He was among the richest men in the world. He made his first fortune in heavy industry. He made his second as a media mogul. And in January 1933, in exchange for a political favor, Alfred Hugenberg provided the electoral capital that made possible Adolf Hitler’s appointment as chancellor. Before Hugenberg sealed his pact with Hitler, a close associate had warned Hugenberg that this was a deal he would come to regret: “One night you will find yourself running through the ministry gardens in your underwear trying to escape arrest.”

In my recent book, Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power, I chronicled the fraught relationship between the tyrant and the titan, but my story ended in January 1933, so I did not detail the subsequent impact on Hugenberg’s fortunes, let alone the catastrophic consequences that lay ahead for other corporate leaders, their companies, and their country.

In the ’20s and early ’30s, the Hitler “brand” was anathema to capitalists and corporate elites. His National Socialist German Worker’s Party was belligerently nationalistisch but also unapologetically sozialistisch—a true Arbeiter Partei, or “working man’s party.” Its 25-point political platform explicitly targeted bankers and financiers, calling for “breaking the bondage of interest,” as well as industrialists who profited from wartime production. Profits were to be confiscated by the state without compensation, and corporate executives charged with treason. Platform Point 13 was explicit: “We demand the nationalization of all existing corporate entities.”

Through the 1920s, businessmen preferred to place their political bets with conservative, centrist, business-friendly politicians, such as those in the Center Party or the Bavarian People’s Party or the right-wing but decidedly pro-business German Nationalists. Out of necessity, then, the National Socialists had to derive most of its financing via storm troopers standing on street corners begging for contributions and from admission fees to Hitler rallies. Among the exceptions to this were socialites—Viktoria von Dirksen, Helene Bechstein, Elsa Bruckmann—who were smitten with Hitler. But the most significant exception was Fritz Thyssen.

Thyssen, heir to one of Germany’s leading industrial fortunes, had been an early financier of the Nazi movement. He first met Hitler in the autumn of 1923 after attending a beer-hall rally. “It was then that I realised his oratorical gifts and his ability to lead the masses,” Thyssen recalled in his 1941 memoir, I Paid Hitler. “What impressed me most, however, was the order that reigned in his meetings, the almost military discipline of his followers.” Thyssen provided the party, by his own estimate, approximately 1 million reichsmarks—more than $5 million today—and also helped finance the acquisition and refurbishment of a Munich palace as the Nazi Party headquarters. Most important, Thyssen arranged for Hitler to speak to his fellow industrialists in Düsseldorf on January 27, 1932.

Hitler sits next to Hermann Göring at the Düsseldorf Industrieclub, while Fritz Thyssen, a wealthy industrialist who was one of Hitler’s early financial backers, speaks at the microphone, January 27, 1932. (Ullstein bild / Getty)

[Read: How Hitler dismantled a democracy in 53 days]

“The speech made a deep impression on the assembled industrialists,” Thyssen said, “and in consequence of this a number of large contributions flowed from the resources of heavy industry into the treasuries of the National Socialist party.” This financing, estimated at a still-cautious 2 million marks annually, was channeled through a trusted intermediary: Alfred Hugenberg.

Hugenberg had served as a director of Krupp A.G., the large steelmaker and arms manufacturer, during the Great War, and had subsequently founded the Telegraph Union, a conglomerate of 1,400 associated newspapers intended to provide a conservative bulwark against the liberal, pro-democracy press. Hugenberg also bought controlling shares in the country’s largest movie studio, enabling him to have film and the press work together to advance his right-wing, antidemocratic agenda. A reporter for Vossische Zeitung, a leading centrist daily newspaper, observed that Hugenberg was “the great disseminator of National Socialist ideas to an entire nation through newspapers, books, magazines and films.”

To this end, Hugenberg practiced what he called Katastrophenpolitk, “the politics of catastrophe,” by which he sought to polarize public opinion and the political parties with incendiary news stories, some of them Fabrikationen—entirely fabricated articles intended to cause confusion and outrage. According to one such story, the government was enslaving German teenagers and selling them to its allies in order to service its war debt. Hugenberg calculated that by hollowing out the political center, political consensus would become impossible and the democratic system would collapse. As a right-wing delegate to the Reichstag, Hugenberg proposed a “freedom law” that called for the liberation of the German people from the shackles of democracy and from the onerous provisions of the Versailles Treaty. The law called for the treaty signatories to be tried and hanged for treason, along with government officials involved with implementing the treaty provisions. The French ambassador in Berlin called Hugenberg “one of the most evil geniuses of Germany.”

Though both Hitler and Hugenberg were fiercely anti-Communist, antidemocratic, anti-immigrant, and anti-Semitic, their attempts at political partnership failed spectacularly and repeatedly. The problem lay not in ideological differences but in the similarity of their temperaments and their competing political aspirations. Like Hitler, Hugenberg was inflexible, stubborn, and self-righteous. When challenged, he doubled down. Hugenberg had spoken of a “third Reich” as early as 1919, well before Hitler was a force on the political scene, and he envisioned himself as the future Reichsverweser, or “regent of the Reich.” His followers greeted him with “Heil Hugenberg!” Joseph Goebbels noted that Hitler invariably emerged from his meetings with Hugenberg red-faced and “mad as shit.”

