created by The-Legendary-Waffle on 02/03/2025 at 23:45 UTC
46 upvotes, 2 top-level comments (showing 2)
On theholocaustexplained.org, it says 'On 13 July 1934 the Reichstag retrospectively approved a bill legalising the purge as emergency defence measures.' I've looked in a few other sources, and I can't find any details regarding this bill. The best I could find was on Wikipedia, saying that on that day Hitler made a speech justifying it. Was a bill like this ever actually passed?
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Comment by Basicbore at 03/03/2025 at 08:16 UTC
22 upvotes, 0 direct replies
The specific bill in question was the Law Regarding Measures of State Self-Defense, passed on July 3, 1934. The law was used to retroactively justify the Night of the Long Knives.
By the time any of this had happened, the German Reichstag had become a “rubber stamp” body, utterly feckless and had little legislative role outside of formalities — it was totally under Nazi control.
President Hindenburg had appointed Hitler as Chancellor in January 1933 and then, under pressure from the Nazis, Hindenburg dissolved the German Reichstag on February 1, 1933. The Reichstag fire in February of 1933 was subsequently exploited by the Nazis as an alibi for further power consolidation, with Hitler pressuring Hindenburg to issue the Reichstag Fire Decree that granted the government sweeping powers to suspend civil liberties and arrest political opponents. Subsequent elections in early March increased Nazi representation in the Reichstag and they forged a majority alliance with fellow conservatives; this majority passed the Enabling Act on March 23, 1933, giving Chancellor Hitler and his cabinet legislative powers that bypassed the Reichstag. The full name of the Enabling Act was the “Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Reich”. Then, in July 1933, the Law Against the Formation of New Parties made the Nazis the only legal political party in Germany.
There were no further elections for representation in the Reichstag until after WW2. So the Reichstag’s dissolution wasn’t that the institution ceased to exist, but rather that it was repurposed to give Nazi laws and Hitler’s decrees an air of legitimacy and legality. Once the Nazi Party established itself as the majority in the Reichstag, it denied any other parties access to it.
So the Law Regarding Measures of State Self-Defense was really passed by Chancellor Hitler, rubber stamped by the Reichstag. According to the Enabling Act, Hitler could have simply decreed the Law Regarding Measures of State Self-Defense, but having it passed through the Reichstag lent the new law greater legitimacy. It was not passed or drafted prior to the Night of the Long Knives, but there were those key developments, like the Enabling Act etc, in the consolidation of political power that made the Law Regarding Measures of State Self-Defense (and the purges that the Law was made to justify) possible.