Instruct: Given a question, retrieve documents that answer the question.
Query: What day did Hitler take office?
On the day before President Paul von Hindenburg's death on August 2, 1934, Hitler's cabinet had enacted a law combining the offices of Chancellor (the head of government) and President (the head of state); Adolf Hitler would henceforth be known as "Führer und Reichskanzler" (Leader and Chancellor) and was both head of state and commander in chief of the armed forces. The day of Hindenburg's death, the cabinet ordered a plebiscite for August 19 for the German people to approve the combination of the two offices.
By January 1945, Hitler became obsessed with seeing a model of the planned cultural complex; he had his adjutants and Martin Bormann, his personal secretary and head of the Nazi Party Chancellery, call Giesler's office repeatedly, to ask when the Führer could view the model. Giesler's office worked around the clock to finish it. The model was finally set up in the cellar of the new Reich Chancellery, and was ready for viewing on 9 February, when it was examined by Hitler, Robert Ley, the Leader of the German Labor Front, and SS-"Oberguppenfūhrer" Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Chief of the Security Police, along with Hitler's personal photographer Walter Frentz and his valet, Heinz Lange. Hitler was apparently entranced by what he saw:
Heidegger was elected rector of the University on 21 April 1933, and joined the National Socialist German Workers' (Nazi) Party on 1 May. In his inaugural address as rector on 27 May he expressed his support of a German revolution, and in an article and a speech to the students from the same year he also supported Adolf Hitler.
On 29 April 1945, Burgdorf, Krebs, Joseph Goebbels, and Martin Bormann witnessed and signed Hitler's last will and testament. After Hitler's suicide on 30 April 1945, Goebbels assumed Hitler's role as chancellor. On 1 May, Goebbels dictated a letter to Soviet Army General Vasily Chuikov, requesting a temporary ceasefire and ordered General Krebs to deliver it. Chuikov commanded the Soviet forces in central Berlin. After this was rejected, Goebbels decided that further efforts were futile. Goebbels then launched into a tirade berating the generals, reminding them Hitler forbade them to surrender. "Ministerialdirektor" Hans Fritzsche left the room to take matters into his own hands. He went to his nearby office on Wilhelmplatz and wrote a surrender letter addressed to Soviet Marshall Georgy Zhukov. General Burgdorf followed Fritzsche to his office. There he asked Fritzsche if he intended to surrender Berlin. Fritzsche replied that he was going to do just that. Burgdorf shouted that Hitler had forbidden surrender and as a civilian he had no authority to do so. Burgdorf then pulled his pistol to shoot Fritzsche, but a radio technician "knocked the gun" and the bullet fired hit the ceiling. Several men then hustled Burgdorf out of the office and he returned to the bunker.
Franz Halder (30 June 1884 – 2 April 1972) was a German general and the chief of the "Oberkommando des Heeres" staff (OKH, Army High Command) from 1938 until September 1942, when he was dismissed after frequent disagreements with Adolf Hitler. During the invasion of the Soviet Union Halder insisted on focusing on Moscow, despite Hitler's objections. Until December 1941 Halder's military position corresponded to the old Chief of the General Staff position, which during World War I had been the highest military office in the German Imperial Army. Halder's diary during his time as chief of OKH General Staff has been a source for authors that have written about such subjects as Hitler, World War II, and the Nazi Party. In William Shirer's "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich", Halder's diary is cited hundreds of times.
Six days after being sworn in as Chancellor in 1933, Hitler met with the German military leaders, declaring that his first priority was rearmament. The new Defense Minister, General Werner von Blomberg, introduced Nazi principles into the armed forces, emphasizing the concept of "Volksgemeinschaft" (national community), in which Germans were united in a society without classes. "The uniform makes all men equal." Military rank specified a chain of command, not class boundaries. Officers were instructed to mingle with other ranks. Blomberg's decree on the army and National Socialism on 25 May 1934 ordered: "When non-commissioned officers and men take part in any festivity, care must be taken that the officers do not all sit together. I request that this guidance be given the most serious attention." The rapidly expanding armed forces enlisted many new officers and men from the Hitler Youth. The American William L. Shirer reported that all ranks ate the same rations, socialized when off duty, and that officers were concerned with their men's personal problems.