[Read: How Hitler’s enablers undid democracy in Germany]

But by late January 1933, the two men’s fates were inextricably entangled. Hugenberg, who had leveraged his wealth into political power, had become the leader of the German National People’s Party, which had the votes in the Reichstag that Hitler needed to be appointed chancellor. Hitler had the potential to elevate Hugenberg to political power. As one Hitler associate explained the Hitler-Hugenberg dynamic: “Hugenberg had everything but the masses; Hitler had everything but the money.”

After cantankerous negotiation, a deal was reached: Hugenberg would deliver Hitler the chancellorship, in exchange for Hugenberg being given a cabinet post as head of a Superministerium that subsumed the ministries of economics, agriculture, and nutrition. Once in the cabinet, Hugenberg didn’t hesitate to meddle in foreign relations when it suited him. Reinhold Quaatz, a close Hugenberg associate, distilled Hugenberg’s calculus as follows: “Hitler will sit in the saddle but Hugenberg holds the whip.”

The New York Times expressed astonishment that Hugenberg, an “arch-capitalist” who stood “in strongest discord with economic doctrines of the Nazi movement,” was suddenly in charge of the country’s finances. Hitler’s “socialist mask” had fallen, the Communist daily Red Banner proclaimed, arguing that “Hugenberg is in charge, not Hitler!” The weekly journal Die Weltbühne dubbed the new government “Hitler, Hugenberg & Co.”

As self-proclaimed “economic dictator,” Hugenberg kept pace with Hitler in outraging political opponents and much of the public. He purged ministries. He dismantled workers’ rights. He lowered the wages of his own employees by 10 percent. “The real battle against unemployment lies singularly and alone in reestablishing profitability in economic life,” one of Hugenberg’s newspapers editorialized, arguing that the goal of economic policy should be to rescue “the professions, and those most negatively affected: the merchant middle class.” Hugenberg declared a temporary moratorium on foreclosures, canceled debts, and placed tariffs on several widely produced agricultural goods, violating trade agreements and inflating the cost of living. “It just won’t do,” Hitler objected in one cabinet meeting, “that the financial burdens of these rescue measures fall only on the poorest.” Let them suffer awhile, Hugenberg argued. “Then it will be possible to even out the hardships.” The economy fell into chaos. The press dubbed Hugenberg the Konfusionsrat —the “consultant of confusion.”

Hugenberg didn’t care about bad press. He was accustomed to being one of the most unpopular personalities in the country. Vorwärts, the socialist newspaper, depicted him as a puffed-up frog with spectacles. Hitler called him a Wauwau, or “woof woof.” Even his close associates referred to him as “the Hamster.” But Hugenberg lived by the golden rule: He who had the gold ruled. Earlier, when disagreements had arisen over the rightward turn of the German National Party, Hugenberg simply expelled the dissenters and financed the party’s entire budget from his own resources. Hitler could aspire to be dictator of the Third Reich, but Hugenberg was already dictator of the economy.

In late June 1933, while Hitler was trying to assuage international concerns about the long-term intentions of his government, Hugenberg appeared in London at an international conference on economic development. To the surprise of everyone, including the other German-delegation members present, Hugenberg laid out an ambitious plan for economic growth through territorial expansion. “The first step would consist of Germany reclaiming its colonies in Africa,” Hugenberg explained. “The second would be that the ‘people without space’”—Volk ohne Raum—“would open areas in which our productive race would create living space.” The announcement made headlines around the world. “Reich Asks for Return of African Lands at London Parley,” read one New York Times headline. Below that, a subhead continued: “Also seeks other territory, presumably in Europe.”

[From the March 1932 issue: Hitler and Hitlerism: a man of destiny]

Konstantin von Neurath, Hitler’s foreign minister, tried to walk back the Hugenberg statement, asserting that Hugenberg had expressed only a personal opinion, not government policy. Hugenberg dug in his heels, retorting that, as economic minister, when he said something, he was speaking for the entire government. Foreign policy was just an extension of economic policy. Confusion and embarrassment followed.

Back in Berlin, Neurath insisted in a cabinet meeting that “a single member cannot simply overlook the objections of the others” and that Hugenberg “either did not understand these objections, which were naturally clothed in polite form, or he did not want to understand them.” Hitler sought to mediate, saying that “what had already happened was no longer of any interest.” But Hugenberg wouldn’t back down: He wanted the issue resolved and on his terms. “It was a matter between Hitler and me as to who was going to seize the initiative,” Hugenberg later admitted. Hitler prevailed. On June 29, 1933, Hugenberg resigned his minister post.

By then Hitler no longer needed either Hugenberg’s corporate contacts or his Reichstag delegates. The bankers and industrialists who had once shunned the crass, divisive, right-wing extremist had gradually come to embrace him as a bulwark against the pro-union Social Democrats and the virulently anti-capitalist Communists. Six months earlier, three weeks before Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, the banker Kurt Baron von Schröder had met with Hitler at Schröder’s villa in a fashionable quarter of Cologne. The arrangements were cloak-and-dagger: Hitler made an unscheduled, early-morning exit from a train in Bonn, entered a hotel, ate a quick breakfast, then departed in a waiting car with curtained rear windows to be driven to the Schröder villa while a decoy vehicle drove in the opposite direction. Hitler walked out of the meeting with a 30 million reichsmark credit line that saved his political movement from bankruptcy.

