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On January 30, 1933, Hitler was appointed chancellor by President Paul von Hindenburg after attempts by General Kurt von Schleicher to form a viable government failed and under heavy pressure from former Chancellor Franz von Papen. Even though the Nazi Party had gained the largest share of the popular vote in the two Reichstag general elections of 1932, they had no majority in parliament.
The new government installed dictatorship in a series of measures in quick succession ( Gleichschaltung for details). On February 27, 1933 Hermann Göring orchestrated the Reichstag building fire, which was followed immediately with the Reichstag Fire Decree, which rescinded Habeas corpus, and other protective laws. The next Reichstag elections on March 5, 1933, yielded 43.9 % of the vote for the NSDAP giving them a slight plurality. The Reichstag drove the final nails in Weimar's coffin by passing the Enabling Act (Ermächtigungsgesetz) on March 23, 1933, which formally gave Hitler the power to govern by decree and in effect disbanded the remainders of the Weimar constitution altogether.
Further consolidation of power was achieved on January 30, 1934 with the Gesetz über den Neuaufbau des Reichs (act to rebuild the Reich). The act changed the highly decentralized federal Germany of the Weimar era into a centralized state. It disbanded state parliaments, transferred sovereign rights of the states to the Reich central government and put the state administrations under the control of the Reich administration. At the death of president Hindenburg on August 2, 1934, the Nazi controlled Reichstag merged the offices of Reichspräsident and Reichskanzler and reinstalled Hitler with the new title Führer und Reichskanzler.
The institution of the Gestapo, police to act outside of any civil authority, highlighted the Nazi's intention to hold powerful means of directly controlling German society. Soon, mirroring Stalin’s terror in the Soviet Union, an estimated army of about 100,000 spies and infiltrants operated throughout Germany, reporting to Nazi officials the activities of any critics or dissenters. Most ordinary Germans, happy with the improving economy and better standard of living remained obedient and quiet, but many political opponents, especially communists and socialists, were reported by omnipresent eavesdropping spies, and put in prison camps where they were severely mistreated, and many tortured and killed. Estimates of political victims range in dozens of thousands dead and disappeared in the first few years of Nazi rule.
The Nazi regime was characterized by political control of every aspect of society in a quest for racial ( Aryan, Nordic), social and cultural purity. Modern abstract art and avant garde art was thrown out of museums, and put on special displays of “ Degenerate art” where it was ridiculed.
The Nazi Party pursued its aims through persecution of those considered impure, especially against targeted minority groups such as Jews, Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, and homosexuals. The Nazi policies against Jews were especially harsh.
By the Nuremberg Laws passed in 1935, Jews were renounced from the German citizenship and denied government employment. Most Jews employed by Germans lost their jobs at this time, their jobs being taken by unemployed Germans. On November 9, 1938, the Nazi party incited a pogrom against Jewish businesses called the Kristallnacht ("Crystal Night"); the euphemism was used because the numerous broken windows made the streets look as if covered with crystal. By September 1939, more than 200,000 Jews had left Germany, with the Nazi government seizing any property they left behind.
The Nazis were no less cruel to their own population, as they carried out the T-4 Euthanasia Program which killed off dozens of thousands of disabled and sickly Germans in an effort to “maintain the purity of the German Master race (German: Herrenvolk)” as described by Nazi propagandists. These efforts would later lead to the Holocaust. Under a law passed in 1933, the Nazi regime carried out the compulsory sterilization of over 400,000 individuals labeled as having hereditary defects, ranging from mental illness to alcoholism.
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