Hitler became agitated by the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) after the Reichstag fire on February 23, 1933. The fire was started by Marinus van der Lubbe who was accused of being one of many communist agitators; however, a trial in March 1933 determined van der Lubbe acted alone. The Reichstag fire caused Hitler to create the Enabling Act which removed habeas corpus and many other civil liberties, providing Hitler with dictatorial control over Germany. Hitler quickly established a plan to execute any person who was working against the Nazi party and twice extended the act beyond its initial 1937 expiration. The Enabling Act also allowed Hitler to rule that all competing political parties of the Nazi regime were illegal. Albert Hensel and his co-conspirators did not have the strength to outwardly fight against Hitler, so they took a secretive approach to resisting. The German police were secretive in their counter efforts as well. The resisters were often not well received by the German populace and had to also hide their actions from them in fear of the citizens informing the police of their actions.
The book is divided into two sections: in the first part, a narrative retells the formative years of the young Adolf Hitler between 1907 and 1918, when he lived as a starving artist on the streets and in the asylums of Vienna, and then joined World War I as a volunteer on the Western Front. When the war ends, Hitler comes into contact with members of the Thule Society in Munich, an association of occultists who had launched a political party, the German Workers Party (DAP).The narration ends in 1920 when Hitler takes over the DAP and turns it into the Nazi Party (NSDAP). In an interview with The Guardian, author Claus Hant explained that the events after 1920 are exhaustively documented in the numerous Hitler biographies. But what the biographies do not investigate is the time before then, when Hitler was transformed from inconsequential artist and drifter to towering political leader. Hant says that he has centered Young Hitler deliberately around this momentous transformation. According to Hant, this decisive turning point in Hitler’s life can only be explained satisfactorily now that recent research has unearthed certain previously unknown data and facts.
Under the Versailles Settlement, the Rhineland was demilitarized. Germany accepted this arrangement under the Locarno Treaties of 1925. Hitler claimed that it threatened Germany and on 7 March 1936 he sent German forces into the Rhineland. He gambled on Britain not getting involved but was unsure how France would react. The action was opposed by many of his advisers. His officers had orders to withdraw if they met French resistance. France consulted Britain and lodged protests with the League, but took no action. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin said that Britain lacked the forces to back its guarantees to France and that in any case, public opinion would not allow it. In Britain, it was thought that the Germans were merely walking into "their own backyard". Hugh Dalton, a Labour Party MP who usually advocated stiff resistance to Germany, said that neither the British people nor Labour would support military or economic sanctions. In the Council of the League, only the Soviet Union proposed sanctions against Germany. Hitler was invited to negotiate. He proposed a non-aggression pact with the Western powers. When asked for details he did not reply. Hitler's occupation of the Rhineland had persuaded him that the international community would not resist him and put Germany in a powerful strategic position.
In the first German presidential election, held on 11 February 1919, five days after the "Nationalversammlung" (constituent assembly) convened in Weimar, Ebert was elected as provisional president of the German Republic. He remained in that position after the new constitution came into force and was sworn in as "Reichspräsident" on 21 August 1919. He was Germany's first-ever democratically elected head of state, and was also the first commoner, the first socialist, the first civilian and the first person from a proletarian background to hold that position. In the whole time of the unified German Reich's existence from 1871 to 1945, he was also the only head of state who was unequivocally committed to democracy.
The design of the Nazi flag was introduced by Hitler as the party flag in mid-1920, roughly a year before (29 July 1921) he became his political party's leader: a flag with a red background, a white disk and a black swastika "(Hakenkreuz)" in the middle. In "Mein Kampf", Hitler explained the process by which the Nazi flag design was created: It was necessary to use the same colours as Imperial Germany, because in Hitler's opinion they were "revered colours expressive of our homage to the glorious past and which once brought so much honour to the German nation." The most important requirement was that "the new flag ... should prove effective as a large poster" because "in hundreds of thousands of cases a really striking emblem may be the first cause of awakening interest in a movement." Nazi propaganda clarified the symbolism of the flag: the red colour stood for the social, white for the movement's national thinking and the swastika for the victory of the Aryan peoples over Jewry. Several designs by a number of different authors were considered, but the one adopted in the end was Hitler's personal design. Albert Speer stated in his memoirs that "in only two other designs did he (Adolf Hitler) execute the same care as he did his Obersalzberg house: that of the Reich War Flag and his own standard of Chief of State".
