The Coming of the Third Reich: How the Nazis Destroyed Democracy and Seized Power in Germany

by Richard J. Evans

Too few Germans subsequently remembered that it was Bismarck who was responsible for defining politics as ‘the art of the possible.’

Proportional representation did not, as some have claimed, encourage political anarchy and thereby facilitate the rise of the extreme right. An electoral system based on a first-past-the-post system, where the candidate who won the most votes in each constituency automatically won the seat, might well have given the Nazi Party even more seats than it eventually obtained in the last elections of the Weimar Republic, though since the parties’ electoral tactics would have been different under such a system, and its arguably beneficial effects in the earlier phases of the Republic’s existence might have reduced the overall Nazi vote later on, it is impossible to tell for sure.

The coming of the Third Reich essentially happened in two phases. The first ended with Hitler’s nomination as Reich Chancellor on 30 January 1933. This was no ‘seizure of power’. Indeed, the Nazis themselves did not use this term to describe the appointment, since it smacked of an illegal putsch. They were still careful at this stage to refer to an ‘assumption of power’ and to call the coalition a ‘government of national renewal’ or, more generally, a government of ‘national uprising’, depending on whether they wished to stress the legitimacy of the cabinet’s appointment by the President or the legitimacy of its supposed backing by the nation.118 The Nazis knew that Hitler’s appointment was the beginning of the process of conquering power, not the end. Nevertheless, had it not happened, the Nazi Party might well have continued to decline as the economy gradually recovered. Had Schleicher been less politically incompetent, he might have established a quasi-military regime, ruling through President Hindenburg’s power of decree and then, when Hindenburg, who was in his late eighties, eventually died, ruling in his own right, possibly with a revised constitution still giving a role of sorts to the Reichstag. By the second half of 1932, a military regime of some description was the only viable alternative to a Nazi dictatorship. The slide away from parliamentary democracy into an authoritarian state ruling without the full and equal participation of the parties or the legislatu...