Word: hitlers
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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...
Throughout these first years of the Third Reich, Hitler imposed a process that the Nazis called Gleichschaltung, which means standardization or making things the same. All political parties except the Nazis were banned as divisive. Leftist union leaders were arrested and replaced by Nazis preaching the harmonious unity of the working classes (strikes were banned). Joseph Goebbels, the Propaganda Minister, rallied students to a vast bonfire outside the University of Berlin, where the works of illustrious liberals (Emile Zola) and Jews (Heinrich Heine) were consigned to the flames. Jews were barred from public office, the civil service and professions like...
They had some very practical reasons. Hitler had substantially revived the economy. Unemployment, so pivotal in bringing him to power, had dropped from 6 million to less than 1 million between 1933 and 1937, this at a time when the U.S. was still wallowing in the Depression. National production and income doubled during the same period. This was partly owing to Hitler's rearmament policy, but also to more benign forms of public spending. The world's first major highway system, the autobahns, began snaking across the country, and there was talk of providing every citizen with a cheap, standardized...
...most impressive of the new public buildings was the Olympic stadium in Berlin, and there Hitler welcomed the powerful and famous of other lands -- for example, the celebrated American aviator Charles Lindbergh -- to his refurbished capital. And despite the fuss over a black American, Jesse Owens, winning four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the team that scored the most points overall was Nazi Germany...