Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor on 30 January 1933 at the head of a coalition in which the Nazis held three cabinet posts out of eleven. He did not have a parliamentary majority, and the conservatives who had arranged his appointment believed they could contain him.
On the night of 27 February the Reichstag burned. A young Dutch council communist, Marinus van der Lubbe, was found at the scene and confessed. Whether he acted alone remains contested — the Nazi leadership immediately claimed a Communist conspiracy, and postwar historians have argued both ways, with the current weight of scholarship favoring that he acted alone.
The response was ready the next day.
The Reichstag Fire Decree, signed by President Hindenburg on 28 February under the emergency provisions of Article 48 of the Weimar constitution, suspended habeas corpus, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly and association, the privacy of postal and telephone communications, and protections against search and property seizure. It remained in force until 1945.
Thousands of Communists and Social Democrats were arrested within days. Elections were held on 5 March under those conditions. On 23 March the Enabling Act — formally the Law to Remedy the Distress of People and Reich — transferred legislative power to the cabinet, passed by a Reichstag from which Communist deputies had been excluded and in which the chamber was surrounded by SA men. Only the Social Democrats voted against.
Two mechanisms account for why populations accept this, and they are well established.
Threat shifts political preference. Terror management research — Greenberg, Solomon and Pyszczynski's work on mortality salience — finds that reminders of death and existential threat reliably increase support for strong leaders, in-group solidarity, and punitive attitudes toward out-groups. Fear also degrades deliberative processing, so the shift happens at a moment when scrutiny is least available.
And legality supplies the permission. Nothing about the process was extra-legal in form. There was a constitutional emergency article, a presidential signature, and a parliamentary vote with the required majority. Milgram's finding — that obedience rises sharply within an institutional frame perceived as legitimate — applies at national scale: officials, judges and civil servants who would have resisted a coup complied with a decree.
The general form is the one to carry: a fear stimulus, followed immediately by a legal-looking remedy that is broader than the stimulus and does not expire. The emergency is the argument, and the argument does not have to survive scrutiny because the powers do not lapse when it fails.
Aftermath & Cross-Reference: Manufactured Crisis Defence