At 9:00 in the morning on August 2, 1934, German President Paul von Hindenburg died at his country estate in Neudeck, East Prussia. He was eighty-six years old, and had been suffering from lung cancer for months. Within hours of the announcement of his death, Adolf Hitler proclaimed himself Führer und Reichskanzler, Leader and Reich Chancellor, of Germany, combining in a single person the offices of head of state and head of government that had previously been held separately. Three hours after Hindenburg’s death, Hitler issued a decree announcing that he had assumed the powers of the presidency in accordance with a law his cabinet had passed the previous day. The Weimar Republic, Germany’s democratic system of government, was finished.
The German armed forces moved with striking speed. By noon of August 2, the Wehrmacht had replaced its oath to the German constitution with a personal oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler. Every soldier, sailor, and airman in Germany swore allegiance not to the state or the nation but to one specific man: “I swear before God this sacred oath, that I will render unconditional obedience to the Führer of the German Reich and people, Adolf Hitler, the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, and will be ready, as a brave soldier, to risk my life at any time for this oath.” It was a moment of profound constitutional consequence. Germany’s armed forces had been captured for Hitler personally, not for Germany.
Germany Before Hitler: The Weimar Republic and Its Collapse
The events of August 2, 1934, were the culmination of a process that had begun with Germany’s defeat in the First World War and the political instability that followed. The Weimar Republic, established in 1919, was Germany’s first attempt at parliamentary democracy, but it was born into conditions of extraordinary difficulty. The Treaty of Versailles imposed massive reparations payments, stripped Germany of territory, limited its military to 100,000 men, and included a “war guilt” clause that required Germany to accept sole responsibility for the war. These terms generated deep resentment across the German political spectrum.
The Weimar Republic survived a series of crises in its early years, including the hyperinflation of 1923 that wiped out the savings of the middle class, and enjoyed a period of relative stability in the mid-1920s. But the Great Depression that began in 1929 destroyed that stability. Unemployment soared to over six million. The political system fractured. Extremist parties of both left and right attracted millions of voters. Into this environment came Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, the Nazis, who combined virulent nationalism, antisemitism, scapegoating of Jews and Communists, and promises of national restoration into a political program that reached voters the mainstream parties had lost.
Hitler had been born on April 20, 1889, in Braunau am Inn, Austria. He had served as a soldier in the First World War, been wounded and decorated, and experienced Germany’s defeat as a personal trauma that would drive the rest of his life. He became the leader of the small Nazi party in Munich in the early 1920s and built it into a significant political force through a combination of theatrical public speaking, organized violence by the SA paramilitary organization, and a nationalist message that resonated with economically desperate Germans. In November 1923, he attempted to seize power in the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich. The attempt failed, and Hitler was sentenced to five years in prison, of which he served nine months in Landsberg fortress, during which time he dictated Mein Kampf, his autobiography and political manifesto.
Released from prison in late 1924, Hitler rebuilt the Nazi party through legal political means. In the elections of July 1932, the Nazis became the largest single party in the Reichstag, winning 37.4 percent of the vote. They were unable to form a government alone, but no other stable coalition was possible without them. On January 30, 1933, President Hindenburg, persuaded by conservative politicians who believed they could control and use Hitler for their own purposes, appointed Hitler as Chancellor of Germany.
The Consolidation of Power: From Chancellor to Dictator, 1933 to 1934
Hitler’s appointment as chancellor was not the end of democracy in Germany but the beginning of its systematic destruction. The Nazis began immediately to exploit every mechanism of the constitutional system they were dismantling.
On February 27, 1933, the Reichstag building was destroyed by fire. The Nazi government blamed Communist arsonists and used the incident as justification for the Reichstag Fire Decree, which suspended civil liberties including freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the right to assembly, and allowed the government to detain political opponents indefinitely without trial. Thousands of Communists, Social Democrats, and trade union leaders were arrested.
In March 1933, Hitler pushed the Enabling Act through the Reichstag, formally titled the Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Reich. The Act gave Hitler as chancellor the power to enact legislation, including laws that violated the constitution, without the approval of the Reichstag or the President. It passed 441 to 94, with the Social Democrats casting the only opposing votes; the Communists were unable to vote because their deputies had been arrested or intimidated into absence. The Catholic Centre Party’s support was secured by Hitler’s promise to respect the rights of the Catholic Church. With the Enabling Act, Hitler had effectively become a dictator. But Hindenburg technically remained capable of dismissing him, and as long as Hindenburg lived, that theoretical check on Hitler’s power remained.
