The Nazi State

Chapter 8 ended with the Reichstag legally handing its own legislative power to Hitler's cabinet. This chapter covers the roughly eighteen months that followed — the real, systematic process Germans of the time called Gleichschaltung, "coordination": a term borrowed from electrical engineering, describing every switch on a circuit forced onto the same setting at once. Every institution this course has traced since Chapter 1 — the elected chamber, the federal states, organized labor, the military's own relationship to political power — was either abolished or absorbed.

Every Other Party, Gone Within Five Months

The Reichstag Fire Decree had already effectively outlawed the KPD in February; the party was formally, completely banned on 6 March 1933. The SPD — the same party whose Otto Wels had cast the only votes against the Enabling Act — was banned outright on 22 June 1933, its assets seized and every one of its electoral mandates cancelled.

The End of Federalism

Chapter 1 established Imperial Germany as a genuine federation of 25 states, with Prussia's own real Bundesrat votes powerful enough to block constitutional change outright. The Second Law on the Coordination of the States with the Reich, passed 7 April 1933, ended that federal structure completely: a single Reichsstatthalter (Reich Governor) was installed over each state, holding real power to dissolve state parliaments, appoint officials, and issue laws directly. The states this course opened with had become administrative subdivisions of a single centralized government.

2 May 1933: Organized Labor, Destroyed in a Day

The day after the Nazi regime's own staged May Day celebrations, SA and SS stormtroopers launched coordinated raids on trade union offices across Germany — occupying buildings, shuttering union newspapers, seizing funds, and arresting leaders. The General German Trade Union Federation (ADGB), the most powerful labor organization in Europe at the time, collapsed without organized resistance.

30 June – 2 July 1934: The Night of the Long Knives

By mid-1934, Hitler's own real remaining rival for power sat inside his own movement: Ernst Röhm's SA, a paramilitary force with millions of members, whom the army's own leadership feared as a genuine rival power center — Röhm himself wanted to merge the SA and the regular army under his own command. Hitler resolved the standoff with a real, violent purge across 30 June to 2 July 1934: the SA's own senior leadership was arrested and executed, alongside a wider purge of other real or perceived political enemies. The official death toll was 85; real historical estimates run as high as 700 to 1,000.

2 August 1934: The Office Chapter 4 Called a Genuine Democratic Leap, Absorbed

President Paul von Hindenburg died on 2 August 1934. The legal groundwork had already been laid the day before: on 1 August, Hitler's own cabinet enacted the Law Concerning the Head of State of the German Reich, merging the presidency into the chancellorship the moment Hindenburg died. Hitler assumed the title Führer und Reichskanzler — taking on the President's own real powers without formally holding the office itself.

The same day, the German armed forces swore a real, personal oath of loyalty — not to the Constitution, not to the office of head of state, but to Hitler as an individual: "Ich schwöre bei Gott diesen heiligen Eid, daß ich dem Führer des Deutschen Reiches und Volkes Adolf Hitler... unbedingten Gehorsam leisten..." — "I swear by God this holy oath that I shall render unconditional obedience to the Führer of the German Reich and people, Adolf Hitler..."

Hands-On Exercises