Europe in an Age of Dictatorship, 1919–39571especially against leftists. The growth in Nazi popular-
ity persuaded Hitler to run for the presidency of Ger-
many in 1932, but he was overwhelmingly beaten
(twenty million to thirteen million votes) by the
eighty-five-year-old incumbent Field Marshal von Hin-
denburg. In two separate Reichstag elections that year,
the Nazis polled 37 percent and 33 percent of the pop-
ular vote but became the largest party in a fragmented
Reichstag. Party membership stood at 849,000 in a
population of 66 million.
Hitler became chancellor of Germany by gaining
the support of Reichstag conservatives led by Franz von
Papen, a Catholic aristocrat and former General Staff
officer who had married into one of the wealthy indus-
trial families of the Saar. Von Papen had dedicated his
political career to preserving the leadership of the
Junker and industrial elites, and he believed that Hitler
would do this. When Hitler became chancellor in early
1933, his lieutenant, Hermann Göring (a World War I
fighter pilot and hero who had won the Iron Cross),
became minister of the interior with control of the po-
lice. Hitler immediately called Reichstag elections. The
Nazis increased their electoral violence, harassing op-
ponents, intimidating voters, and even burning the
Reichstag building. The Reichstag fire was blamed on
Communists and used to justify the suspension of civil
liberties, including both freedom of speech and the
press. Nazi violence achieved 44 percent of the votes
and a parliamentary majority through the alliance with
von Papen. This Reichstag voted Hitler dictatorial
powers for five years in the Enabling Act of March
1933, which allowed him to change the constitution
and to promulgate laws with the Reichstag’s approval.
(Similar Enabling Laws had been used to deal with the
economic crisis and Ruhr invasion of 1923.) Hitler used
these powers to begin a policy that he called Gleichschal-
tung(coordination); this simply meant the consolidation
of a lasting Nazi dictatorship. In the first few months of
the Gleichschaltung,the Nazis created a secret police
force (the Gestapo), a law permitting the arrest of dis-
senters, secret trials in People’s Courts, and the first
concentration camps (Dachau, near Munich, and
Buchenwald, near Weimar) for the detention of politi-
cal opponents. Elective local governments, labor
unions, other political parties, the upper house of Par-
liament, the presidency, and civil liberties were all abol-
ished. Nazi violence also increased. On “the Night of
the Long Knives” in June 1934, Himmler (a frail and
sickly man with an enormous drive for power) directed
the SS in the murder of approximately one thousand
people—opponents of the Nazis and unreliable party
members, including the leaders of the SA.
Nazi persecution of the Jews (approximately
1 percent of the German population) began almost im-
mediately. The purge of the bureaucracy ousted Jewish
civil servants, professors, and public school teachers.
A government-backed boycott closed many Jewish
businesses. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 (and 250
supplemental decrees) defined Jews as anyone having
one Jewish grandparent (increasing the number of Jews
to 2.5 million, or 4 percent of the population). These
decrees stripped Jews of their citizenship, forbade inter-
marriage, barred them from many occupations, and re-
stricted where they could live. Discrimination and
harassment turned to violence in the late 1930s, and
72 percent of German Jews fled the country before em-
igration became impossible. On the Kristallnacht(“night
of the broken glass,” named for thousands of broken
windows) in November 1938 (see illustration 28.4), the
SS launched a pogrom. Rioters killed approximately
one hundred Jews, trashed more than 7,000 businesses
(completely destroying 815 shops), and burned 191
synagogues. More than twenty thousand Jews were ar-
rested in the following weeks, and many of them were
sent to concentration camps such as Dachau.
Nazi persecution was not limited to the Jews. Polit-
ical opponents were the first to suffer under the new
police state. Communists were rounded up and interred
in March 1933 (barely one month after Hitler became
chancellor) and the arrest of leading socialists followed
in April 1933; high office was no protection, as the
prime minister of Oldenburg (arrested in early March)
discovered. Between July 1933 and April 1935, Nazi
campaigns were launched against homosexuals, gypsies,
the handicapped, and members of several religious
sects, especially the Jehovah’s Witnesses. A law of 1933,
for example, permitted the government to order the
sterilization of the handicapped (and several other
groups), starting a campaign that culminated in Opera-
tion T4, begun in 1939, to “grant mercy death” to the
handicapped. The Nazi attempt to exterminate mem-
bers of such groups, especially Jews, in the concentra-
tion camps (for which the word genocidewas coined) did
not begin until after World War II had started.
Nazi social policy also affected women and chil-
dren, schools and churches. Nazi policy toward
women, for example, sought their return to the sup-
posed traditional “women’s place”: Kinder, Kirche, Küche
(children, church, kitchen). This led to efforts to drive
women out of the workplace and higher education.
The first Nazi economic plan, for example, sought to
cut the employment of women by 200,000 per year,
while educational policy cut the enrollment of women
in German universities from 18,315 in 1932 to 5,447 in