Presidential elections were held in Germany on 29 March 1925, with a second round run-off on 26 April. They were the first direct elections to the office of President of the Reich (), Germany's head of state during the 1919–33 Weimar Republic. The first President, Friedrich Ebert, who had died on 28 February 1925, had been elected indirectly, by the National Assembly, but the Weimar Constitution required that his successor be elected by the "whole German people". Paul von Hindenburg was elected as the second president of Germany in the second round of voting.
The Reichstag fire (, ) was an arson attack on the Reichstag building (home of the German parliament) in Berlin on Monday 27 February 1933, precisely four weeks after Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany. Hitler's government stated that Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch council communist, was found near the building and attributed the fire to communist agitators in general—though later that year, a German court decided that van der Lubbe had acted alone, as he claimed. After the fire, the Reichstag Fire Decree was passed. The Nazi Party used the fire as a pretext that communists were plotting against the German government, and the event is considered pivotal in the establishment of Nazi Germany. The term Reichstag fire has come to refer to false flag actions perpetrated or facilitated by an authority to promote their own interests through popular approval of retribution or retraction of civil rights.
Roman Herzog (5 April 1934 – 10 January 2017) was a German politician, judge and legal scholar, who served as President of Germany from 1994 to 1999. A member of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), he was the first president to be elected after the reunification of Germany. He previously served as a judge of the Federal Constitutional Court, and he was the President of the court 1987–1994. Before his appointment as a judge he was a professor of law. He received the 1997 Charlemagne Prize.
Hitler believed in the leader principle (hence his title, the Leader, "der Führer"), and he considered it ludicrous that an idea of governance or morality could be held by the people above the power of the leader. As Joachim Fest described a 1930 confrontation between Hitler and Otto Strasser, "Now Hitler took Strasser to task for placing 'the idea' above the Führer and wanting 'to give every party comrade the right to decide the nature of the idea, even to decide whether or not the Führer is true to the so-called idea.' That, he cried angrily, was the worst kind of democracy, for which there was no place in their movement. 'With us the Führer and the idea are one and the same, and every party comrade has to do what the Führer commands, for he embodies the idea and he alone knows its ultimate goal.'"
The high command under Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff increasingly controlled the country, but in October after the failed offensive in spring 1918, the German armies were in retreat, allies Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire had collapsed, and Bulgaria had surrendered. The Empire collapsed in the November 1918 Revolution with the abdications of its monarchs. This left a postwar federal republic and a devastated and unsatisfied populace, which later led to the rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazism.
While he studied the activities of the German Workers' Party (DAP), Hitler became impressed with founder Anton Drexler's antisemitic, nationalist, anti-capitalist and anti-Marxist ideas. Drexler was impressed with Hitler's oratory skills, and invited him to join the DAP on 12 September 1919. On the orders of his army superiors, Hitler applied to join the party, and within a week was accepted as party member 555 (the party began counting membership at 500 to give the impression they were a much larger party). Hitler, in his work "Mein Kampf", later claimed to be the seventh party member (he was in fact the seventh executive member of the Party's central committee).
In 1931 he joined the socialist "Red students group". On 1 May 1933 he joined the Nazi party: he was member number 2,673,178. Party membership had surged since January 1933 when the Nazis took power and lost no time in transforming Germany into a one-party dictatorship. Nevertheless, in his autobiography published in 1999 Gerstner evidently identified an inconsistency which could not go unremarked. He had taken the step, he wrote, only "out of hatred against Hitler ... in order [to do] something against the Nazis" ("nur aus "Hass gegen Hitler ...um etwas gegen die Nazis" zu tun"). With half an eye on Gerstner's subsequent career as a German diplomat, there were commentators who found the explanation less than persuasive.
