Andrew KimmelVerified account

The courts could be ignored, not least because Hitler’s gov’t was able to govern by exec. order after the burning down of the Reichstag. A lone Dutch anarchist was found guilty of the fire, but the Nazis portrayed it as a terrorist act by Communists in a conspiracy to take power.

The Nazi seizure of power was carried out step-by-step through the first half of 1933, each step disguised as a seemingly legal act.

Hitler didn’t attain supreme power on a wave of popularity. On the contrary, in the last free elections of the Weimar Republic, the left-wing parties—the Communists and Social Democrats—won more votes and gained more seats in the national parliament than the Nazis did.

...they were fatally divided, spending as much time fighting each other as they did trying to stop Hitler from establishing a dictatorship. Their rhetoric was feeble in comparison, their supporters less fanatical, their electoral propaganda less powerful and less sophisticated.

The concentration of political and legislative power in the cabinet didn’t last long. Beneath the surface appearance of normality, the cabinet was being marginalized as Hitler appointed his own cronies & disciples to new positions or pushed out his conservative coalition partners

Hitler made sure that the armed forces were on his side by giving them massive increases in funding & a huge new armaments program...His program for making Germany great again included a new aggressive attitude in international affairs.

Hitler’s seizure and remaking of the state was buttressed by a wholesale reorganization of the education system and an effort to redefine German culture. The intellectual quality of German universities, which had led the world in research before 1933, plummeted.

Before Hitler took over, 1/5 of all university students were enrolled in the humanities; by the eve of the war, that portion had been cut in half, in a student body that was itself shrinking rapidly, from a total of 104,000 in all universities in 1931 to just under 41,000 in 1939

The regime’s assault on culture ex­tended to its policy toward the arts, which were “coordinated” by Goebbels in a Reich Chamber of Culture that ended funding for modern painting, sculpture, and music, and banned allegedly subversive artists from working.

The main objective of Nazi education and culture was not to distract people from issues of political importance; it was to instill a new sense of patriotism. Pupils were made to salute the flag before school every morning...

History lessons were turned into a celebration of German heroes from the past. Geography was Nazified in order to justify German claims on other parts of Europe...Such exercises pointed to the fact that the regime constantly targeted minorities to mobilize approval and support.

Elections & referendums were put to the voters, & they routinely delivered majorities in favor of whatever the gov’t proposed - results achieved by depriving opponents of the vote, by manipulating the electoral process, & by intimidating the great mass of people.

Hitler was a conspiracy theorist without equal: Influenced by a bizarre forgery known as the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, he believed, perhaps as early as 1919, when he used these views into his first-ever recorded speech—that there was a worldwide conspiracy of Jews...

...that Jews, directed by a secret cabal probably located somewhere in Paris, to overthrow the German race, annihilate its culture, and render it impotent before its enemies. All Jews everywhere, no matter their political views, were part of this vast plot.

Hitler deprived Jews of German citizenship, robbed them of their livelihoods, stripped them of their possessions, forced as many of them as he could to emigrate by making their existence in Germany a living hell...