Through 1933, the Nazis systematically eliminated the remaining structures of German political pluralism. All other political parties were banned by July 1933. State parliaments were dissolved. Trade unions were abolished. The press was brought under Nazi control. The civil service was purged of Jews and political opponents. Joseph Goebbels, appointed Minister of Propaganda in March 1933, built the machinery of total information control that would define the Third Reich.
The Night of the Long Knives: Murdering the Way to Total Power
By spring 1934, one obstacle remained between Hitler and absolute uncontested power. President Hindenburg was still alive, increasingly frail but constitutionally still capable of dismissing Hitler and transferring power to the military. And within the Nazi movement itself, a dangerous tension was building between Hitler and the SA, the Sturmabteilung or Stormtroopers, the Brownshirts whose street violence had been crucial in Hitler’s rise but who were now becoming a liability.
Ernst Rohm, the SA chief of staff, commanded a force that had grown to somewhere between three and four and a half million men by mid-1934. Rohm wanted to dissolve the professional army and replace it with his mass SA organization, creating a “people’s army” built from the Nazi movement’s grassroots. The professional generals of the Reichswehr were furious at this prospect and deeply distrustful of Rohm. Hindenburg himself threatened to declare martial law and hand power to the military if Hitler did not bring the SA under control. Hitler understood that he needed the generals’ support to succeed Hindenburg as president, and that he could not have that support while Rohm remained a power in the Nazi state.
Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, Reinhard Heydrich, his intelligence chief, and Hermann Goring spread fabricated evidence that Rohm was planning a coup against Hitler. On June 21, 1934, Hitler obtained Hindenburg’s approval to proceed against the SA by force. The operation was codenamed Hummingbird. On the night of June 30 to July 2, 1934, the event known as the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler ordered the SS and Gestapo to murder the SA leadership. Rohm and his commanders were summoned to a hotel in Bad Wiessee, Bavaria, where they were arrested by Hitler personally. Most were executed without trial over the following two days. Rohm himself was initially offered the chance to commit suicide, which he refused, and was then shot by SS guards on July 1.
The purge did not stop with the SA leadership. Former Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher and his wife were shot in their home. Gregor Strasser, who had been second in the Nazi party hierarchy until 1932 and whom Hitler suspected of disloyalty, was murdered. Conservative politicians and others on Hitler’s enemies list were also killed. Hitler later told the Reichstag that 61 people had been executed, though most historians put the actual death toll at between 150 and 200, with some estimates reaching 1,000.
The aftermath was carefully managed. Hindenburg sent a telegram congratulating Hitler on his “courageous personal intervention.” Hitler justified the murders in a radio address: “In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and thereby I became the supreme Justiciar of the German people.” The Reichstag retroactively legalized the killings. German public opinion, manipulated by Goebbels’s propaganda apparatus and deeply fearful of what the SA’s “second revolution” might have brought, largely accepted the official narrative that Hitler had saved Germany from a violent putsch.
The Wikipedia article on the Night of the Long Knives provides a comprehensive account of the planning, execution, and political consequences of the purge that cleared the path to Hitler’s assumption of supreme power.
The Law of August 1 and Hindenburg’s Death
Through July 1934, Hitler and his inner circle knew that Hindenburg was dying. Hitler had been aware since April that the president would likely not survive the year. The military had already agreed in principle, in exchange for the murder of Rohm, that it would support Hitler as Hindenburg’s successor. On April 11, 1934, Hitler and Defense Minister General Werner von Blomberg had met aboard the cruiser Deutschland off the Baltic coast and reached an understanding: the SA would be subordinated, Rohm would be removed, and the military would support Hitler as president after Hindenburg’s death.
On August 1, 1934, with Hindenburg’s death imminent, the Reich Cabinet passed the Law Concerning the Head of State of the German Reich. Its language was brief and absolute: “The office of Reich President will be combined with that of the Reich Chancellor. The existing authority of the Reich President shall consequently be transferred to the Führer and Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler. He shall designate his successor. This law takes effect upon the death of Reich President von Hindenburg.” The law was signed by Hitler and his cabinet ministers including Franz von Papen as Deputy Reich Chancellor, Konstantin von Neurath as Foreign Minister, Wilhelm Frick as Interior Minister, Joseph Goebbels as Propaganda Minister, and Werner von Blomberg as Defense Minister.
