city of Kaliningrad), Hitler appeals to German voters one last time before the Reichstag elections.

Hitler, as a veteran of the Western Front during World War I, professes his closeness to Hindenburg, remembered for his role in the defense of East Prussia against the Russians in 1914. The day before his speech, police arrest a Communist shipwright, Kurt Lutter, for planning to assassinate Hitler with a bomb. In custody for several months, Lutter is released in late 1933 after police fail to supply concrete evidence.

March 5: Reichstag elections are held. Almost 89% of the German electorate votes. The Nazis get 43.8% of the vote in the aftermath of the Reichstag Fire, gaining 288 of the 647 seats in the Reichstag, but far short of an absolute majority. Hitler’s coalition partner, the German National People’s Party (DNVP), brings in 8%.

The parties of the Left, the SPD and KPD, still at odds, win 18.3% and 12.3%, respectively. In doing so, they together claimed almost a third of the vote despite enormous intimidation. The Catholic Center Party receives 11.2%.

March 6-7: The Nazis initiate the “coordination (Gleich­schaltung)” of state and local governments. Typically, the Nazis would stage some kind of provocation in a city and call for the national government to reinstitute law and order. Then a Nazi would be established as head of government. This happened in Württemberg, Baden, Hesse, Bremen and Lübeck in just a few days,

March 9: A wave of anti-Jewish violence erupts (there were about 525,000 Jews in Germany at the time). That day, SA men in Berlin round up Eastern European Jews in the Scheunenviertel, a traditionally Jewish quarter of the city. They will be among the first Jews sent to concentration camps under the Nazi regime.

On March 13, the SA in Mannheim compel Jewish shopowners to close their establishments. Attacks on Jewish businesses and a synagogue in Göttingen on March 28 are blamed on Communists.

March 13: Joseph Goebbels becomes Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.

March 21: A carefully orchestrated ceremony takes place in Potsdam at the Garnisonkirche (Garrison Church), burial place of the 18th-century Prussian kings, Frederick William I (known for his love of the army) and Frederick the Great. There the newly elected Reichstag meets.

At the ceremony, Hitler clasps the hand of Hindenburg, who wears the uniform of a Prussian field marshal, and bows. Wreaths are placed at the tombs of the kings and there is a twenty-one gun salute. A parade of soldiers, SA, and SS marches past Hindenburg. The ceremony publicly binds the Nazi leader to the old conservative Prussian traditions of church, monarchy, and army.

A Fascist Police State

March 21: The new Malicious Practices Act criminalizes criticism of the government and its leaders. The law even covers spreading rumors about government officials. Thousands of Germans denounce co-workers or neighbors to the police.

March 22: At the site of a former gunpowder and munitions factory, the first inmates arrive at what will become the SS-run Dachau concentration camp, near Munich. The vast majority of the inmates are political opponents of the Hitler dictatorship (communists, social democrats, and trade unionists).

In the fall of 1933, Theodor Eicke, a trusted and ruthless subordinate of SS leader Heinrich Himmler, institutionalizes a brutal regimen of control and punishment over the incarcerated population that makes Dachau a “model” concentration camp for the SS. Eventually some 41,000 human beings will perish in Dachau.

Nazi paramilitaries enter Kroll Opera House in Berlin where the Reichstag debates the Enabling Act, March 23, 1933. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. (Courtesy of Nederlands Instituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie)

March 23: The Enabling Act nears passage in the new Reichstag holding its sessions in the Kroll Opera House in Berlin. The Act, officially the Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Reich, gives Hitler almost unlimited power for four years as chancellor by allowing him to pass legislation without the consent of the Reichstag.

Nazi paramilitaries enter the Opera House, instilling a menacing atmosphere. SPD leader Otto Wels voices an already imperiled opposition to the Nazis. He stands by his party’s record (which was an overwhelmingly moderate one by the standards of the leftist politics of that time) and eloquently defends the constitution of the Weimar Republic. Wels declares:

“The Weimar Constitution is not a socialist constitution. But we stand by the principles enshrined therein, the principles of a state based on the rule of law, of equal rights, of social justice. In this historic hour, we German Social Democrats solemnly pledge ourselves to the principles of humanity and justice, of freedom and socialism. No Enabling Act gives you the power to destroy ideas that are eternal and indestructible. After all, you yourselves have professed your adherence to Socialism. The Anti-Socialist Law [passed when Otto von Bismarck was chancellor and which lasted from 1878 to 1890] did not destroy Social Democracy. German Social Democracy will draw new strength from the latest persecution, too.”(4)

Social Democrats are the only ones to vote against the Enabling Act, which passes easily, 444 to 94 (26 SPD delegates are absent from the voting). Delegates of the KPD, now banned, are not able to participate (Wels has practically nothing to say about this).

The legislation completes the transformation of Germany into a fascist dictatorship. Subsequently, the Nazis throw everything they have into destroying the ideas trumpeted by Wels and any institutions which still enshrine them.

March 28: Albert Einstein, the most famous physicist in the world, arrives in Antwerp, Belgium. There he renounces his German citizenship.

