Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Seizure of control (1931–1933)

Is good that, at this time anyway, American democratic institutions still exist. No one could deny though that there are echoes here.

Both within Germany and abroad initially there were few fears that Hitler could use his position to establish his later dictatorial single-party regime. Rather, the conservatives that helped to make him chancellor were convinced that they could control Hitler and "tame" the Nazi Party while setting the relevant impulses in the government themselves; foreign ambassadors played down worries by emphasizing that Hitler was "mediocre" if not a bad copy of Mussolini; even SPD politician Kurt Schumacher trivialized Hitler as a "Dekorationsstück" ("piece of scenery/decoration") of the new government. German newspapers wrote that, without doubt, the Hitler-led government would try to fight its political enemies (the left-wing parties), but that it would be impossible to establish a dictatorship in Germany because there was "a barrier, over which violence cannot proceed" and because of the German nation being proud of "the freedom of speech and thought". Theodor Wolff of Frankfurter Zeitung wrote:[77]

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It is a hopeless misjudgement to think that one could force a dictatorial regime upon the German nation. [...] The diversity of the German people calls for democracy.
—?Theodor Wolff in Frankfurter Zeitung, Jan 1933
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Even within the Jewish German community, in spite of Hitler not hiding his ardent antisemitism, the worries appear to have been limited. In a declaration of January 30, the steering committee of the central Jewish German organization (Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens) wrote that "as a matter of course" the Jewish community faces the new government "with the largest mistrust", but at the same they were convinced that "nobody would dare to touch [their] constitutional rights". The Jewish German newspaper Jüdische Rundschau [de] wrote on Jan 31st:[78]

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... that also within the German nation still the forces are active that would turn against a barbarian anti-Jewish policy.
—?Jüdische Rundschau [de], Jan 31st, 1933
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However a growing number of keen observers, like Sir Horace Rumbold, British Ambassador in Berlin, began to revise their opinions. On 22 February 1933, he wrote, "Hitler may be no statesman but he is an uncommonly clever and audacious demagogue and fully alive to every popular instinct," and he informed the Foreign Office that he had no doubt that the Nazis had "come to stay."[79] On receiving the dispatch Robert Vansittart, Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, concluded that if Hitler eventually gained the upper hand, "then another European war [was] within measurable distance."[80]

With Germans who opposed Nazism failing to unite against it, Hitler soon moved to consolidate absolute power.

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At the risk of appearing to talk nonsense I tell you that the National Socialist movement will go on for 1,000 years! ... Don't forget how people laughed at me 15 years ago when I declared that one day I would govern Germany. They laugh now, just as foolishly, when I declare that I shall remain in power!
—?Adolf Hitler to a British correspondent in Berlin, June 1934[81]
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Chancellor to dictator

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler%27s_rise_to_power#Seizure_of_control_(1931%E2%80%931933)