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The next morning, Hitler uses the fire as a pretext to declare a national emergency, pressuring President Hindenburg to sign a decree that suspends indefinitely all seven sections of the Weimar Constitution guaranteeing basic civil liberties to Germans.
The decree abolishes freedom of speech and freedom of the press. No longer can Germans attend rallies and march in demonstrations against the Nazi government, as the decree abolishes the right to assembly. Letters and telephone calls can now be monitored by the Nazi government, as the decree abolishes the right to privacy. Storm Troopers, the Gestapo, and anyone else with a badge can raid any home without a search warrant.
Six days ago, Hitler gutted the Weimar Constitution. He did it legally, right under everyone’s nose, without bullets or blood. Germans have lost nearly all their rights—all but one. They still have the right to vote.
The Reichstag members cast their votes: 441 in favor, 84 against. This gives the Nazis far more than a two-thirds majority. In a spectacle of cowardice and political opportunism, the politicians support Hitler and pass a new law. Hitler calls it the “Law to Remove the Distress of People and Reich.” It will come to be known as the “Enabling Act.” In five short paragraphs, it guts what remains of the Weimar Constitution and transforms Germany into a dictatorship.
Women during the Weimar era were granted too many rights, Goebbels tells the crowd. Women shouldn’t hold public office or compete with men in the workplace.
Across Germany, women lose their jobs. Over nineteen thousand women in leadership positions at the ministries and in regional and local government offices are immediately fired.
Young women are discouraged from going to college. A new quota restricts the number of women who can enroll in a German university to 10 percent.
Newspapers carry stories about German gynecologists facing criminal charges. Gynecologists may receive the death penalty if they are found guilty of terminating an unwanted pregnancy, but only if the woman is Aryan, “racially pure.”
Most enfeebling was the provision that required Germany to pay a colossal sum. (It took Germany more than ninety years—until October 2010—to pay off the debt.)
By the winter of 1923, forty-two billion marks was worth one American cent. The collapse was complete.
a heartfelt conviction that the rich in America were too rich, the poor too poor. “If capitalism keeps on the path it is going,” she wrote, “the coming years will bring the enormous wealth of a very few and the misery and want of the common people.”