As a German Jew subjected to relentless propaganda from the Nazi regime, Einstein had debated about what course of action to take. He had been teaching at the California Institute of Technology when Hitler takes power.

Subsequently the Gestapo carries out raids of Einstein’s apartment, and Goebbels accuses him of spreading “atrocity stories” about the Nazis. Before renouncing his citizenship, Einstein resigns from the Prussian Academy of Sciences (a purge of that venerable institution is already in motion).

After March 28, the Nazi state confiscates his property inside Germany. At the invitation of Abraham Flexner, Einstein soon joins the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, becoming one of its first faculty members.

April 1: National boycott of Jewish businesses happens on this day. International coverage and outrage against Nazi anti-Jewish violence (which the Hitler government dubs “atrocity stories”) is the pretext for the boycott.

With Hitler’s blessing, Goebbels and figures in the SA and the Nazi Enterprise Cells Organization push for aggressive action against businesses and shops owned or operated by Jews. Vandalism of these establishments occurs in cities across Germany, and SA men call on Germans to not buy from Jews and stand menacingly outside them.

Nazi Stormtroopers, members of the SA, hold antisemitic signs during the April 1, 1933 boycott of Jewish businesses, Berlin. The sign in the middle says, “Germans, Defend Yourselves! Do Not Buy from Jews!” (The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD)

Most Germans choose, however, to ignore the boycott. The Nazis are divided as well over how to define “Jewish” business establishments, and there are fears of an economic backlash at a time when Germany still suffers from the Great Depression. Although the boycott lasts a single day, the Nazis soon move against the German-Jewish population in other ways.

April 7: The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service is promulgated to purge the entire government bureaucracy in Germany. The law, pushed by Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick, applies to more than two million employees and targets Jews and people with leftist backgrounds. Civil servants who are not of “Aryan” origin are to retire (non-Aryan is defined here as anyone who has at least one parent or grandparent of non-Aryan background).

President Hindenburg does intervene to exempt civil servants who had held their jobs prior to August 1, 1914 (the beginning of Germany’s involvement in World War I), as well as combat veterans and civil servants whose fathers or sons had perished in World War I. All others who do not meet the new racial definition of eligibility have to retire.

April 25: The Law Against the Overcrowding of German Schools and Universities is passed. This law restricts the matriculation of new Jewish students in any German school or university to 1.5% of the total of new applicants, with the overall number of Jewish pupils or students in any institution capped at 5%. There are exemptions for children of World War I veterans and those born of mixed marriages contracted before the law is passed.

May 2: A day after celebrating May Day, a day traditionally celebrated by workers’ movements in Germany and elsewhere (Hitler addresses crowds near Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport), the Nazi regime orders the occupation of trade-union offices.

Independent trade unions (the General German Trade Union Federation and the General Independent Employees’ Federation, both allied with the SPD) are forcibly disbanded, many of their officials are taken into custody, and their assets are confiscated. The trade unions are replaced on May 6 by a German Labor Front, headed by Nazi Robert Ley.

Burning of books at Opernplatz (Opera Square), Berlin, May 10, 1933. Credit: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. (Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD)

May 10: Book burnings take place in more than 30 German university towns (e.g. Königsberg, Frankfurt am Main, Munich, Kiel, Leipzig, and Berlin). The German Students’ Association and the National Socialist German Students’ Association organize this purge of university libraries. Bonfires are held, crowds sing nationalist songs, and “fire-oaths” are sworn.

The events target writings of figures condemned as “un-German.” A list of some of these writers include 19th-century German-Jewish radicals Heinrich Heine and Karl Marx, and contemporary authors such as the Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht, the brothers Heinrich Mann and Thomas Mann, Erich Maria Remarque, author of All Quiet on the Western Front, and the poet Erich Kästner.

Consigned to the flames were also works by American authors like Ernest Hemingway. In Berlin, Goebbels speaks at the Opernplatz before a crowd of 40,000, denounces the legacy of the German Revolution of 1918-1919, and accuses several German writers of decadence. Right-wing students immolate perhaps as many as 25,000 volumes.

Purges and Consolidation

May 26: Paragraphs 219 and 220 are reintroduced into the German Penal Code. These two paragraphs, eliminated in 1926, ban any publicity or education dedicated to abortion. The Nazis will seek to halt most voluntary abortions while allowing abortions that were considered medically and, especially, racially necessary.

May 27: Martin Heidegger, one of the leading philosophers in the world and author of the highly influential Being and Time (1927), gives his inaugural lecture as Rector of the prestigious Freiburg University. Some of his most prominent students in the Weimar years had been German Jews (Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Günther Anders, Herbert Marcuse, and Hans Jonas).

Heidegger’s Rector’s Address, titled “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” linked the complex philosophy of the human being he had already developed with aspects of Nazi ideology. He endorsed the Nazification of German universities and called for students to undertake three types of service to the Hitler regime: “Labor Service,” “Armed Service,” and “Knowledge Service.”

June 1: The Law for the Reduction of Unemployment is passed. As part of this law, marriage loans are offered to German couples, which could be paid off by the couple having children. Couples cannot receive the loans, however, unless the woman gives up any job she holds.

