On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of a German government in which Nazis held only a couple of cabinet posts. But Hitler had demanded yet another Reichstag election (Germany’s third in less than a year), and the Nazis set out to create a crisis out of a supposed impending Communist revolution.
When a fire was set in the Reichstag just days before the election, Hitler and the Nazis got everything they needed to declare an emergency, crack down on the left, and persuade the Reichstag to grant them sweeping “emergency” powers that they would retain until 1945.
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Playlist:
Fanfare
Opening Theme
Sonata for Clarinet and Piano, Opus 167
Composed in 1921 by Camille Saint-Saëns. Public domain.
Performed by Jordi Rumbau. Recording used pursuant to a Creative Commons CC BY-NC 3.0 license. Source.
Closing Theme
Except when otherwise indicated, the contents of this podcast are © and ℗ 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 by Mark Painter, all rights reserved. Some music and sound effects used by arrangement with Pond 5.
Another great episode Mark! I have binged all the way from your first podcast and have enjoyed all of them. Thank you for the amazing amount of work you have put into this making it a truly monumental historical record!
By the way, there was a jocular term for those who joined the Nazi Party after the election. It was “Märzgefallene“ literally “the Fallen of March” a term that had been used for the dead of the 1848 revolution (wich happened in March) which has a similar double meaning in German as in English – both “the Fallen” as in “dead” and “the Fallen” as in “morally bankrupt”…