Hitler

for Prussia, and from there accompanied Goebbels to the Berlinoffices of the
Völkischer Beobachter
, where an inflammatory editorial was rapidly prepared and a new front page of the party newspaper made up.
    At the meeting in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, it was the German National State Secretary Ludwig Grauert, firmly convinced himself that the Communists had set the Reichstag alight, who proposed an emergency decree for the State of Prussia aimed at arson and acts of terror. By the following morning, however, Reich Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick had come up with the draft of a decree ‘For the Protection of People and State’ which extended the emergency measures to the whole of the Reich – something attributed by Blomberg to Hitler’s presence of mind – and gave the Reich government powers of intervention in the Länder. The road to dictatorship was now wide open.
    The emergency decree ‘For the Protection of People and State’ was the last item dealt with by the cabinet at its meeting on the morning of 28 February. With one brief paragraph, the personal liberties enshrined in the Weimar Constitution – including freedom of speech, of association, and of the press, and privacy of postal and telephone communications – were suspended indefinitely. With another brief paragraph, the autonomy of the Länder was overridden by the right of the Reich government to intervene to restore order. This right would be made ample use of in the immediate aftermath of the election to ensure Nazi control throughout all the German states. The hastily constructed emergency decree amounted to the charter of the Third Reich.
    By the time of the cabinet meeting, Hitler’s near-hysterical mood of the previous evening had given way to colder ruthlessness. The ‘psychologically correct moment for the showdown’ with the KPD had arrived. It was pointless to wait longer, he told the cabinet. The struggle against the Communists should not be dependent on ‘juristical considerations’. There was no likelihood that this would be the case. The rounding up of Communist deputies and functionaries had already been set in train by Göring during the night in raids carried out with massive brutality. Communists were the main targets. But Social Democrats, trade unionists, and left-wing intellectuals such as Carl Ossietzky were also among those dragged into improvised prisons, often in the cellars of SA or SS local headquarters, and savagely beaten, tortured, and in some cases murdered. By April, the number taken into ‘protective custody’ in Prussia alone numbered some 25,000.
    The violence and repression were widely popular. The ‘emergencydecree’ that took away all personal liberties and established the platform for dictatorship was warmly welcomed. Louise Solmitz, like her friends and neighbours, was persuaded to cast her vote for Hitler. ‘Now it’s important to support what he’s doing with every means,’ an acquaintance who had up to then not supported the NSDAP told her. ‘The entire thoughts and feelings of most Germans are dominated by Hitler,’ Frau Solmitz commented. ‘His fame rises to the stars, he is the saviour of a wicked, sad German world.’
    On 4 March, Hitler made a final, impassioned plea to the electorate in a speech broadcast from Königsberg. When the results were declared the next day, the Nazis had won 43.9 per cent of the vote, giving them 288 out of 647 seats in the new Reichstag. Their nationalist coalition partners had gained 8.0 per cent. Despite the draconian terror, the KPD had still managed an astonishing 12.3 per cent, and the SPD 18.3 per cent – together the parties of the Left, even now, gaining almost a third of all votes cast. The Zentrum received only a marginally smaller proportion of the vote (11.2 per cent) than it had done the previous November. Support for the remaining parties had dwindled almost to nothing. Goebbels claimed the result as a ‘glorious triumph’. It was rather less than that. Substantial gains had been certain. They had undoubtedly been assisted by a late surge following the Reichstag fire. Hitler had hoped for an absolute majority for the NSDAP. As it was, the absolute majority narrowly attained by the government coalition left him dependent on his conservative allies. He would now not be rid of them at least as long as Hindenburg lived, he was reported as saying on hearing the results. Still, even allowing for the climate of intense