After years of political maneuvering, street violence, and backroom deals among conservative elites who believed they could control him, Hitler was sworn in as chancellor of a coalition government. Within weeks he would use the Reichstag fire and emergency powers to dismantle German democracy entirely, transforming a legal appointment into totalitarian dictatorship.
Hitler never won a majority in a free German election. The Nazi Party had peaked at around 37% of the vote and was actually losing ground by late 1932. What brought him to power was elite miscalculation: conservative politicians around aging President Paul von Hindenburg, including former chancellor Franz von Papen, believed they could use Hitler's popular movement while keeping him personally boxed in by non-Nazi ministers in a coalition cabinet.
Hindenburg, who personally despised Hitler as an upstart 'Austrian corporal,' reluctantly agreed to the appointment on January 30, 1933, largely because Papen assured him the Nazis could be contained. Hitler was sworn in as chancellor of a cabinet in which Nazis held only a handful of the ministries.
The miscalculation proved catastrophic. Within a month, the Reichstag fire gave Hitler the pretext for the Enabling Act and emergency decrees that gutted civil liberties and outlawed opposition parties. Within eighteen months, the Night of the Long Knives and Hindenburg's death cleared away every remaining check on his power. The 'legal' path to power, chosen precisely to seem respectable and reversible, became the hinge on which the 20th century's greatest catastrophe turned.
Key people: Adolf Hitler, Paul von Hindenburg, Franz von Papen