Emergency Powers Act (1933)

On January 30, 1933, Reich President of Germany Paul Hindenburg appointed Reich Chancellor (Head of Government) Adolf Hitler, leader of the National Socialists . The Reichstag was dissolved by presidential decree on February 1 and new elections were called.

On February 27, 1933, the Reichstag was set on fire , in which the Communist Party was accused. After that, a terror campaign against the left began in Germany. The day after the arson, on February 28, Reich President Hindenburg issued two decrees: “ On the Defense of the People and the State ” and “Against the Betrayal of the German People and the Intrigues of the Traitors to the Homeland”. Constitutional rights and freedoms were terminated.

March 5 elections were held in the Reichstag , in which the Nazis received 43.91% of the vote. The Communist Party of Germany was banned by a special decree, the mandates that were supposed to be given to the Communist deputies (81 mandates) following the results of the past elections were canceled, about a quarter of the opposition Nazi deputies of the Social Democratic Party were arrested, deported, or were underground ^[1] .

According to Art. 76 of the Weimar Constitution, in order to grant broad powers that were laws in nature, contradicting or changing the norms of the constitution, a qualified majority of 2/3 of the votes was required (the presence of 2/3 of the Reichstag members and the consent of 2/3 of the present deputies). According to the results of the March 5, 1933 elections to the Reichstag, the National Socialists got only 288 mandates out of 647. After the cancellation of 81 mandates, which were supposed to be the Communist deputies elected in these elections, the number of deputies of the Reichstag will be reduced from 647 to 566 and it will be required to adopt an act to amend the constitution no longer 423, but only 378 votes.

Voting for the bill took place in an environment where the building in which the deputies sat was surrounded by troops of the SA . Hitler negotiated with the center party leader Ludwig Kaas and persuaded him to support the bill in exchange for verbal guarantees of freedom of church received from Hitler. The Social Democrats planned to break the quorum by boycotting the meeting, but the leadership of the Reichstag, led by Hermann Goering, changed the procedure according to which the absence, for no good reason, was not taken into account as the basis for determining the quorum. Thus, the boycott lost its meaning and the Social Democrats took part in the meeting.

441 deputies voted for the law, all 94 deputies from the SPD voted against.

The law consists of five articles. Article 1 empowers the imperial government to issue state laws. Article 2 permits that laws so issued may contain derogations from the German constitution, with the exception of questions regarding the powers of the Reichstag and the Reichsrat, as well as the rights of the Reich President. Section 3 determines that laws are drawn up by the Reich Chancellor and enter into force on the day of publication in the official publication (newspaper "Reichsgesetzblatt"). Article 4 gives the Reich government complete freedom of action when concluding foreign policy treaties. Article 5 establishes the duration of the specified powers, granting them to the "government currently in power."

Initially, the law was limited to the period until April 1, 1937. However, on January 30, 1937, the Reichstag, by then unconditionally controlled by the Nazi government, extended it for another four years. Two years later, on January 30, 1939, the decision to extend the law for the same period (that is, until 1943) was made by the so-called Great German Reichstag, convened in 1938 after the Anschluss of Austria and the annexation of the Sudetenland . And finally, on May 10, 1943, a special decree, now issued personally by Hitler himself, extended the law for an unlimited period. ^[2] As a result, the Extraordinary Powers Act was in force until the fall of the Third Reich .

The law finally enshrined the Nazi dictatorship in Germany. According to Mikhail Marchenko , the law maximally emasculated the Weimar constitution, which was democratic at that time ^[3] . The transfer of legislative powers to the imperial government destroyed the separation of legislative and executive powers in favor of the latter, and the authority granted to the government to enact laws contrary to the constitution depreciated the constitution itself. The Reichstag from a capable legislative body turned into a decorative appendage of the Nazi regime.

• March 23rd, 1933: Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Nation . learnhistory.org.uk. Date of treatment July 14, 2012. Archived on September 28, 2012.
• Ermächtigungsgesetz - “Die SPD hat die Ehre der Weimarer Republik gerettet” - (German) . SPIEGEL ONLINE. Date of treatment July 14, 2012. Archived on September 28, 2012.