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How our democracy died in 1933 - and what we have to learn from it

It was the death certificate of the first German democracy: the so-called Enabling Act, which the Reichstag passed exactly 90 years ago, on March 23, 1933.

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How our democracy died in 1933 - and what we have to learn from it

It was the death certificate of the first German democracy: the so-called Enabling Act, which the Reichstag passed exactly 90 years ago, on March 23, 1933. With this law, the Weimar Republic apparently became the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler legally. We need to know this date. This story concerns us.

Because today we are witnessing again in many parts of the world how democracies are being destroyed, how elected politicians are striving for authoritarian power, how the judiciary and the press are being attacked and the checks and balances are being undermined, and how hatred is poisoning the political culture. In our country, too, we are not immune to upheavals in democracy.

It begins with a policy of lies. In the Weimar Republic it was the stab in the back legend. Germany's defeat in World War I was to blame for the empire's elites. Instead of coming to their senses, they invented the lie of treason by Democrats, Jews and liberals on the "home front". Nationalists and revanchists balked at reality and called for the assassination of elected politicians who faced the truth and took responsibility for the republic.

Every democracy needs a minimum level of acknowledgment of facts across political camps. Respect between political opponents is essential, even in heated disputes. But if those who think differently are vilified as "enemies" and "traitors", if only one's own view is considered the "true" popular opinion, even though millions voted for a different policy on election day, then the poison is for every democracy.

The Weimar Republic is a lesson in the fatal consequences of mendacious propaganda, linguistic brutalization and political declarations of enemies. The many murders of democrats by right-wing extremists, of which the Jewish Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau was the most prominent victim, showed how words turned into bloody deeds. Violence as a means of conflict should have formed an insurmountable dividing line from the extremists, but even a convicted putschist like Hitler and his NSDAP were welcome allies for the national conservatives.

A look back shows what is still threatening democracies today: once those who despise democracy have moved into key positions in the state, they abuse its power to destroy democracy. Because the elites in the judiciary and administration, the police and the military often internally rejected the Weimar Republic, democracy and freedom were only half-heartedly defended. Because fanatics found understanding, the rule of law eroded.

His judges undermined the fact that the Austrian Hitler should have been expelled by law after his attempted putsch in Munich in 1923: "According to the court's opinion, the provision of the Republic Protection Act can apply to a man who thinks and feels as German as Hitler ... .do not apply,” they ruled.

It is also a lesson from Weimar that the state must defend itself against its enemies in state offices, that in particular police officers or soldiers who are trained to use weapons and spread misanthropic hatred in right-wing extremist chat groups may not be protected or promoted, but punished disciplinary or have to be released.

The responsibility for protecting and preserving a democracy cannot be delegated to the state and its officials alone; each and every individual bears this responsibility at the latest on election day Volk was elected President of the Reich was also the fatal consequence of short-sighted party politics: In the second ballot, the Communists had stuck to their candidate Ernst Thälmann, and the Bavarian People's Party had called for the election of the Protestant Hohenzollern General instead of the Rhenish Catholic Wilhelm Marx.

In the spring of 1930, Hindenburg began the gradual elimination of the Reichstag by appointing chancellors regardless of the majority in parliament and having them govern with presidential emergency decrees. Hitler's appointment as Reich Chancellor on January 30, 1933 was the last step in a series of chancellor changes and new elections aimed at destroying democratic institutions and establishing authoritarian rule.

Hitler wanted total power and tried to get rid of the controls and restrictions imposed by opposition, the separation of powers and the constitution. The "Enabling Act" was intended to allow the government, and thus de facto Hitler, to write laws and constitutional amendments themselves.

At the same time, it became the pseudo-legal bridge from democracy to dictatorship, with which countless opportunists in the state apparatus justified their collaboration with the new regime. As a consequence, the Basic Law today contains an eternity clause that prohibits the abolition of democracy, the rule of law and federalism by means of a constitutional amendment.

In March 90 years ago, the political parties still had means against the dictatorship. The Catholic center and the shrunken bourgeois center were able to thwart the necessary two-thirds majority in the Reichstag vote on the “Enabling Act”, but their deputies allowed themselves to be lured by Hitler with false promises and intimidated with open threats .

"We were scared too. We were also human beings and fathers of families,” the Augsburg SPD deputy Josef Felder recalled at the moment of the vote, when armed SA men marched into the plenary hall. Together with Otto Wels and the members of his parliamentary group, Felder refused and had to pay for it with torture in a concentration camp and with exile.

Today in Germany nobody needs to become a hero for democracy. But it is necessary as a citizen to stand up for free democracy and to maintain a firm stance and a clear distance from those who despise it. Looking back teaches us that, and the happiness of our country should be worth that much to us.

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