The Abuse Of Article 48 In The Weimar Constitution

Adolf Hitler used the power as Hindenburg's chancellor to help him rise to power .Before Hindenburg’s death they made a law saying the office of president will share his power with people in the chancellor. “Hitler became head of state as well as head of government and was formally named leader and chancellor”.This was because the president would need

Hitler’s assumption of power on the 30th of January 1933 was seemingly due to the mass popularity of the Nazi party. However it was far off achieving the 50% majority it needed to put Hitler automatically in power. As well as popularity, backstairs intrigue and the short-sightedness of those in power enabled Hitler to become Chancellor. The weaknesses of Germany’s political leadership were fundamental to Hitler’s success. In some senses the popularity of the party only provided an opening, available for exploitation.

After Germany’s humiliating defeat in World War I, Germans had little faith in their government, and in the early 1930s following the stock market crash in New York, Germany was economically struggling . Millions of people were out of work due to the world wide catastrophe making it an opportune time for Hitler and the Nazis to rise into power. Hitler, who was a powerful and spellbinding speaker, attracted Germans desperate for change. He promised to make Germany a better country and promised the disenchanted, a better life. Nazis appealed especially to the youth, unemployed, and members of the lower to middle class. Hitler’s rise to power seemed instantaneous. Before the economic depression, Nazis were virtually unknown, winning less than 3 percent of the vote to the Reichstag, which was the German Parliament. However, in the 1924 elections, the Nazis won a whopping 33 percent of the votes which was more than any other party. In January of 1933, Hitler was appointed Chancellor, the head of German Government . The Germans were convinced that they had found a savior for the Nation. The timing of his rise made it very easy for Hitler to gain power in a democratic government because people were hopeless and wanted a fast solution to the deficit. He promised things like a stronger economy, prosperity, and anything that they desired . He focused on first getting noticed and then grew from there. He didn’t say anything but what the people wanted to hear. Getting the people of Germany to trust him was how he started to gain so much control. Unfortunately, Hitler’s charm and persuasion was not the sole reason why Hitler gained so much power in a democratic

The Weimar Republic would have continued to be a functional government far longer than achieved if not for the defeat of WWI, the economic burdens imposed by the Versailles Treaty, and the flawed Article 48 which all contributed to the down fall of Germany’s first attempt at a legitimate Democracy. This paper will argue that the societal, economical, and constitutional aspects all played a role in the hopeless Democracy Germany attempted which ultimately lead Germany into a totalitarian state that would further shake the world with the rise of the NSDAP and Adolf Hitler.

On The 30th of January 1933, President Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Chancellor. In the 18 months succeeding this, Hitler became, essentially, a dictator. This essay will look at what a dictatorship is and how it operates, how the population is brought to a point where they accept a dictatorship, and examine and analyze the vital events that took place in Germany which lead to Hitler assuming dictatorial power: the Reichstag fire, the Emergency Decree, the Enabling Act, the banning of trade unions and other political parties, the Night Of The Long Knives, the death of President Hindenburg, and the German army’s oath of loyalty to Hitler. It will

Hitler was able to slowly gain more and more power until he eventually was appointed Chancellor of Germany. The beginning of Hitler’s rise to power started when he joined the “Deutsche Arbeiterpartei,” or the German Worker’s Party, in 1919 when he was just twenty years of age. In the year of 1922 to gain more power Hitler attempted to overthrow the Bavarian government. In Hitler’s viewpoint there were three great benefits of attempting this. The first benefit is that the attempt

With incompetent leadership and an unhappy nation, the German people began to realize that their country was in a vulnerable situation and began to look for stable alternatives to democracy. Hitler’s

After WWI, Germany fell into poverty. Everyday, lines of people were seen in the streets waiting to purchase bread. People were poor and desperate. Hitler saw this and used it. He gave people hope and the economy improved and he was announced chancellor of Germany in 1933. Government suspected he was unstable, but were convinced they could control him if necessary. Hitler secretly made a new police called the Nazis who were Hitler’s supporters and enforced the law at Hitler’s command. Quickly and unknowingly, the government was no longer in control of Hitler. Hitler had full power of Germany.

Adolf Hitler was appointed German Chancellor on January 30, 1933. His regime brought citizens no guaranteed basic rights. In 1933, the first Nazi concentration camps were built. The initial camps imprisoned political opponents, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, gypsies, and others classified as dangerous. During Hitler’s first six years, German Jews had more than 400 decrees and regulations. The first major law against the Jews was, the “Law for Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” of April 7, 1933. That law made Jews and “politically unreliable” employees excluded from state service. The laws began to go further by, restricting the numbers of Jews in schools and colleges, and taking business away from Jewish doctors and

First, we must look at the Enabling Act, brought about by then German Chancellor Adolf Hitler during early 1933. The act came from an emergency decree, removing all power from the German Reichstag (parliament),

This gave the Cabinet a range of legislative and budgetary powers, enabling Hitler to suspend the constitution for a period of four years, with Hitler also given total power over this duration.

On the other hand, if this were to have existed in a dictatorship, one would merely get used to how something went because that was how life would be from now on if there was a dictator present. With all the mess and distress already present, the body of laws present in a democracy is much slower to be established, while it usually took much less time with a dictator. Rather than one person having to agree on a law or come up with one, a democracy requires the whole body instead to ratify or accept it. This is due to the fact that your own personal needs must be given up in a dictatorship, while they are respected and valued on the other hand in a democracy. Therefore, seeing from all these changes, the alteration in government that the German government faced must have produced overwhelming challenges for Germany as a whole. They must completely abandon the norm for them and accustom themselves once again to a new way of life. Not only will these bring upon conflicts within the human population, but in all aspects including political, social, and economic qualities. In specificity to all these problems, it was many problems that accumulated and grew through time that presented a chance for Hitler to rise to power. Adolf Hitler was not only a strong and powerful leader that could have rose to power completely on his own, yet many of the inhabitants in Germany was tired of everything and needed a changed

This allowed a single person, in this case Hitler, the chancellor, complete control over a country in crisis. These measures may seem quite harsh but the idea of the Enabling Act is quite a common one, having been used in Germany for five years and being used at the same time in the USA. The Enabling act allowed Hitler to pass laws without them having to go through parliament, thus decreasing the time taken to actually do something. One of the first things Hitler did was to ban all other political parties. This eliminated all political opposition and allowed him to have complete control by removing any objectors to the Nazi régime.

Members were taking the law into their own hands and this gave the impression of a revolution from below. The Enabling Law was the constitutional foundation stone of the Third Reich. In purely legal terms the Weimar Constitution was not dissolved in 1945, and the Enabling Law provided a legal basis for the dictatorship which evolved from 1933. Gleichschaltung could never allow the existence of other political parties. Nazism openly rejected democracy and any concessions to alternative opinions. Instead, it aspired to establish authoritarian rule within a one party state. The regions had a very strong tradition in Germany. This contradicted Nazi ideas to create a fully unified country. Nazi activists had already exploited the climate of February-March 1933 to intimidate opponents and to infiltrate federal governments. A law of March 1933 dissolved regional parliaments and reformed them with acceptable majorities, allowing the Nazis to dominate regional state governments. In January 1934, regional parliaments were abolished. The governments of all the states were subordinated.

Hitler gained even more power when he was named chancellor by President Paul von Hindenburg. Hitler used propaganda as a strong tool, and right at the center of his campaigning were anti-Semitic messages and a hatred for communism. In 1933, there was a mysterious fire at the Reichstag building, which allowed Hitler to instate the Enabling Act. This act allowed him to create laws without the