On the road to dictatorship

The Presidential Decree for the Protection of the People and the State

Four days after his appointment as Reich Chancellor on 30 January 1933, Adolf Hitler persuaded the 84-year-old Reich President von Hindenburg to issue an emergency decree restricting freedom of assembly and freedom of the press. Although the Dutch Communist Marinus van der Lubbe had confessed to acting alone in setting fire to the Reichstag on the night of 27 February, Hitler immediately told the world that it was the start of an attempted Communist coup.

Acting on this justification, the government presented the Reichstag Fire Decree to President Hindenburg, who signed it on the same day. The decree suspended the basic rights and liberties guaranteed by the Weimar constitution, meaning that the police were now able to take suspects into “protective custody” without any evidence. Newspapers critical of the government could also be banned. Thousands of Communists and other opponents of the Third Reich were arrested and sent to a range of makeshift concentration camps that were built to ease prison overcrowding. Hitler was within touching distance of establishing a dictatorship.