If the president dies, resigns or is otherwise removed from office, a successor is to be elected within thirty days. Horst Köhler, upon his resignation on May 31, 2010, became the first president to trigger this re-election process. Jens Böhrnsen, President of the Senate and Mayor of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen and at the time President of the Bundesrat, assumed the powers and duties of head of state. Similarly, when Christian Wulff resigned in 2012, it was Horst Seehofer, Minister-President of Bavaria, as President of the Bundesrat, who assumed the powers and duties of head of state. When Heinrich Lübke, on the other hand, announced his resignation in 1968, it only came into effect the following year, a mere three months before the scheduled end of his term and after the expedited election of his successor. Back in 1949 Karl Arnold, at the time Minister-President of North Rhine-Westphalia and President of the Bundesrat, also acted as head of state for a few days: after the Basic Law had come into effect and he himself was elected as President of the Bundesrat, the first President of Germany was not yet elected and the office therefore vacant.
Red, white, and black were the colors of the German Empire from 1870 to 1918, and as such they came to be associated with German nationalism. In the 1920s they were adopted as the colors of the Nazi flag. In "Mein Kampf", Hitler explained that they were "revered colors expressive of our homage to the glorious past." The red part of the flag was also chosen to attract attention – Hitler wrote: "the new flag ... should prove effective as a large poster" because "in hundreds of thousands of cases a really striking emblem may be the first cause of awakening interest in a movement." The red also symbolized the social program of the Nazis, aimed at German workers. Several designs by a number of different authors were considered, but the one adopted in the end was Hitler's personal design.
In November 1918, with internal revolution, a stalemated war, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire suing for peace, Austria-Hungary falling apart from multiple ethnic tensions, and pressure from the German high command, the Kaiser and all German ruling princes abdicated. On 9 November 1918, the Social Democrat Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed a Republic, in cooperation with the business and middle classes, not the revolting workers. The new government led by the German Social Democrats called for and received an armistice on 11 November 1918; in practice it was a surrender, and the Allies kept up the food blockade to guarantee an upper hand. The war was over; the history books closed on the German Empire. It was succeeded by the democratic, yet flawed, Weimar Republic.
In April 1945, he was present in the Berlin "Führerbunker" during the last days of Adolf Hitler and Goebbels. After Hitler's suicide on 30 April 1945, Goebbels assumed Hitler's role as chancellor. On 1 May, Goebbels completed his sole official act as chancellor. He dictated a letter to Soviet Army General Vasily Chuikov, requesting a temporary ceasefire and ordered German General Hans Krebs to deliver it. Chuikov commanded the Soviet forces in central Berlin. After this was rejected, Goebbels decided that further efforts were futile. Goebbels then launched into a tirade berating the generals, reminding them Hitler forbade them to surrender. Fritzsche left the room to try and take matters into his own hands. He went to his nearby office on Wilhelmplatz and wrote a surrender letter addressed to Soviet Marshall Georgy Zhukov. An angry and drunk General Wilhelm Burgdorf followed Fritzsche to his office. There he asked Fritzsche if he intended to surrender Berlin. Fritzsche replied that he was going to do just that. Burgdorf shouted that Hitler had forbidden surrender and as a civilian he had no authority to do so. Burgdorf then pulled his pistol to shoot Fritzsche, but a radio technician "knocked the gun" and the bullet fired hit the ceiling. Several men then hustled Burgdorf out of the office and he returned to the bunker. Fritzsche then left his office and went over to the Soviet lines and offered to surrender the city.
