The NSDAP becomes the only party

On 14 July 1933 the Reich government passed the Law against the Formation of New Parties (Gesetz gegen die Neubildung von Parteien). It had only two sections. The first stated: “The National Socialist German Workers’ Party is the only political party in Germany.” The second threatened imprisonment or penal servitude of up to three years for anyone who maintained the organisation of another party or founded a new one. The law was signed by Chancellor Adolf Hitler, the Minister of the Interior, Wilhelm Frick, and the Minister of Justice, Franz Gürtner. The Reichstag had no say in the matter: under the Enabling Act the government could pass laws by itself. Germany had formally become a one-party state.

The law confirms the facts

The law did not ban any existing party, because none was left. The communist KPD had been shattered since the Reichstag fire and its assets confiscated. Frick had banned all activity by the Social Democratic SPD on 22 June. Alfred Hugenberg’s nationalists, the liberals, the Bavarian People’s Party and the Catholic Centre had dissolved themselves between 27 June and 5 July. Earlier, on 2 May, the Nazis had smashed the trade unions. The law of 14 July thus closed off the future: it prohibited the revival of the dissolved parties and the creation of new ones. In the years that followed many people were convicted under it, above all communists and Social Democrats working underground.

Accounts of the day repeated in many chronicles say that the NSDAP became “the official party of Germany”. More precisely, it became the only legal party. The relationship between party and state was not regulated until several months later.

The party that had gained this monopoly was itself changing fast. After the March elections, crowds of civil servants, teachers and careerists began joining the NSDAP; the old members mockingly called them the “March fallen” (Märzgefallene). According to approximate figures, membership rose from about 850,000 in January 1933 to about 2.5 million in the spring, and from 1 May the party stopped admitting new members. On 6 July Hitler told the Reich Governors that the revolution was over and must now give way to evolution. The message was meant above all for the SA leaders, headed by Ernst Röhm, who were demanding a “second revolution”.

One cabinet meeting, many laws

The cabinet meeting of 14 July 1933 went down in history not only because of the law on parties. That day the government passed several acts that showed what the new state was to be.

The most sinister was the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring (Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses). It permitted the compulsory sterilisation of people deemed to be suffering from “hereditary diseases”, including “congenital feeble-mindedness”, schizophrenia, epilepsy, hereditary blindness and deafness, severe physical deformities and also severe alcoholism. Sterilisation was decided by special “hereditary health courts”, and applications could be made by doctors and the directors of institutions. The law came into force on 1 January 1934. By 1945 between 300,000 and 400,000 people had been forcibly sterilised under it, several thousand of whom died as a result of the operations. The law was the first step in the policy of “racial hygiene” that in 1939 led to Aktion T4, the murder of the mentally ill and disabled, whose doctors and methods were later used in the extermination camps.

The same day the government adopted the Law on the Revocation of Naturalisations and the Deprivation of German Citizenship. It allowed naturalisations granted between November 1918 and January 1933 to be annulled – which struck above all at Jews who had come from Eastern Europe, Poland included – and citizenship to be withdrawn from émigrés who “harmed the interests of the Reich”. On this basis writers and politicians in exile, among others, were stripped of their citizenship. The Law on Plebiscites gave the government the right to call referendums, which Hitler used to legitimise his decisions, and the law on the confiscation of property “hostile to the nation and the state” allowed the assets of the SPD and other opponents to be seized.

The Concordat

There was one more matter in the background. On 8 July in Rome, Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen and the Holy See’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, later Pope Pius XII, initialled a concordat between the Reich and the Holy See. They signed it on 20 July, and the Reich ratified it on 10 September. The Concordat guaranteed the Catholic Church freedom of worship, denominational schools and the activity of Catholic associations of a religious character; in return, Article 32 barred the clergy from activity in political parties. For Pius XI and Pacelli, who a few years earlier had concluded the Lateran Treaty with Mussolini, it was an attempt to protect the Church in a state where a Catholic party no longer existed. For Hitler it was his government’s first major international agreement and proof that the world was taking the new Germany seriously. It soon became clear that the regime had no intention of abiding by its provisions. In 1937, in the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, the Pope accused the Reich government of violating the Concordat.

Party and state

The law of 14 July was the beginning, not the end, of the construction of the dictatorship. On 12 November 1933 Reichstag elections were held with a single list of candidates, for which, according to official figures, 92 per cent of voters cast their ballots; they were combined with a plebiscite on Germany’s withdrawal from the League of Nations. The Law to Secure the Unity of Party and State of 1 December 1933 made the NSDAP a corporation under public law, “the bearer of the German idea of the state”, and Hitler’s deputy in the party, Rudolf Hess, and the SA chief of staff, Röhm, joined the government. The Reichstag became an assembly that met a few times a year to listen to Hitler’s speeches and unanimously approve whatever was put before it.

Significance

From 14 July 1933 until 1945 there was no legal opposition in Germany. All the decisions that led to war – from leaving the League of Nations in October 1933, through the reintroduction of universal military service and the remilitarisation of the Rhineland, to the annexation of Austria and the occupation of Czechoslovakia – were taken in a closed circle around Hitler, and no one in the country could publicly challenge them. On 1 September 1939 Hitler announced in a Reichstag made up solely of NSDAP deputies and their guests that “since 5.45 a.m. we have been returning fire”, although the attack on Poland had begun an hour earlier. No one in the chamber protested.

The law remained in force in Germany until 1945, and from 1938 in Austria as well. It was repealed by the Allied Control Council on 20 September 1945. The sentences passed under it were not annulled in Germany until 1998.