lp4guld

named without any reference to the Reichstag. His position waswholly illegal from the start. He took the next logical step. Heproceeded to govern by decree and to seize the government ofPrussia, consolidating the state and federal government under hishand. He dissolved *¯he Reichstag and called new elections. Hitler,who had gotten six and a half million votes in 1930, now got fourteenmillion for his candidates with 230 seats in the Reichstag insteadof 107. At this point, however, the republican government was atan end. It was now a question of what these adventurers would dowith the apparatus of government that remained. Hindenburg wasa dictator—old, feeble, vacillating, pulled and hauled by a palacecabal headed by his son, Von Papen, and Von Schleicher, and withno fast hold upon the dictatorship. Von Papen became Chancellorin June. He was let out in November to make room for VonSchleicher.Then in January 1933, on the advice of Von Papen, Von Schleicherwas ousted and Hitler called to power by Hindenburg after an electionin which his vote was reduced from fourteen million to elevenand a half million. How vain and meaningless it must have been formen in Germany who still clung to the shreds of the tattered democracyto talk against Hitler's climb to power because of the fear ofdictatorship when the men he was to replace had themselves alreadybuilt the foundations and the superstructure of dictatorship! Hitlerhad merely to complete the job by ridding himself of reliance on thedecrepit Hindenburg. He dissolved the Reichstag, called an electionin which his party got seventeen million votes, gained control of theReichstag, got a vote from the compliant majority giving him fullpower to rule by decree, suppressed all labor unions and all otherparties, and when, sometime later, Hindenburg died, had the officeof Chancellor and President consolidated into one. The whole armoryof fascism was complete for Hitler when he arrived at the chancellery.The work had been done for him by the men who precededhim and most of all by the men of the republic. For fascism, as itturned out in Germany, as in Italy, bore no resemblance to theheterogeneous collection of principles enunciated by the NationalSocialists as they set out to capture the German state.Hitler's national socialist program of confiscating war profits,146