On the evening of 29 January 1933, when the conservative "Junker" Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin told Papen that his plan to have Hitler as Chancellor while retaining power for himself was an absurd scheme that could only end very badly for everybody, Papen replied: "What do you want? I have the confidence of Hindenburg. In two months we'll have pushed Hitler so far into the corner that he'll squeal." In the end, the President, who had previously vowed never to allow Hitler (whom he derisively referred to as a 'Bohemian corporal'), to become Chancellor, appointed Hitler to the post on 30 January 1933, with Papen as Vice-Chancellor. The British historian Edgar Feuchtwanger wrote that Schleicher's rapid rise and fall from power was due to the system of presidential government he had created in 1930, as the system of presidential government reduced almost everything down to the whims of President Hindenburg, and gave enormous power to those like Papen who happened to enjoy Hindenburg's trust and favor. The system of presidential government created very personalized politics where those who had the approval of Hindenburg and his "Kamarilla" enjoyed power and those who did not were excluded from power, regardless of what the voters felt. On institutional grounds, Papen should have been in a weak position as he was a very unpopular former Chancellor without a seat in the "Reichstag" or even a political party, whose influence was based entirely on his friendship with Hindenburg. Feuchwanger wrote that Papen was a vain, irresponsible intriguer who was only powerful in January 1933 because he was Hindenburg's favorite politician and the president wanted his favorite back into office again. 
At the formation of Hitler's cabinet on 30 January, only three Nazis had cabinet posts: Hitler, Göring, and Wilhelm Frick. The only Nazi besides Hitler to have an actual portfolio was Frick, who held the then-powerless interior ministry. The other eight posts were held by conservatives close to Papen. Additionally, as part of the deal that allowed Hitler to become Chancellor, Papen was granted the right to attend every meeting between Hitler and Hindenburg. Under the Weimar Constitution, the Chancellor was a fairly weak figure, serving as little more than a chairman. Moreover, Cabinet decisions were made by majority vote. Papen believed that his conservative friends' majority in the Cabinet and his closeness to Hindenburg would keep Hitler in check. To the warning that he was placing himself in Hitler's hands, Papen replied, "You are mistaken. We've hired him." On the morning of 30 January 1933, when Hitler was due to be sworn in as Chancellor by Hindenburg, the "Government of National Concentration" almost collapsed before it began when Hugenberg learned that Hitler planned on dissolving the "Reichstag" to allow him to get the two-third majority so he could pass the Enabling Act, whereas Hugenberg had been given to believe that the "Government of National Concentration" would rule with the "Reichstag" elected in November 1932. Passing the Enabling Act would allow Hitler to rule via decree, which would mean that Hitler would not need the support of the DNVP in the "Reichstag" anymore. Hugenberg knew Hitler well enough to understand what Hitler ruling with the Enabling Act would mean for the DNVP. The discovery that Hitler planned on dissolving the "Reichstag" caused a lengthy shouting march between Hitler and Hugenberg that delayed the swearing of the Hitler government and was ended when Papen told Hugenberg not to doubt the word of a fellow German and Meissner came out to say Hindenburg was tiring of waiting to swear in the new government. In his 1996 book "Hitler's Thirty Days to Power", the US historian Henry Ashby Turner wrote that Papen was "the key figure in steering the course of events toward the disastrous outcome, the person who more than anyone else caused what happened. None of what occurred in January 1933 would have been possible in the absence of his quest for revenge against Schleicher and his hunger for a return to power".
President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler Chancellor on January 30, 1933. Over the next few months, during the so-called Gleichschaltung, Hitler dispensed with the need for the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic as a legislative body and eliminated all rival political parties in Germany, so that by the middle of 1933 the country had become a one-party state under his direction and control. Hitler did not exercise absolute power, however, despite his swift consolidation of political authority. As chancellor, Hitler did not command the army, which remained under the formal leadership of Hindenburg, a highly respected veteran field marshal. While many officers were impressed by Hitler's promises of an expanded army, a return to conscription, and a more aggressive foreign policy, the army continued to guard its traditions of independence during the early years of the Nazi regime.
One day before the death of "Reichspräsident" Paul von Hindenburg, Hitler and his cabinet decreed a law that merged the office of the president with that of Chancellor, so that Hitler became "Führer and Reichskanzler" – although eventually "Reichskanzler" was quietly dropped. Hitler therefore assumed the President's powers without assuming the office itself – ostensibly out of respect for Hindenburg's achievements as a heroic figure in World War I. Though this law was in breach of the Enabling Act, which specifically precluded any laws concerning the Presidential office, it was approved by a referendum on 19 August.