Once Hitler was in power, there was no longer need for secrecy or subterfuge. On Monday, February 20, 1933, Hermann Göring, one of two Nazis ministers in the Hitler cabinet and the president of the Reichstag, hosted a fundraiser at his official residence for the Nazi Party in advance of upcoming elections. The event was presided over by Hjalmar Schacht, a respected banker and co-founder of a centrist political party who saw Hitler as the best bet against left-wing political forces and had lobbied President Paul von Hindenburg to appoint Hitler chancellor.

Among the two dozen industrialists, bankers, and businessmen in attendance, the most prominent was Gustav Krupp von Bohlen, known as “the cannon king” for his armament production. “I was astonished,” Schacht recalled, “because I knew that this same Krupp von Bohlen had refused an invitation from Fritz Thyssen to attend an event with the Rhine-Westfalen industrialists four weeks earlier.”

Gustav Krupp von Bohlen (at left) and Adolf Hitler during a visit to the Krupp Factory in Essen. Krupp, another wealthy Hitler backer, supplied armaments to the Third Reich. (DPA Picture Alliance / Alamy)

Perhaps equally surprising was the presence at this fundraiser of four directors from the board of the giant chemical and pharmaceutical conglomerate I.G. Farben, which had to that point been staunchly pro-democracy, pro–Weimar Republic, and anti–National Socialist. (The Nazis derided the company, which employed many Jewish scientists, as “an international capitalist Jewish company.”)

Hitler himself stunned party attendees by showing up as the unannounced guest of honor. Clad in a suit and tie rather than a brown storm trooper’s uniform, Hitler addressed the assembled corporate elite, warning of the dangers of communism and trumpeting his appointment as chancellor as a “great victory” that he saw as a mandate for radical change. He outlined his plans to restore the power of the military, assert totalitarian control over the country, destroy the parliamentary system, and crush all political opponents by force. “Private enterprise cannot be maintained in the age of democracy,” Hitler told them.

[Jeffrey Goldberg: Trump: ‘I need the kind of generals that Hitler had’]

After Hitler departed, Schacht spoke of the need for additional campaign financing in advance of the upcoming elections. Hermann Göring added that the election, scheduled for March 5, “will surely be the last one for the next 10 years, probably even for the next 100 years.” By day’s end, the fundraiser had generated 3 million reichsmarks, the equivalent of $15 million today.

The following three weeks delivered a series of blows to the Weimar Republic that resulted in its demise: the arson attack on the Reichstag on February 27, which saw the very symbol of parliamentarian democracy consumed in flame; the March 5 elections from which the Nazis emerged with a mandate for Hitler’s reforms; and the passing of an “enabling law,” on March 23, that established Hitler as unchallenged dictator. In a letter to Hitler, Gustav Krupp wrote, “The turn of political events is in line with the wishes which I myself and the board of directors have cherished for a long time.”

German corporations, large and small, helped retool the Weimar Republic as the Third Reich. Ferdinand Porsche designed the Volkswagen, a “car for the people.” Mercedes-Benz provided Hitler and his chief lieutenants with bulletproof sedans. Hugo Boss designed the black uniforms for the SS. Krupp supplied armaments. Miele produced munitions. Allianz provided insurance for concentration camps. J.A. Topf & Sons manufactured crematoria ovens. A dismayed executive at Deutsche Bank, which was involved in the expropriation of Jewish businesses, sent a letter to the chairman of his supervisory board: “I fear we are embarking on an explicit, well- planned path toward the annihilation of all Jews in Germany.”

For the industrialists who helped finance and supply the Hitler government, an unexpected return on their investment was slave labor. By the early 1940s, the electronics giant Siemens AG was employing more than 80,000 slave laborers. (An official Siemens history explains that although the head of the firm, Carl Friedrich von Siemens, was “a staunch advocate of democracy” who “detested the Nazi dictatorship,” he was also “responsible for ensuring the company’s well-being and continued existence.”)

By October 1942, I.G. Farben and its subsidiaries were using slave laborers in 23 locations. The life expectancy of inmates at an I.G. Farben facility at Auschwitz was less than four months; more than 25,000 people lost their lives on the construction site alone. As corporate practices adapted to evolving political realities, the company aligned its wide technological and human resources with government priorities. Jews were purged from the corporate ranks. The I.G. Farben pharmaceutical division, Bayer, supported Nazi medical experiments. A postwar affidavit alleges that Bayer paid 170 reichsmarks for 150 female Auschwitz prisoners. “The transport of 150 women arrived in good condition,” the affidavit reads. “However, we were unable to obtain conclusive results because they died during the experiments,” and “we would kindly request that you send us another group of women to the same number and at the same price.” Although recent investigations have questioned the veracity of this particular affidavit, Bayer’s involvement in medical experimentation on Auschwitz inmates is undisputed.

The I.G. Farben company Degussa owned a chemical subsidiary that produced a cyanide-based pesticide known as Zyklon B, used primarily for fumigating ships, warehouses, and trains—and, after 1942, as a homicidal agent at Nazi extermination facilities. Company logs confirm the delivery of an estimated 56 tons of Zyklon B from 1942 to 1944; more than 23.8 tons were sent to Auschwitz, where it served as the primary instrument of death for the more than 1 million Jewish people murdered there.

