![]() Political prisoners were subject to what Fritzsche succinctly calls a “licensed sadism.”įrom below, the Nazis courted support by cultivating the electorate’s paranoia and gullibility - two traits that are more compatible than they sound. Violence was key, though it was presented as a defensive reaction to “intellectual instigators” and dangerous provocateurs, which allowed the Nazis to paint themselves not as cruel thugs but as servants of “justice.” There was a national debate over whether those charged with capital crimes should be executed with the hand axe or the guillotine the guillotine was derided as “soulless, impersonal” and indicative of a lamentable “humanitarianism.” The Dachau concentration camp was opened in March. From above, the Nazis deployed coercion, terrorizing their opponents and eliminating dissent. Transformation came from both directions. Peter Fritzsche, whose new book is “Hitler’s First Hundred Days.” Credit. “A quarter past 11 led, in only 100 days, to the Thousand Year Reich,” Fritzsche writes, referring to the hour before midnight when Hitler and the conservative elites made their back-room deal to appoint him chancellor. ![]() On Day 61, the Nazis organized a nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses, and six days later purged the civil service of Jews. The Reichstag fire on Day 29 gave Hitler the pretext he needed to get President Paul von Hindenburg to sign an emergency decree suspending civil liberties, and the Reichstag elections a week later consolidated the Nazis’ grip on power. On Day 7, he established links between his brownshirt paramilitaries and the official law-and-order apparatus of the state. ![]() On Day 4, Hitler and his conservative allies censored any press that showed “contempt” for government. The changes were audacious, and they were swift. 30, 1933, in crushing what remained of the Weimar Republic and installing “the 20th century’s most popular dictatorship.” In “Hitler’s First Hundred Days,” the historian Peter Fritzsche shows how Hitler and the National Socialists wasted little time after he was appointed chancellor on Jan. Needless to say, the adults in the room overestimated their own powers of containment. As one of them put it, “In two months, we’ll have pushed Hitler so far into a corner that he’ll squeal.” Germany’s conservative politicians assured one another that they would still be the ones to pull the puppet strings. Yes, Adolf Hitler was ridiculous and vulgar, a tin-pot demagogue instead of a smooth politician, but he knew how to excite the nationalist base and deliver a whopper of a speech. ![]() The right-wing elites were confident they could use him to their advantage. ![]()
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