Chapter 5: 1933 — The Nazi Party Extinguishes the Democratic Weimar Republic

“Hindenburg was working the Big Room and  I… why I was playing the lounge. And then I got my big break. Somebody burned down the Reichstag! And, would you believe it? They made me Chancellor. Chancellor!”

The above words are spoken dialogue during the Broadway version of the song “Springtime for Hitler” from Mel Brooks’ musical “The Producers.” These words may seem humorous here – the reality certainly wasn’t for six million murdered Jewish men, women and children and millions of other innocent victims.

How to explain the early 1930s political situation in the Weimar Republic (Germany)?

Yes, there are tons and tons of books and even more Ph.D. theses and media coverage about this. For the purpose of this book, I will be sharing the high points in order to move us along the historical continuum leading to WWII and the Holocaust.

It is important to understand that the president of the Weimar Republic was voted into office directly by the electorate. The president then chose the chancellor.

Here’s an explanation about Germany from the Holocaust Encyclopedia:

“By the 1930s, the Weimar government was increasingly challenged from forces on the Right. [President Paul von] Hindenburg abandoned some of his more moderate positions in order to appease right-wing critics. In the 1932 Reichstag [German parliament] election, Hitler’s Nazi Party received 37.4% of the vote, the most obtained by any single party. Hitler demanded the Chancellorship as a result. Hindenburg refused. […] Hitler withdrew his party’s support, forcing yet another round of elections.

“The new chancellor, Kurt von Schleicher, could not create a coalition or a successful government. Hindenburg’s advisors convinced him that Hitler must be given the chancellorship to ensure the support of the Nazi Party and a functional government.”

Timothy W. Ryback, author of the 2024 book Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power, explains what happened in his The Atlantic article of January 8, 2025, titled “How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy in 53 Days: He used the constitution to shatter the constitution”:

“[Hitler] had been co-opting or crushing right-wing competitors and paralyzing legislative processes for years, and for the previous eight months [before January 1933], he had played obstructionist politics, helping to bring down three chancellors and twice forcing the president [Paul von Hindenburg] to dissolve the Reichstag [German parliament] and call for new elections.” 

Now at the end of January 1933, Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher was out, and Hindenburg had to appoint a new chancellor. German citizens awaited word of who this would be.

The 2018 feature film by the non-Jewish German director Florian Frerichs titled “The Last Supper” in English (“Das Letzte Mahl” in German) compelling portrays this uncertainty. The fictional film takes place around the dinner table of an assimilated Berlin Jewish family awaiting Hindenburg’s announcement. One younger member of the family already plans to leave for the Land of Israel while other family members – many who don’t believe Hitler will be chosen chancellor – are not afraid of what he might do to Germany’s Jews (many of whom fought and died for Germany in WWI).

And then Hindenburg does appoint Hitler as chancellor on January 30, 1933.

Of course the political takeover account doesn’t end there. Let’s see if we can summarize it briefly.

On February 27, 1933, the Reichstag itself burned down. Ryback says in his Atlantic article: “The image of the seat of German parliamentary democracy going up in flames sent a collective shock across the country. The Communists blamed the National Socialists [Hitler’s Nazi Party]. The National Socialists blamed the Communists. […] Berlin fire chief, Walter Gempp, who supervised the firefighting operation, saw evidence of potential Nazi involvement.”

And now Hitler, “working the Big Room,” proceeded to do what he said he would do as Ryback again explains:

“Following [Hitler’s] failed Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923, Hitler had renounced trying to overthrow the Weimar Republic by violent means but not his commitment to destroying the country’s democratic system.[…] [I]n September 1930 […] Hitler informed the court [Constitutional Court] that once he had achieved power through legal means, he intended to mold the government as he saw fit.”

For the purposes of this book we can skip over the March 5, 1933, Reichstag elections that Hitler had called when he became chancellor. (Note that the day before – March 4, 1933 – Franklin Delano Roosevelt began serving his first of four elections to the office of the President of the United States.)

The important date for us in March 1933 is when the Enabling Act was passed. As the Holocaust Encyclopedia explains:

“The Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Reich is also known as the Enabling Act. Passed on March 23, 1933, and proclaimed the next day, it became the cornerstone of Adolf Hitler’s dictatorship. The act allowed him to enact laws, including ones that violated the Weimar Constitution, without approval of either parliament or Reich President von Hindenburg.” (boldface mine)

Something else sinister happened the day before – March 22, 1933 – when the first prisoner transports arrived at the newly established Dachau concentration camp.  (It was located on the grounds of an abandoned munitions factory in Dachau, about 10 miles northwest of Munich.)

The Holocaust Encyclopedia says:

“The Dachau concentration camp was established in March 1933. It was the first regular concentration camp established by the National Socialist (Nazi) government. Heinrich Himmler, as police president of Munich, officially described the camp as ‘the first concentration camp for political prisoners.’”

And now that Hitler and his Nazi Party have extinguished democracy in Germany and outlawed opposition — everything that will come later truly BEGINS.

