Word: gave
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Split between Nazis and Communists as well as several traditional parties, the Reichstag became ungovernable. That gave crucial political power to a man who was supposed to be a figurehead, President Paul von Hindenburg, commander of Germany's armies during the war. Hindenburg was 83, vain, righteous and inclined to long naps. Since the Reichstag could not agree on a policy, he appointed some of his favorites as Chancellors, letting them rule by presidential decree...
Independent experts assumed from the beginning that the Nazis had started the fire, but Hitler immediately made it his pretext for seizing power. He persuaded Hindenburg to sign a decree that gave the government broad powers to make arrests, search homes, confiscate property and impose "restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion." The Storm Troopers were in power now, and mass arrests began. "My mission is only to destroy and exterminate," said Goring...
...their last free (or semifree) elections, held March 5, 1933, the Germans gave their new dictator 44% of their votes. Hitler never won a majority in an election, but that 44% brought the Nazis, along with their right-wing allies of the Nationalist Party, their first majority in the Reichstag. So Hitler presented the Reichstag with an "enabling act" that would surrender most of its powers to what was now very much his Cabinet. Some Communists and socialists -- those not already in jail -- protested, but while the Nazi delegates cheered and shouted, the Reichstag docilely voted itself out of business...
...Austria, Hitler's war of nerves began with a wave of terrorist bombings and street riots. Berlin sponsored this violence with payments to Konrad Henlein, leader of Czechoslovakia's Sudeten German Party. It also gave him his instructions, which Henlein himself once summed up: "We must always demand so much from the Czechs that we can never be satisfied." When Czech President Eduard Bene first asked Henlein what he wanted, the list included political autonomy, payment of damages, separate citizenship for Sudeten Germans and freedom to practice "the ideology of Germans." Bene refused...
...That would mean the surrender of the entire Sudetenland, which represented not only one-fifth of Czechoslovakia's territory but also its industrial heartland and its defensible natural frontier. Bene at first refused, but when the British and French told him that he would have to fight alone, he gave...