The Night the Reichstag Burned and Hitler Seized Absolute Power

On the night of February 27, 1933, the German parliament caught fire. Adolf Hitler had been Chancellor for exactly four weeks. By the next morning, every civil liberty in the country was suspended under a single emergency decree. That decree had no expiration date. What followed was not a revolution. There were no tanks in the streets, no military coup. It was a sequence of legal steps, one after another, each one enabled by the last, each one technically permitted under the laws that existed at the time. An election held under armed intimidation. A parliamentary vote taken in a chamber half-emptied by arrest. A law that made one party the only legal party in the country. And then a death that removed the last person standing between Hitler and total control. Eighteen months. That is how long it took to go from a fragile coalition to absolute power, and this is exactly how it happened.