April 1, 1933, one-day boycott of Jewish businesses:

As the Holocaust Encyclopedia explains:

“The April 1, 1933, boycott aimed to intimidate Germany’s Jews and discourage the German public from shopping at Jewish businesses. It marked the beginning of Nazi efforts to drive Jews from the German economy. The Nazis claimed that the boycott was a justifiable response to ‘international Jewry’s’ criticism of Germany. Newspapers in the United States widely covered the boycott, which generated international criticism of Nazi Germany.”

Then on April 7, 1933: “The German government issued the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which excluded Jews and political opponents from all civil service positions,” as the Holocaust Encyclopedia notes. This also meant university instructors as the civil service included universities.

And then books were burned. The PBS article “Book Burnings in Germany, 1933” begins:

“On May 10, 1933, university students in 34 university towns across Germany burned over 25,000 books. The works of Jewish authors like Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud went up in flames alongside blacklisted [non-Jewish] American authors such as Ernest Hemingway and Helen Keller, while students gave the Nazi salute.” (boldface mine)

“In Berlin 40,000 people gathered to hear German Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels give a speech in Berlin’s Opera Square. He declared ‘the era of extreme Jewish intellectualism is now at an end. […] The future German man will not just be a man of books, but a man of character. It is to this end that we want to educate you. […] And thus you do well in this midnight hour to commit to the flames the evil spirit of the past.’

“Radio stations broadcast the Berlin speeches, songs, and ceremonial incantations to countless German listeners. Widespread newspaper coverage called the ‘Action against the Un-German Spirit’ a success. The Nazi war on ‘un-German’ individual expression had begun.”

(If you are visiting Berlin, I highly recommend viewing the book-burning memorial in Bebelplatz, which consists of a glass plate set in the paving stones. If you peer through the glass, you will see an underground room with empty white bookshelves. Designed by Israeli artist Micha Ullman, it was unveiled on March 20, 1995. In addition to the plaque describing what happened here on May 10, 1933, a second plaque states: “That was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people as well.” Heinrich Heine 1820)

In the January 16, 2025, zoom podcast interview I did with Thomas Doherty, author of the book Hollywood and Hitler 1933-1939, he said that Goebbels expressly wanted news film footage of the Jewish business boycott of April 1, 1933, and the book burning of May 10, 1933, to be shown globally. The newly established Nazi German government was announcing its intentions to the world.

While we are on the subject of books, I want to recommend a novel by the German-Jewish writer Lion Feuchtwanger – “The Oppermanns.” The novel was first published in Amsterdam in 1934 and describes the fall of democratic Weimar Germany through the eyes of one fictional bourgeois Berlin Jewish family. What I found especially frightening – and telling – in the book is how quickly the textbooks in schools were changed to reflect the Nazi ideology. There’s also a description of the plunder of the Oppermann family’s library, a fictional account of the illegal search of Feuchtwanger’s own house in Berlin after Hitler’s takeover.

(Feuchtwanger himself was lucky to be out of Germany at the time, although his books were burned in the May 1933 bonfires. He moved to the south of France, where he was detained in the Les Milles internment camp after the Germans invaded France in May 1940. He was then helped to escape to the U.S.)

In Yehuda Bauer’s 1994 book Jews for Sale? Nazi-Jewish Negotiations, 1933-1945, he says:

“Nazi policies toward the Jews were ill defined: the original Nazi Party platform of 1920 promised to deny Jews citizens’ rights and expel all Jewish immigrants who had entered Germany after 1914. By implication, large Jewish retail stores were threatened, and all Jews engaged in journalism, including owners of newspapers, would be removed from their positions; generally, the ‘Jewish materialistic’ spirit was decried. As the new administration [Hitler] took hold, a centrally important addition emerged: to get rid of as many Jews as quickly as possible through emigration.

“By September 1933, Jews had been removed from all government or government-controlled positions, with a few exceptions for war veterans. An economic boycott took effect for one day, on April 1 [1933]. Many Jews were arrested and tortured in makeshift interrogation centers established mostly by the Nazis storm troopers (Sturmabteilung, or SA); in most case they were not arrested as Jews but as opponents of the regime, although they were generally treated more harshly than non-Jews.

“Support for the former democratic parties disintegrated; the churches were silent, and the Nazis made an attempt to capture the majority Protestants by establishing a German Christian church (Deutsche Christen). The opposition within German Protestantism slowly reorganized and established the Confessing Church, the vast majority of whose clergy disagreed with the regime on purely theological grounds, thus tacitly accepting the antisemitic Nazi program.

“Most Germans entered the Nazi orbit and, it is generally assumed, agreed with what in retrospect would be regarded as the more ‘moderate’ elements of Nazi antisemitism: deprivation of citizenship; removal from the economic, social and cultural life of German society; confiscation of property; and forced emigration.”

(Boldface in the quoted material from Yehuda Bauer’s book is mine.)

Now, indeed, Hitler was working the “Big Room” …