Helga Martiros’s Reviews > The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic > Status Update

Already in March, the Nazis had announced with great fanfare the creation of their first concentration camp, borrowing the term from the Boer War and the Russian Civil War. The first wave of victims consisted largely of political opponents of the Nazis: liberal, left wing, or pacifist politicians, activists, journalists, writers, and lawyers. In nearly all cases, the tortures and beatings were beyond description.

The Nazis also knew and approved of the 1915 Armenian genocide, in which the Ottoman government had killed somewhere between 750,000 and 1.5 million Armenians. They also approved of the expulsion of Greeks from Turkey under the terms of the Treaty of Lausanne. These instances of ethnic cleansing, so the Nazis thought, had been necessary steps on the way to creating the strong and successful Turkey they admired.

We can safely say that without the coming of the First World War, Hitler would probably have drifted for the rest of his life and died an obscure postcard painter eking out a living in Vienna or some south German town.

For most Germans alive in 1933, the Reichstag fire and the decree marked a crucial turning point. Walter Kiaulehn, a seasoned Berlin reporter, concluded an elegiac book about his native city written after the war with the words, “First the Reichstag burned, then the books, and soon the synagogues. Then Germany began to burn, England, France and Russia…”