As with the Reichstag fire decree, a temporary piece of emergency legislation with some limited precedents in the Weimar period now became the legal, or pseudo-legal basis for the permanent removal of civil rights and democratic liberties. Renewed in 1937 and again in 1939, it was made permanent by decree in 1943. The brownshirt terror on the streets was already comprehensive enough to make it quite clear what was now about to happen. Wels was right to predict that Germany would soon become a one-party state.