In August 1947, 24 senior I.G. Farben managers were placed on trial for their role in Nazi aggression and atrocity. In his opening statement before the court, the prosecutor Telford Taylor said of these executives, “They were the magicians who made the fantasies of Mein Kampf come true. They were the guardians of the military and state secrets.” The 15,638 pages of courtroom testimony, along with the 6,384 documents submitted as evidence—purchase orders, internal memos, board minutes—indicated that these Farben executives knew the exact number of airplane and truck ties, the running feet of tank tread, the amount of explosives, as well as the precise number of canisters of Zyklon B gas delivered to Auschwitz. The defense attorney for the chairman of I.G. Farben’s supervisory board argued that his client was “no robber, no plunderer, no slave dealer,” but rather just a 60-year-old senior executive doing what senior executives were paid to do—run the company with an eye to the bottom line. If he collaborated with the government, it was out of “a feeling of personal responsibility to the company.” Twenty-three I.G. Farben directors were eventually charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity; 13 of them were convicted and sentenced to prison.

[From the February 1937 Issue: Hitler looks eastward]

At the International War Crimes Tribunal in Nuremberg in 1945, Gustav Krupp was indicted as a major war criminal alongside the likes of Göring and Hans Frank, but he was too ill to stand trial. Instead, his son was tried in 1947, in The United States of America v. Alfried Krupp, et al. The indictment charged the younger Krupp, alongside 11 Krupp corporate directors, with crimes against humanity and war crimes, for participating in “the murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, imprisonment, torture, and use for slave labor of civilians.” Alfried Krupp reportedly never expressed remorse, at one point telling a war-crimes trial observer, “We Krupps never cared much about political ideas. We only wanted a system that worked well and allowed us to work unhindered. Politics is not our business.”

As for Alfred Hugenberg? Unlike other early private-sector Hitler enablers such as Fritz Thyssen and Hjalmar Schacht—both of whom ended up in concentration camps after crossing Hitler—Hugenberg got off lightly. Hugenberg withdrew to his sprawling estate, Rohbraken, in the former feudal province of Lippe, where he lived as the local regent while his business empire was gradually whittled away.

The German Nationalist Party was disbanded as soon as Hugenberg stepped down from his cabinet post in June 1933. In December of that year, the Telegraph Union was taken over by the ministry of propaganda and absorbed into a newly created entity, the German News Office. In 1943, Hugenberg’s publishing house, Scherl Verlag, was acquired by the Nazi publisher, Eher Verlag. By war’s end, the defrocked cabinet minister and disenfranchised media mogul was diminished and dissipated but still defiant.

On September 28, 1946, Hugenberg was arrested by the British military police. He was detained for five months, and his assets were frozen. After a formal hearing, Hugenberg was deemed to be a “lesser evildoer”—officially, a “Mitläufer,” the lowest order of complicity in the Nazi regime—on the grounds that he had left his cabinet post in the first months of the Hitler regime and had never been a member of the Nazi Party. With undiminished temerity, Hugenberg balked at even that lesser charge. Having been stripped of most of his business empire, Hugenberg saw himself as a victim of, not a participant in, the Nazi regime. He appealed the hearing’s determination and won. He was declared “untainted,” which allowed him to lay claim to his frozen assets. Unrepentant to his dying day, Hugenberg refused to publicly countenance any suggestion of guilt or responsibility for Hitler’s excesses.

On the morning of Tuesday, January 31, 1933, less than 24 hours after enabling Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, Hugenberg reportedly spoke with Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, a fellow conservative and the mayor of Leipzig. “I’ve just committed the greatest stupidity of my life,” Hugenberg allegedly told Goerdeler. “I have allied myself with the greatest demagogue in the history of the world.”

Ninety-two years ago this month, on Monday morning, January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed the 15th chancellor of the Weimar Republic. In one of the most astonishing political transformations in the history of democracy, Hitler set about destroying a constitutional republic through constitutional means. What follows is a step-by-step account of how Hitler systematically disabled and then dismantled his country’s democratic structures and processes in less than two months’ time—specifically, one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours, and 40 minutes. The minutes, as we will see, mattered.

Hans Frank served as Hitler’s private attorney and chief legal strategist in the early years of the Nazi movement. While later awaiting execution at Nuremberg for his complicity in Nazi atrocities, Frank commented on his client’s uncanny capacity for sensing “the potential weakness inherent in every formal form of law” and then ruthlessly exploiting that weakness. 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. Invoking Article 1 of the Weimar constitution, which stated that the government was an expression of the will of the people, Hitler informed the court that once he had achieved power through legal means, he intended to mold the government as he saw fit. It was an astonishingly brazen statement.

“So, through constitutional means?” the presiding judge asked.

“Jawohl!” Hitler replied.

By January 1933, the fallibilities of the Weimar Republic—whose 181-article constitution framed the structures and processes for its 18 federated states—were as obvious as they were abundant. Having spent a decade in opposition politics, Hitler knew firsthand how easily an ambitious political agenda could be scuttled. He had been co-opting or crushing right-wing competitors and paralyzing legislative processes for years, and for the previous eight months, he had played obstructionist politics, helping to bring down three chancellors and twice forcing the president to dissolve the Reichstag and call for new elections.

When he became chancellor himself, Hitler wanted to prevent others from doing unto him what he had done unto them. Though the vote share of his National Socialist party had been rising—in the election of September 1930, following the 1929 market crash, they had increased their representation in the Reichstag almost ninefold, from 12 delegates to 107, and in the July 1932 elections, they had more than doubled their mandate to 230 seats—they were still far from a majority. Their seats amounted to only 37 percent of the legislative body, and the larger right-wing coalition that the Nazi Party was a part of controlled barely 51 percent of the Reichstag, but Hitler believed that he should exercise absolute power: “37 percent represents 75 percent of 51 percent,” he argued to one American reporter, by which he meant that possessing the relative majority of a simple majority was enough to grant him absolute authority. But he knew that in a multiparty political system, with shifting coalitions, his political calculus was not so simple. He believed that an Ermächtigungsgesetz (“empowering law”) was crucial to his political survival. But passing such a law—which would dismantle the separation of powers, grant Hitler’s executive branch the authority to make laws without parliamentary approval, and allow Hitler to rule by decree, bypassing democratic institutions and the constitution—required the support of a two-thirds majority in the fractious Reichstag.

