I was always taught that Hitler rose to power in Germany through legal means and took over the country. Obviously you see a lot of conspiracy theories on the Internet and they always say that, “The same could happen here in the US remember Hitler took over in Germany legally.”
My question did he REALLY do that. What I am getting at is this; say I run for office, and say I hire a bunch of thugs to go out and hold a gun to people’s heads and threaten to blow their heads off it they don’t vote for me. Of course they do and I am elected. Now I “technically” won legally but in reality it wasn’t “legal.”
So what’s the real straight dope on Hitler’s rise to power, was it legal or shady or is the whole thing a myth?
The National Socialist Party (NAZI’s) won a working majority in the legislature and the President, von Hindenberg, asked Hitler to be Chancellor. It was all perfectly legal.
Hitler then used the burning of the Reichstag as an excuse to magnify executive power by getting the Reichstag to grant him temporary emergency powers to fend off a presumed communist revolution.
That’s greatly simplified but it’s pretty much what happened.
The answer is “yes” to the OP title question and “no” to this assertion. Yes, he rose to power legally, but did not have a majority of seats: he was the leader of the party that formed the coalition. In order to this to happen in America you’d have to have third and fourth parties come to a compromise with a popular extremist leader if they win critical electoral votes, which almost certainly will never happen.
Hitler rose to power legally. A similar situation couldn’t happen in the United States because the American constitution doesn’t have provisions for granting emergency powers like the German constitution had in the 1930s.
But Germany and US have different legal systems, so you can’t really compare on that basis. Under their system of government, Hitler did become Chancellor legally.
Not to mention that we don’t have a parliamentary system to begin with. Our heads of state are elected by the people (thru the EC, of course) and not by the Congress. If no one gets an absolute majority of electoral votes (as happened once before), then the president is elected by the House, and perhaps that’s a more analogous scenario. But even then, the House votes as blocks of states (one vote per state), so it wouldn’t necessarily be easy for a majority party to just put their guy in power.
If you ask whether Hitler became Chancellor legally then the answer is:
Yes, President Hindenburg appointed him. End of story. Although it wasn’t a requirement the fact that he controlled a plurality in parliament made him a natural candidate.
If you look at the most important steps in the development of his absolute dictatorship then the question becomes a bit more complicated. Especially the Reichstag Fire Decree was at least constitutionally questionable. Then this decree was used in the persecution of political opponents and helped passing the Enabling Act.
However there were no effective measures to enforce constitutionality. The legal positivism and understanding of democracy at the time put less emphasis on protecting the constitution or any other “higher” values. In part because of this Hitler got away with many things that might not violate the letter of the law but the spirit of the constitution: Purely partisan use of the powers under the Reichstag Fire Decree, lowering the constitutional requirements for passing the Enabling Act via rules of procedure, open intimidation of political rivals etc.
That would not be an accurate characterization of Nazi methods before Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933. It’s true that the party was never above beating up its opponents (especially Communists), and it’s also true that violence got worse during the last round of “free” elections after Papen legalized the SA in summer 1932.
But there was only so much the Nazis could do before they controlled the police and courts. Germany had more than 20 million voters in the 1930’s, and it wasn’t possible for an out-of-power political party backed by the odd street gang to terrorize all of them. The overwhelming majority of people who voted for the Nazis before 1933 did so of their own free will.
The moment Hitler was appointed Chancellor, however, all restraints fell away. The Nazis took control of the police, beat up and arrested opposition politicians, forbade opposition parties from campaigning, arbitrarily sent the upper house of Parliament (the Reichsrat) packing, and by threats of further violence secured a two-thirds majority for the “Enabling Act” which conferred dictatorial power upon Hitler. The bare legal forms were followed, but other than that, there was nothing “legal” about it.