Intended to push women back into the home and into the roles of wives and mothers, the law is supplemented by additional provisions which entailed a medical examination for applicants and refusal of loans if either the man or the woman suffers from a mental or physical illness or any illness deemed hereditary.

June 22: The SPD’s activities inside Germany are prohibited, its delegation in the Reichstag is dissolved, and its assets are confiscated. The Social Democrats have already set up operations in exile across the border in Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia.

June 27: What had been the DNVP (it had renamed itself the German National Front in May 1933), the party of Minister of Agriculture Hugenberg, dissolves.

Hugenberg, who many observers had believed would be a central figure in the Hitler-led coalition government, resigns from the cabinet on June 26 after angering Hitler by pursuing his own agenda at a meeting of the World Economic Conference in London.

By then, many members have already abandoned the party for the Nazi Party, and the Nazis have begun to openly try to intimidate those who stayed. The disappearance of the DNVP/German National Front signifies that the Nazis will no longer tolerate any competition from other rightwing parties.

June 28: Under Nazi pressure, the German State Party (formerly the German Democratic Party) and the German People’s Party, the two longtime liberal parties in Germany, dissolve themselves. Both parties had waned in membership and influence as the German political spectrum polarized.

Fritz Koelle’s statue, “To the Unknown Concentration Camp Inmate,” commemoration site of Dachau concentration camp, dedicated in April 1950. The inscription says “To Honor the Dead, to Warn the Living. (Photo taken by the author, October 2023.)

July 5: The Catholic Center Party dissolves itself. The Nazi Party is the only one of the major political parties left.

July 8: The Hitler regime and Pope Pius XI make an initial agreement to the Reich Concordat. It is signed on July 20. Four months earlier, after Hitler had moved to crush the KPD, Pius XI lauds the Nazis for their anti-communism.

Instrumental to this formal agreement is Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (later Pope Pius XII), Pius XI’s Secretary of State. The Concordat recognizes the freedom of German Catholics to practice their faith and for the Catholic Church in Germany to administer its own affairs, while withdrawing the Church from politics (something already implemented with the dissolution of the Catholic Center Party).

July 14: The Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring is passed (it goes into effect in January 1934). This makes legal the compulsory sterilization of individuals with allegedly hereditary illnesses (chronic alcoholism is included).

Newly created Hereditary Health courts order the sterilization of a person. Their decisions can only be appealed to a Higher Hereditary Health Court. If the appeal is not successful, then the individual is sterilized, no matter their wishes or the objections of those who advocate for them.

For men, the procedure usually involves a vasectomy, for women tubal ligation. Some 400,000 people are forcibly sterilized under this law by May 1945.

July 14: Targeting Eastern European Jews who had immigrated to Germany, the Law for the Repeal of Naturalization and Recognition of German Citizenship rescinds naturalizations enacted between November 9, 1918 [the start of the German Rev­olution of 1918-19] and January 30, 1933.

July 14: The Law Against the Founding of New Parties is passed, bearing the signature of Hitler, Frick, and Reich Minister of Justice Franz Gürtner (the latter had served for many years as Bavarian Minister of Justice prior to Hitler taking power).

The law bluntly proclaims, “the National Socialist German Work­ers Party is the only political party in Germany.” Thence forward, efforts to preserve “the organizational cohesion of another political party” or to attempt “the founding of a new political party” are illegal and can be punished with up to three years in prison.

The date of July 14 for promulgation of these dreadful pieces of legislation is highly symbolic: the day in 1789 when radicalized crowds stormed the Bastille in Paris, a central moment in the French Revolution. Hitler, Goebbels and the Nazis’ hatred for the French Revolution and its slogan of “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” is evident.

Notes

1. Leon Trotsky, “Germany, the Key to the International Situation,” in Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, trans. Morris Lewitt (New York: Pathfinder Press, 2001 [1971]), 144.
   back to text
2. For this timeline, I have turned to a series of works that were formative for my own understanding of Nazism. See Henry Friedlander, The Origin of Nazi Genocide: From “Euthanasia” to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Atina Grossmann, Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1923-1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Hans Mommsen, The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy, trans. Elborg Forster and Larry Eugene Jones (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Vol 1: The Years of Persecution 1933-1939 (New York: HarperCollins, 1997); Eric Weitz, Creating German Communism, 1890-1990: From Popular Protests to Socialist State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris (New York: Norton, 1999); Harold Marcuse, Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933-2001 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). For other works, see Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (New York: Penguin Press, 2004); Peter Fritzsche, Hitler’s First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021); Jochen Hellbeck, World Enemy No. 1: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Fate of the Jews (New York: Penguin Press, 2025). The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Holocaust Encyclopedia has also been immensely helpful.
   back to text
3. Tim Kirk, The Longman Companion to Nazi Germany (London: Longman, 1995), 49-50, 117-118, 159; Robert Moeller, The Nazi State and German Society: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2010), 184-185.
   back to text
4. Social Democratic Delegate Otto Wels Speaks out against the “Enabling Act” (March 23, 1933), published in: German History in Documents and Images. Thomas Dunlap translated Wels’s speech.
   back to text

May-June 2026, ATC 242