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Hitler dismantled a democracy in 53 days through constitutional means

He used the constitution to shatter the constitution.

Following his failed Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923, Hitler had renounced trying to overthrow the Weimar Republic by violent means but not his commitment to destroying the country’s democratic system, a determination he reiterated in a Legalitätseid —“legality oath”—before the Constitutional Court in September 1930. That Forward article appeared on Saturday morning, February 25, under the headline “How Long?” Two days later, on Monday evening, shortly before 9 p.m., the Reichstag erupted in flames, sheafs of fire collapsing the glass dome of the plenary hall and illuminating the night sky over Berlin. Seven years earlier, in 1926, after being elected to the Reichstag as one the first 12 National Socialist delegates, Goebbels had been similarly struck: He was surprised to discover that he and these 11 other men (including Hermann Göring and Hans Frank), seated in a single row on the periphery of a plenary hall in their brown uniforms with swastika armbands, had—even as self-declared enemies of the Weimar Republic—been accorded free first-class train travel and subsidized meals, along with the capacity to disrupt, obstruct, and paralyze democratic structures and processes at will.

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