1933: LA NAZIFICACIÓN | El Origen del Tercer Reich

January 30, 1933. It's cold in Berlin. In the Reich chancellery, a man with a short mustache has just been sworn into office. His name is Adolf Hitler. He has just been appointed Chancellor of Germany. There have been no shots fired. There have been no tanks in the streets. There has been no coup. On that same

day, in Germany, there is still a parliament. There are political parties: communists, social democrats, Catholics, conservatives, liberals. There are free trade unions. There is a press that criticizes the government without fear of being shut down. There are independent courts. There are regional governments with their own autonomy. There are elections. Germany, in January 1933,

is a democratic republic with all its institutions standing. 12 months later, almost none of that will still exist. All but one of the political parties will have disappeared. The unions will have been destroyed. [music] The press will be controlled. The courts will have lost much of their independence. The regional governments will have been subjected to the

central power. Thousands of opposition members will be imprisoned, exiled, or dead. That's why the question that should guide us is not the most frequently asked one. The question is not how Hitler came to power. That happened in a single day, through a legal appointment, within the rules of the republic itself. The real question is different, and it's much

more uncomfortable. How did a government manage to transform the legal power entrusted to it into a total dictatorship [music] in a matter of months, without most of the country being able, or willing, to prevent it? This is the story of that transformation. The story [music] of how a democracy was dismantled from within,