Hitler moved rapidly and skillfully to establish an unshakable dictatorship that would pursue the Nazi program of race and space. To maintain appearances, Hitler called for new elections. In February 1933, in the midst of an electoral campaign plagued by violence — much of it caused by Nazi toughs — the Reichstag building was partly destroyed by fire. Hitler blamed the Communists and convinced Hindenburg to sign emergency acts that abolished freedom of speech and assembly as well as most personal liberties.

The façade of democratic government was soon torn asunder. When the Nazis won only 44 percent of the vote in the elections, Hitler outlawed the Communist Party and arrested its parliamentary representatives. Then on March 23, 1933, the Nazis pushed through the Reichstag the Enabling Act, which gave Hitler dictatorial power for four years.

Germany became a one-party Nazi state. The new regime took over the government bureaucracy intact, installing Nazis in top positions. At the same time, it created a series of overlapping Nazi Party organizations responsible solely to Hitler. Once the Nazis were firmly in command, Hitler and the party turned their attention to constructing a National Socialist society defined by national unity and racial exclusion. First they eliminated political enemies. Communists, Social Democrats, and trade-union leaders were forced out of their jobs or arrested and taken to hastily built concentration camps.

Hitler then purged the Nazi Party itself of its more extremist elements. The Nazi storm troopers (the SA), the brown shirts who had fought Communists and beaten up Jews before the Nazis took power, now expected top positions in the army. Some SA radicals even talked of a “second revolution” that would sweep away capitalism. Now that he was in power, however, Hitler was eager to win the support of the traditional military and maintain social order. He decided that the leadership of the SA had to be eliminated. On the night of June 30, 1934, Hitler’s elite personal guard — the SS — arrested and executed about one hundred SA leaders and other political enemies. Afterward, the SS grew rapidly. Under its methodical, ruthless leader Heinrich Himmler (1900–1945), the SS took over the political police and the concentration camp system.

Acting on its vision of racial purity, the party began a many-faceted campaign against those deemed incapable of making positive contributions to the “master race.” The Nazis persecuted a number of supposedly undesirable groups. Jews headed the list, but Slavic peoples, Sinti and Roma (Gypsies), homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and people considered handicapped were also targets of ostracism and brutal repression.

In what some historians term the Nazi “racial state,” barbarism and race hatred were institutionalized with the force of science and law.1 New university academies, such as the German Society for Racial Research, wrote studies that measured and defined racial differences; prejudice was thus presented in the guise of enlightened science. The ethical breakdown was exemplified in a series of sterilization laws, which led to the forced sterilization of some four hundred thousand “undesirable” citizens.

From the beginning, German Jews were a special target of Nazi persecution. In 1935, the infamous Nuremberg Laws classified as Jewish anyone having three or more Jewish grandparents, outlawed marriage and sexual relations between Jews and those defined as German, and deprived Jews of all rights of citizenship. For the vast majority of German citizens not targeted by such laws, the creation of a demonized outsider group may well have contributed to feelings of national unity and support for the Hitler regime.

In late 1938, the assault on the Jews accelerated. During a well-organized wave of violence known as Kristallnacht (or the Night of Broken Glass), Nazi gangs smashed windows and looted over 7,000 Jewish-owned shops, destroyed many homes, burned down over 200 synagogues, and killed dozens of Jews. German Jews were then rounded up and made to pay for the damage. By 1939, some 300,000 of Germany’s 500,000 Jews had emigrated, sacrificing almost all their property in order to escape this persecution. Some Germans privately opposed these outrages, but most went along or looked the other way.