The process proved to be even more challenging than anticipated. Hitler found his dictatorial intentions getting thwarted within his first six hours as chancellor. At 11:30 that Monday morning, he swore an oath to uphold the constitution, then went across the street to the Hotel Kaiserhof for lunch, then returned to the Reich Chancellery for a group photo of the “Hitler Cabinet,” which was followed by his first formal meeting with his nine ministers at precisely 5 o’clock.

Hitler opened the meeting by boasting that millions of Germans had welcomed his chancellorship with “jubilation,” then outlined his plans for expunging key government officials and filling their positions with loyalists. At this point he turned to his main agenda item: the empowering law that, he argued, would give him the time (four years, according to the stipulations laid out in the draft of the law) and the authority necessary to make good on his campaign promises to revive the economy, reduce unemployment, increase military spending, withdraw from international treaty obligations, purge the country of foreigners he claimed were “poisoning” the blood of the nation, and exact revenge on political opponents. “Heads will roll in the sand,” Hitler had vowed at one rally.

[From the March 1932 issue: Hitler and Hitlerism: a man of destiny]

But given that Social Democrats and Communists collectively commanded 221 seats, or roughly 38 percent, of the 584-seat Reichstag, the two-thirds vote Hitler needed was a mathematical impossibility. “Now if one were to ban the Communist Party and annul their votes,” Hitler proposed, “it would be possible to reach a Reichstag majority.”

The problem, Hitler continued, was that this would almost certainly precipitate a national strike by the 6 million German Communists, which could, in turn, lead to a collapse of the country’s economy. Alternatively, Reichstag percentages could be rebalanced by holding new elections. “What represents a greater danger to the economy?” Hitler asked. “The uncertainties and concerns associated with new elections or a general strike?” Calling for new elections, he concluded, was the safer path.

Economic Minister Alfred Hugenberg disagreed. Ultimately, Hugenberg argued, if one wanted to achieve a two-thirds Reichstag majority, there was no way of getting around banning the Communist Party. Of course, Hugenberg had his own self-interested reasons for opposing new Reichstag elections: In the previous election, Hugenberg had siphoned 14 seats from Hitler’s National Socialists to his own party, the German Nationalists, making Hugenberg an indispensable partner in Hitler’s current coalition government. New elections threatened to lose his party seats and diminish his power.

When Hitler wondered whether the army could be used to crush any public unrest, Defense Minister Werner von Blomberg dismissed the idea out of hand, observing “that a soldier was trained to see an external enemy as his only potential opponent.” As a career officer, Blomberg could not imagine German soldiers being ordered to shoot German citizens on German streets in defense of Hitler’s (or any other German) government.

Hitler had campaigned on the promise of draining the “parliamentarian swamp”—den parlamentarischen Sumpf—only to find himself now foundering in a quagmire of partisan politics and banging up against constitutional guardrails. He responded as he invariably did when confronted with dissenting opinions or inconvenient truths: He ignored them and doubled down.

The next day, Hitler announced new Reichstag elections, to be held in early March, and issued a memorandum to his party leaders. “After a thirteen-year struggle the National Socialist movement has succeeded in breaking through into the government, but the struggle to win the German nation is only beginning,” Hitler proclaimed, and then added venomously: “The National Socialist party knows that the new government is not a National Socialist government, even though it is conscious that it bears the name of its leader, Adolf Hitler.” He was declaring war on his own government.

We have come to perceive Hitler’s appointment as chancellor as part of an inexorable rise to power, an impression resting on generations of postwar scholarship, much of which has necessarily marginalized or disregarded alternatives to the standard narrative of the Nazi seizure of power (Machtergreifung) with its political and social persecutions, its assertion of totalitarian rule (Gleichschaltung) and subsequent aggressions that led to the Second World War and the nightmare of the Holocaust. In researching and writing this piece, I intentionally ignored these ultimate outcomes and instead traced events as they unfolded in real time with their attendant uncertainties and misguided assessments. A case in point: The January 31, 1933, New York Times story on Hitler’s appointment as chancellor was headlined “Hitler Puts Aside Aim to Be Dictator.”

In the late 1980s, as a graduate student at Harvard, where I served as a teaching fellow in a course on Weimar and Nazi Germany, I used to cite a postwar observation, made by Hans Frank in Nuremberg, that underscored the tenuous nature of Hitler’s political career. “The Führer was a man who was possible in Germany only at that very moment,” the Nazi legal strategist recalled. “He came at exactly this terrible transitory period when the monarchy had gone and the republic was not yet secure.” Had Hitler’s predecessor in the chancellery, Kurt von Schleicher, remained in office another six months, or had German President Paul von Hindenburg exercised his constitutional powers more judiciously, or had a faction of moderate conservative Reichstag delegates cast their votes differently, then history may well have taken a very different turn. My most recent book, Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power, ends at the moment the story this essay tells begins. Both Hitler’s ascendancy to chancellor and his smashing of the constitutional guardrails once he got there, I have come to realize, are stories of political contingency rather than historical inevitability.

