Editing Weimar Republic (section)

====Hitler's chancellorship (1933)====
{{See also|Hitler cabinet}}
Hitler was sworn in as chancellor on the morning of 30 January 1933. By early February, the government had begun to clamp down on the opposition. Meetings of the left-wing parties were banned and even some of the moderate parties found their members threatened and assaulted. Measures with an appearance of legality suppressed the Communist Party in mid-February<ref>{{Cite web |last=Scriba |first=Arnulf |date=8 September 2014 |title=Die Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KPD) |trans-title=The Communist Party of Germany |url=https://www.dhm.de/lemo/kapitel/weimarer-republik/innenpolitik/kpd |access-date=12 July 2024 |website=Deutsches Historisches Museum |language=de}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |last=Mommsen |first=Hans |title=The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy |publisher=University of North Carolina Press |year=1996 |isbn=978-0-807-82249-4 |location=Chapel Hill |page=542 |translator-last=Forster |translator-first=Elborg |translator-last2=Jones |translator-first2=Larry Eugene}}</ref> and included the plainly illegal arrests of Reichstag deputies.

On 27 February 1933 the [[Reichstag fire|Reichstag was gutted by a fire]] which was blamed on an act of arson by [[Marinus van der Lubbe]], a Dutch [[Council communism|council communist]]. Hitler blamed the fire on the KPD (although Van der Lubbe was not a member of the party) and convinced Hindenburg to issue the [[Reichstag Fire Decree]] the following day. The decree invoked [[Article 48 (Weimar Constitution)|Article 48]] of the [[Weimar Constitution]] and "suspended until further notice" a number of constitutional protections of civil liberties, allowing the Nazi government to take swift action against political meetings and to arrest both socialists and communists.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of the People and State ("Reichstag Fire Decree") (February 28, 1933) |url=https://ghdi.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=2325 |access-date=12 July 2024 |website=German History in Documents and Images (GHDI)}}</ref>

In the [[German federal election, March 1933|Reichstag election]] which took place on 5 March 1933, the NSDAP obtained 17&nbsp;million votes and a scant majority of 16 seats for the NSDAP-DNVP coalition. The Communist, Social Democrat and Catholic Centre votes changed little.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Das Deutsche Reich. Reichstagswahl 1933 |trans-title=The German Reich. Election Results 1933 |url=https://gonschior.de/weimar/Deutschland/RT8.html |access-date=14 July 2024 |website=gonschior.de |language=de}}</ref> It was the last multi-party election of the Weimar Republic and the last in a united Germany for 57 years.