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.
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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.
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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...
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...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.
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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...
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Ordinary Germans were not won over by such acts of persecution and destruction; only a minority applauded them. But the great mass of Germans did nothing to stop any of this. Civil courage was in short supply in a country cowed into submission...
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