Hitler’s appointment as chancellor of the country’s first democratic republic came almost as much as a surprise to Hitler as it did to the rest of the country. After a vertiginous three-year political ascent, Hitler had taken a shellacking in the November 1932 elections, shedding 2 million votes and 34 Reichstag seats, almost half of them to Hugenberg’s German Nationalists. By December 1932, Hitler’s movement was bankrupt financially, politically, ideologically. Hitler told several close associates that he was contemplating suicide.

But a series of backroom deals that included the shock weekend dismissal of Chancellor Schleicher in late January 1933 hurtled Hitler into the chancellery. Schleicher would later remember Hitler telling him that “it was astonishing in his life that he was always rescued just when he himself had given up all hope.”

[Thomas Weber: Hitler would have been astonished]

The eleventh-hour appointment came at a steep political price. Hitler had left several of his most loyal lieutenants as political roadkill on this unexpected fast lane to power. Worse, he found himself with a cabinet handpicked by a political enemy, former Chancellor Franz von Papen, whose government Hitler had helped topple and who now served as Hitler’s vice chancellor. Worst of all, Hitler was hostage to Hugenberg, who commanded 51 Reichstag votes along with the power to make or break Hitler’s chancellorship. He nearly broke it.

As President Hindenburg waited to receive Hitler on that Monday morning in January 1933, Hugenberg clashed with Hitler over the issue of new Reichstag elections. Hugenberg’s position: “Nein! Nein! Nein!” While Hitler and Hugenberg argued in the foyer outside the president’s office, Hindenburg, a military hero of World War I who had served as the German president since 1925, grew impatient. According to Otto Meissner, the president’s chief of staff, had the Hitler-Hugenberg squabble lasted another few minutes, Hindenburg would have left. Had this occurred, the awkward coalition cobbled together by Papen in the previous 48 hours would have collapsed. There would have been no Hitler chancellorship, no Third Reich.

In the event, Hitler was given a paltry two cabinet posts to fill—and none of the most important ones pertaining to the economy, foreign policy, or the military. Hitler chose Wilhelm Frick as minister of the interior and Hermann Göring as minister without portfolio. But with his unerring instinct for detecting the weaknesses in structures and processes, Hitler put his two ministers to work targeting the Weimar Republic’s key democratic pillars: free speech, due process, public referendum, and states’ rights.

Frick had responsibility over the republic’s federated system, as well as over the country’s electoral system and over the press. Frick was the first minister to reveal the plans of Hitler’s government: “We will present an enabling law to the Reichstag that in accordance with the constitution will dissolve the Reich government,” Frick told the press, explaining that Hitler’s ambitious plans for the country required extreme measures, a position Hitler underscored in his first national radio address on February 1. “The national government will therefore regard it as its first and supreme task to restore to the German people unity of mind and will,” Hitler said. “It will preserve and defend the foundations on which the strength of our nation rests.”

Frick was also charged with suppressing the opposition press and centralizing power in Berlin. While Frick was undermining states’ rights and imposing bans on left-wing newspapers—including the Communist daily The Red Banner and the Social Democratic Forward—Hitler also appointed Göring as acting state interior minister of Prussia, the federated state that represented two-thirds of German territory. Göring was tasked with purging the Prussian state police, the largest security force in the country after the army, and a bastion of Social Democratic sentiment.

Rudolf Diels was the head of Prussia’s political police. One day in early February, Diels was sitting in his office, at 76 Unter den Linden, when Göring knocked at his door and told him in no uncertain terms that it was time to clear house. “I want nothing to do with these scoundrels who are sitting around here in this place,” Göring said.

A Schiesserlass, or “shooting decree,” followed. This permitted the state police to shoot on sight without fearing consequences. “I cannot rely on police to go after the red mob if they have to worry about facing disciplinary action when they are simply doing their job,” Göring explained. He accorded them his personal backing to shoot with impunity. “When they shoot, it is me shooting,” Göring said. “When someone is lying there dead, it is I who shot them.”

Göring also designated the Nazi storm troopers as Hilfspolizei, or “deputy police,” compelling the state to provide the brownshirt thugs with sidearms and empowering them with police authority in their street battles. Diels later noted that this—manipulating the law to serve his ends and legitimizing the violence and excesses of tens of thousands of brownshirts—was a “well-tested Hitler tactic.”

As Hitler scrambled to secure power and crush the opposition, rumors circulated of his government’s imminent demise. One rumor held that Schleicher, the most recently deposed chancellor, was planning a military coup. Another said that Hitler was a puppet of Papen and a backwoods Austrian boy in the unwitting service of German aristocrats. Still others alleged that Hitler was merely a brownshirt strawman for Hugenberg and a conspiracy of industrialists who intended to dismantle worker protections for the sake of higher profits. (The industrialist Otto Wolff was said to have “cashed in” on his financing of Hitler’s movement.) Yet another rumor had it that Hitler was merely managing a placeholder government while President Hindenburg, a monarchist at heart, prepared for the return of the Kaiser.

