(HOST) Exactly seventy-five years ago today, Vermont Humanities Council Executive Director and VPR Commentator Peter Gilbert says there were political developments in Germany that had catastrophic consequences on a global scale.
(GILBERT) Historic anniversaries of good events or bad – afford us natural, built-in opportunities to remember and understand the past. They bring to our attention issues and events that we otherwise might not have thought of or learned about.
Seventy-five years ago today, on January 30th, 1933, amidst great political instability, German President von Hindenburg appointed Adolph Hitler chancellor of Germany. From there, the road to dictatorship proved very short indeed. The very next day, Hitler withdrew his Nazi party from the coalition government and asked the President to dissolve the Reichstag, Germany’s parliament.
As William Shirer writes in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, "[T]he Nazi Party could now employ all the vast resources of the government to win votes." [Propaganda Minister Joseph] Goebbels was jubilant. "Now it will be easy," [Goebbels] wrote in his diary… "Radio and press are at our disposal. We shall stage a masterpiece of propaganda. And this time, naturally, there is no lack of money."
A general election was called for March 5th. In the weeks leading up to the election, the Nazis fomented street violence both to intimidate the opposition and to fuel the publics fear of general unrest and of Communism specifically. Then, on the night of February 27th, just six days before the election, the Reichstag burned to the ground. One can hardly imagine the political impact in this country if the U.S. Capital building were destroyed just a week before a national election. Claiming that the fire was evidence of a Communist conspiracy that threatened the nation, the Nazis suspended civil liberties and arrested the Communist deputies to the Reichstag. According to Shirer, "only Hitler understood the inexplicable weakness, that now bordered on paralysis, of [Germany’s] existing institutions the Army, the churches, the trade unions, the political parties or of the vast non-Nazi middle class and the highly organized proletariat all of which, . . . [gave] up without a fight."
In the general election Hitler won only a slim majority, not enough to wield the kind of unilateral power he wanted. And so he proposed the Law for Removing the Distress of People and Country,which gave his cabinet (in reality, him) essentially all legislative power. With Communist Party representatives and some Social Democrats arrested, the measure easily passed on March 23rd. Hitler had assumed dictatorial powers using the countrys democratic political system. As Shirer writes, except for the arrests of the Communists and some Social Democratic deputies, it was all done quite legally, though accompanied by terror.
The citizens of many nations lost their freedom to German invasion in World War II, but the Germans themselves lost their liberty because they voluntarily gave it away to a man who, in the twelve years that followed, led them goose-stepping down the garden path to their own destruction.