Historian Reveals How Hitler 'Dismantled' Democracy in Less Than Two Months

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Historian reveals how Hitler 'dismantled' democracy in less than two months - Alternet

After Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor in 1933, he promptly packed the government full of loyalists and used Weimar Germany's constitution to turn himself into an absolute dictator.

In a Wednesday essay for the Atlantic, historian Timothy W. Ryback, who is the director of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation in The Hague, described the process in which Hitler rapidly disintegrated Germany's constitutional republic in just 53 days. Ryback noted that after the failed Beer Hall Putsch — in which the Nazi leader attempted to violently overthrow the government — Hitler abandoned his goal of violent revolution in favor of "destroying the country's democratic system" through legal means.

After his election in 1933, Hitler bragged that the German electorate welcomed him with "jubilation," and rolled out a plan to force out longtime career civil servants with political stooges committed to his vision. He then executed a plan to get two-thirds of the Reichstag (the German parliamentary body) to pass an "empowering law" that would allow him to centralize his authority and govern by decree.

Hitler was convinced that he needed the empowering law to follow through on his campaign promises, which, according to Ryback, included calls to "revive the economy, reduce unemployment, increase military spending, withdraw from international treaty obligations, purge the country of foreigners he claimed were “poisoning” the blood of the nation and exact revenge on political opponents." He also notably ran on draining den parlamentarischen Sumpf, or "the parliamentarian swamp," and his economic agenda including sweeping new tariffs on grain imports.

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