There was little truth to any of this, but Hitler did have to confront the political reality of making good on his campaign promises to frustrated German voters in advance of the March Reichstag elections. The Red Banner published a list of Hitler’s campaign promises to workers, and the Center Party publicly demanded assurances that Hitler would support the agricultural sector, fight inflation, avoid “financial-political experiments,” and adhere to the Weimar constitution. At the same time, the dismay among right-wing supporters who had applauded Hitler’s earlier demand for dictatorial power and refusal to enter into a coalition was distilled in the pithy observation “No Third Reich, not even 2½.”

On February 18, the center-left newspaper Vossische Zeitung wrote that despite Hitler’s campaign promises and political posturing, nothing had changed for the average German. If anything, things had gotten worse. Hitler’s promise of doubling tariffs on grain imports had gotten tangled in complexities and contractual obligations. Hugenberg informed Hitler during a cabinet meeting that the “catastrophic economic conditions” were threatening the very “existence of the country.” “In the end,” Vossische Zeitung predicted, “the survival of the new government will rely not on words but on the economic conditions.” For all Hitler’s talk of a thousand-year Reich, there was no certainty his government would last the month.

Over the eight months before appointing Hitler as chancellor, Hindenberg had dispatched three others—Heinrich Brüning, Papen, and Schleicher—from the role, exercising his constitutional authority embedded in Article 53. And his disdain for Hitler was common knowledge. The previous August, he had declared publicly that, “for the sake of God, my conscience, and the country,” he would never appoint Hitler as chancellor. Privately, Hindenburg had quipped that if he were to appoint Hitler to any position, it would be as postmaster general, “so he can lick me from behind on my stamps.” In January, Hindenburg finally agreed to appoint Hitler, but with great reluctance—and on the condition that he never be left alone in a room with his new chancellor. By late February, the question on everyone’s mind was, as Forward put it, how much longer would the aging field marshal put up with his Bohemian corporal?

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. Witnesses recall seeing the fire from villages 40 miles away. The image of the seat of German parliamentary democracy going up in flames sent a collective shock across the country. The Communists blamed the National Socialists. The National Socialists blamed the Communists. A 23-year-old Dutch Communist, Marinus van der Lubbe, was caught in flagrante, but the Berlin fire chief, Walter Gempp, who supervised the firefighting operation, saw evidence of potential Nazi involvement.

[From the May 1944 issue: What is German?]

When Hitler convened his cabinet to discuss the crisis the next morning, he declared that the fire was clearly part of a Communist coup attempt. Göring detailed Communist plans for further arson attacks on public buildings, as well as for the poisoning of public kitchens and the kidnapping of the children and wives of prominent officials. Interior Minister Frick presented a draft decree suspending civil liberties, permitting searches and seizures, and curbing states’ rights during a national emergency.

Papen expressed concern that the proposed draft “could meet with resistance,” especially from “southern states,” by which he meant Bavaria, which was second only to Prussia in size and power. Perhaps, Papen suggested, the proposed measures should be discussed with state governments to assure “an amicable agreement,” otherwise the measures could be seen as the usurpation of states’ rights. Ultimately, only one word was added to suggest contingencies for suspending a state’s rights. Hindenburg signed the decree into law that afternoon.

Put into effect just a week before the March elections, the emergency decree gave Hitler tremendous power to intimidate—and imprison—the political opposition. The Communist Party was banned (as Hitler had wanted since his first cabinet meeting), and members of the opposition press were arrested, their newspapers shut down. Göring had already been doing this for the past month, but the courts had invariably ordered the release of detained people. With the decree in effect, the courts could not intervene. Thousands of Communists and Social Democrats were rounded up.

On Sunday morning, March 5, one week after the Reichstag fire, German voters went to the polls. “No stranger election has perhaps ever been held in a civilized country,” Frederick Birchall wrote that day in The New York Times. Birchall expressed his dismay at the apparent willingness of Germans to submit to authoritarian rule when they had the opportunity for a democratic alternative. “In any American or Anglo-Saxon community the response would be immediate and overwhelming,” he wrote.

More than 40 million Germans went to the polls, which was more than 2 million more than in any previous election, representing nearly 89 percent of the registered voters—a stunning demonstration of democratic engagement. “Not since the German Reichstag was founded in 1871 has there been such a high voter turnout,” Vossische Zeitung reported. Most of those 2 million new votes went to the Nazis. “The enormous voting reserves almost entirely benefited the National Socialists,” Vossische Zeitung reported.

Although the National Socialists fell short of Hitler’s promised 51 percent, managing only 44 percent of the electorate—despite massive suppression, the Social Democrats lost just a single Reichstag seat—the banning of the Communist Party positioned Hitler to form a coalition with the two-thirds Reichstag majority necessary to pass the empowering law.

The next day, the National Socialists stormed state-government offices across the country. Swastika banners were hung from public buildings. Opposition politicians fled for their lives. Otto Wels, the Social Democratic leader, departed for Switzerland. So did Heinrich Held, the minister-president of Bavaria. Tens of thousands of political opponents were taken into Schutzhaft (“protective custody”), a form of detention in which an individual could be held without cause indefinitely.

Hindenburg remained silent. He did not call his new chancellor to account for the violent public excesses against Communists, Social Democrats, and Jews. He did not exercise his Article 53 powers. Instead, he signed a decree permitting the National Socialists’ swastika banner to be flown beside the national colors. He acceded to Hitler’s request to create a new cabinet position, minister of public enlightenment and propaganda, a role promptly filled by Joseph Goebbels. “What good fortune for all of us to know that this towering old man is with us,” Goebbels wrote of Hindenburg in his diary, “and what a change of fate that we are now moving on the same path together.”