At 9:00 a.m. on August 2, Hindenburg died. Three hours later, Hitler issued his decree declaring that he had assumed the powers of the presidency. He announced that the title “Reich President” would not be used again, arguing that the office had become so inseparably linked to Hindenburg personally that it would be disrespectful to transfer the title. He would instead be called Führer und Reichskanzler. He also announced that a referendum would be held to seek popular approval for the merger of the two offices.
The Führer Oath was administered to the Wehrmacht that same day. Germany’s armed forces were now personally bound to Hitler, not to the constitution or the state. It was a transformation of constitutional significance that the generals had agreed to willingly. They had gotten what they wanted: Rohm was dead, the SA was neutralized, and the professional army was supreme. What they had given in return was the personal loyalty of the entire German military to a single man who answered to no one.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum article on the death of President von Hindenburg provides a concise account of the legal mechanisms by which Hitler assumed dictatorial power upon Hindenburg’s death.
The August 19 Referendum and the Verdict of German Opinion
Hitler had announced on August 2 that a referendum would be held to ratify his assumption of both offices. The referendum took place on August 19, 1934. Voters were asked to approve the merger of the offices of president and chancellor under the title of Führer. The referendum was held under conditions of widespread intimidation and with no organized opposition possible in a state where all other political parties had been banned and the press was entirely controlled by Goebbels’s ministry. Joseph Goebbels himself recorded his anxiety in his diary entry for August 22: “Initial results: very bad. Then better. Finally over 38 million for the Führer. I expected more. The Catholics failed.”
The official result was approximately 89.9 percent in favor, with roughly 90 percent of eligible voters participating. The “yes” vote represented about 38 million people. The “no” vote was approximately 4.3 million, a figure that was remarkable given the pressure to conform and the absence of any organized opposition. Historian Ian Kershaw argued that even accounting for manipulation and intimidation, the results genuinely reflected that Hitler had the backing, much of it enthusiastically so, of the large majority of the German people in August 1934. The combination of economic recovery under Nazi management, nationalist pride at Germany’s reassertion on the world stage, the cult of personality that Goebbels had constructed around Hitler, and the genuine fear of Communist revolution had produced a population that was, in the short term at least, broadly supportive.
Victor Klemperer, a German-Jewish intellectual who kept a meticulous diary throughout the Nazi period, noted the psychological complexity of the vote: “One third said Yes out of fear, one third out of intoxication, one third out of fear and intoxication.” His observation captured something important about the nature of Nazi political support that simple voting statistics could not.
The Third Reich: Complete Dictatorship and the Path to War
With the referendum completed, Hitler’s position was legally and politically unassailable within Germany. There were no constitutional checks on his power. The Reichstag continued to meet, but only to listen to Hitler’s speeches and cast unanimous votes of approval. The courts had been subordinated to Nazi ideology. The press printed what Goebbels’s ministry approved. The churches were under pressure that would increase throughout the decade. The SA had been neutered. The SS under Himmler was building the infrastructure of the police state, including the concentration camp system that had already begun with the opening of Dachau in March 1933.
The economic recovery that had been proceeding since 1933, driven partly by massive rearmament spending in violation of the Treaty of Versailles, continued to generate genuine popular support. Unemployment fell. Public works projects employed millions. The 1936 Berlin Olympics provided a global showcase for a Germany that appeared dynamic, modern, and restored. The reality of the terror, discrimination, and persecution being visited on Jews, political opponents, and other targeted minorities was hidden from international visitors and minimized in the German press.
Hitler used his unchallenged power to pursue the expansionist agenda he had outlined in Mein Kampf and had repeated in his speeches and in conversations with military and political leaders throughout his rise. In 1936, Germany remilitarized the Rhineland in violation of Versailles. In March 1938, Germany annexed Austria. In September 1938, the Munich Agreement gave Hitler the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia, with British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s acquiescence. In March 1939, Germany occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia. On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and Britain and France declared war.
The History.com article on Hitler becoming dictator of Germany covers the moment of August 2, 1934, and the broader arc of Nazi consolidation of power from 1933 through the declaration of war in 1939.
What had begun with Hindenburg’s reluctant appointment of Hitler as chancellor on January 30, 1933, and what was completed with Hindenburg’s death on August 2, 1934, was the total destruction of German democracy and its replacement with a personal dictatorship that would kill tens of millions of people before it was finally defeated in May 1945. The aged president who had believed that conservative politicians could control Hitler, who had handed him the chancellorship with a calculated political gamble, and whose death gave him the uncontested power he had spent his entire political career pursuing, had been wrong from beginning to end. Hitler proved controllable by no one.
