Berlin, Germany • September 14, 1930 On this date in 1930 German voters went to the polls to elect a new Reichstag, and the results were shocking. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or NSDAP) was the ninth and smallest of Germany’s political parties, with but 12 members in the national parliament. In…
Berlin, Germany • February 28, 1933 On this date in 1933, with the Reichstag (German parliament building) still smoldering following the fire allegedly set by 24‑year-old Dutch Communist Marinus van der Lubbe the day before, German Chancellor Adolf Hitler persuaded 87‑year-old President Paul von Hindenburg to sign the Reichstag Fire Edict. The emergency decree suspended…
Berlin, Germany • January 30, 1933 At noon on this date in 1933 in Berlin, German president and World War I hero Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler, an Austrian now with German citizenship, Reichskanzler of the postwar Weimar Republic, a parliamentary representative democracy of 65 million people that had replaced the imperial form of government in 1919…
Munich, Germany · February 26, 1932 On this date in 1932 in Germany, Austrian-born Adolf Hitler was granted German citizenship. A decade earlier the stateless Austrian (Hitler had formally renounced his Austrian citizenship in April 1925) was the unlikely leader of a fringe Populist-nationalist movement, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. In November 1923 he…
Munich, Germany · February 26, 1932 On this date in 1932 in Germany, Austrian-born Adolf Hitler was granted German citizenship. A decade earlier the Austrian was the unlikely leader of a fringe Populist-nationalist movement, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. In November 1923 he led a “beer-hall putsch” in the Bavarian capital, Munich, hoping to…