A week later, Hindenburg’s embrace of Hitler was on full public display. He appeared in military regalia in the company of his chancellor, who was wearing a dark suit and long overcoat, at a ceremony in Potsdam. The former field marshal and the Bohemian corporal shook hands. Hitler bowed in putative deference. The “Day of Potsdam” signaled the end of any hope for an Article 53 solution to the Hitler chancellorship.

That same Tuesday, March 21, an Article 48 decree was issued amnestying National Socialists convicted of crimes, including murder, perpetrated “in the battle for national renewal.” Men convicted of treason were now national heroes. The first concentration camp was opened that afternoon, in an old brewery near the town center of Oranienburg, just north of Berlin. The following day, the first group of detainees arrived at another concentration camp, in an abandoned munition plant outside the Bavarian town of Dachau.

Plans for legislation excluding Jews from the legal and medical professions, as well as from government offices, were under way, though Hitler’s promise for the mass deportation of the country’s 100,000 Ostjuden, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, was proving to be more complicated. Many had acquired German citizenship and were gainfully employed. As fear of deportation rose, a run on local banks caused other banks and businesses to panic. Accounts of Jewish depositors were frozen until, as one official explained, “they had settled their obligations with German business men.” Hermann Göring, now president of the newly elected Reichstag, sought to calm matters, assuring Germany’s Jewish citizens that they retained the same “protection of law for person and property” as every other German citizen. He then berated the international community: Foreigners were not to interfere with the domestic affairs of the country. Germany would do with its citizens whatever it deemed appropriate.

Adolf Hitler's address to the Reichstag on March 23, 1933, at the Kroll Opera House. On this day, a majority of the delegates voted to eliminate almost all constitutional restraints on Hitler’s government. (Ullstein Bild / Getty)

On Thursday, March 23, the Reichstag delegates assembled in the Kroll Opera House, just opposite the charred ruins of the Reichstag. The following Monday, the traditional Reich eagle had been removed and replaced with an enormous Nazi eagle, dramatically backlit with wings spread wide and a swastika in its talons. Hitler, dressed now in a brown stormtrooper uniform with a swastika armband, arrived to pitch his proposed enabling law, now formally titled the “Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Reich.” At 4:20 p.m., he stepped up to the podium. Appearing uncharacteristically ill at ease, he shuffled a sheaf of pages before beginning to read haltingly from a prepared text. Only gradually did he assume his usual animated rhetorical style. He enumerated the failings of the Weimar Republic, then outlined his plans for the four-year tenure of his proposed enabling law, which included restoring German dignity and military parity abroad as well as economic and social stability at home. “Treason toward our nation and our people shall in the future be stamped out with ruthless barbarity,” Hitler vowed.

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The Reichstag recessed to deliberate on the act. When the delegates reconvened at 6:15 that evening, the floor was given to Otto Wels, the Social Democratic leader, who had returned from his Swiss exile, despite fears for his personal safety, to challenge Hitler in person. As Wels began to speak, Hitler made a move to rise. Papen touched Hitler’s wrist to keep him in check.

“In this historic hour, we German Social Democrats solemnly pledge ourselves to the principles of humanity and justice, of freedom and socialism,” Wels said. He chided Hitler for seeking to undermine the Weimar Republic, and for the hatred and divisiveness he had sowed. Regardless of the evils Hitler intended to visit on the country, Wels declared, the republic’s founding democratic values would endure. “No enabling act gives you the power to destroy ideas that are eternal and indestructible,” he said.

Hitler rose. “The nice theories that you, Herr Delegate, just proclaimed are words that have come a bit too late for world history,” he began. He dismissed allegations that he posed any kind of threat to the German people. He reminded Wels that the Social Democrats had had 13 years to address the issues that really mattered to the German people—employment, stability, dignity. “Where was this battle during the time you had the power in your hand?” Hitler asked. The National Socialist delegates, along with observers in the galleries, cheered. The rest of the delegates remained still. A series of them rose to state both their concerns and positions on the proposed enabling law.

The Centrists, as well as the representatives of the Bavarian People’s Party, said they were willing to vote yes despite reservations “that in normal times could scarcely have been overcome.” Similarly, Reinhold Maier, the leader of the German State Party, expressed concern about what would happen to judicial independence, due process, freedom of the press, and equal rights for all citizens under the law, and stated that he had “serious reservations” about according Hitler dictatorial powers. But then he announced that his party, too, was voting in favor of the law, eliciting laughter from the floor.

Shortly before 8 o’clock that evening, the voting was completed. The 94 Social Democrat delegates who were in attendance cast their votes against the law. (Among the Social Democrats was the former interior minister of Prussia, Carl Severing, who had been arrested earlier in the day as he was about to enter the Reichstag but was released temporarily in order to cast his vote.) The remaining Reichstag delegates, 441 in all, voted in favor of the new law, delivering Hitler a four-fifths majority, more than enough to put the enabling law into effect without amendment or restriction. The next morning, U.S. Ambassador Frederic Sackett sent a telegram to the State Department: “On the basis of this law the Hitler Cabinet can reconstruct the entire system of government as it eliminates practically all constitutional restraints.”

Joseph Goebbels, who was present that day as a National Socialist Reichstag delegate, would later marvel that the National Socialists had succeeded in dismantling a federated constitutional republic entirely through constitutional means. 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. “The big joke on democracy,” he observed, “is that it gives its mortal enemies the means to its own destruction.”