On January 23, 1930, there was a heated debate in the parliament of the regional state of Thuringia about the formation of a new right-­wing government including one of Hitler’s most ardent followers and a co-­putschist of 1923, Wilhelm Frick, as minister of the interior and public education.

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The debate began with the former state premier and SPD parliamentary group leader, August Frölich, criticizing the fact that the president of the parliament had taken down the democratic black, red, and gold flag from the building. Was this intended to demonstrate, he asked, “that the colors of the Third Reich under Hitler and Frick should take the place of the national colors?”

In Frick, the speaker continued, “a high traitor”—­who had already broken his oath to the constitution as a Bavarian civil servant and who had never made a secret of his opposition to the parliamentary-­democratic system—­“has been appointed a minister in charge of the [regional] constitution.”

The fact that Weimar of all places—­the Thuringian capital, in which Germany had adopted its democratic constitution—­served as a springboard to elevate the National Socialists to an important position of power was not a coincidence.

Frölich recalled that Frick had pleaded in the Reichstag for amnesty to be given to Ernst Werner Techow, who had been involved in Rathenau’s murder, and had demanded impunity for the Erzberger assassins, Schulz and Tillessen. He reminded the DVP, which wanted to join the right-­wing government, that not long ago, in December 1929, Frick had vilified the late Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann as a paid foreign agent for accepting the Nobel Peace Prize. Repeatedly interrupted by the National Socialists, Frölich concluded his speech with the words: “The election of Mr. Frick makes today a day of political and cultural shame for Thuringia.”

That afternoon DVP parliamentary group leader Georg Witzmann tried to justify his party’s stance. Despite considerable reservations, he said, his party had decided to join the government in the spirit of cooperating with all parties “who have the goodwill to serve our country with their work.” Frick had promised to swear an oath to the constitution and also declared that he would drop his accusations of corruption against Stresemann. A firewall on the political right was out of the question for the Thuringian DVP.

On the contrary, Witzmann said, the National Socialists were “ideologically and politically closer” to the DVP than the Social Democrats were. In the end, the government was confirmed by 28 votes to 22 from the SPD, KPD, and DDP. Frick became the first National Socialist minister of a regional German government.

The fact that Weimar of all places—­the Thuringian capital, in which Germany had adopted its democratic constitution—­served as a springboard to elevate the National Socialists to an important position of power was not a coincidence. After the interlude of the Thuringian united-­front leftist government of the SPD and KPD in the fall of 1923, which ended with the Reich intervening there and in Saxony, the Right had begun to gain strength. The “Thuringian Order League”—­a conglomeration of the DNVP, DVP, and Thuringian Rural League—­emerged as the strongest force in the state elections on February 10, 1924.

However, with thirty-­five of seventy-­two state parliamentary seats, it fell short of a majority and therefore had to rely on being tolerant of the Popular-­Ethnic Social Bloc, a successor organization to the then-­banned Nazi Party, which surprised everyone by winning 9.3 percent of the vote and seven parliamentary seats. In the city of Weimar itself, it had even received almost twice as many votes, with 18.6 percent.

One of the new government’s first measures was to cut funding for Walter Gropius’s unpopular Bauhaus in Weimar. In response, the director and the “masters,” as the instructors were known, declared their contracts with the state of Thuringia null and void. The world-­famous architecture and art school found a new home in Dessau, the capital of the regional state of Anhalt.

In contrast to previous quarrels within the far-­right ethnic nationalist movement, the Nazi Party presented a new unity, tightly focused on the “Führer” as the undisputed integrating leader.

It was the minister of the interior in this conservative–­extreme right government who in February 1925, after the reestablishment of the Nazi Party, lifted a nationwide ban on Hitler speaking publicly. Gradually, Thuringia replaced Bavaria as the primary stomping ground for the Far Right. “Nowhere in Germany did Hitler, the Nazis, the racist antisemites, the military associations, and extreme nationalists find a better place for their activities,” historian Karsten Rudolph has concluded.

In March 1925, Hitler gave his first speeches in Weimar at several packed events. Further appearances followed in October 1925. When in the city, the party leader preferred to stay at the Hotel Elephant, the traditional hotel on the market square, which rolled out the red carpet early on. The hospitality he received was one reason that, after the ban on him speaking was rescinded, Hitler decided to convene the NSDAP’s first Reich Party Conference in early July 1926 in Weimar.

In contrast to previous quarrels within the far-­right ethnic nationalist movement, the Nazi Party presented a new unity, tightly focused on the “Führer” as the undisputed integrating leader. On the afternoon of July 4, Hitler was allowed to speak at the Deutsches Nationaltheater—­the same venue where Friedrich Ebert had opened the National Assembly on February 6, 1919, and where the National Constituent Assembly had met. “Where Ebert once sat, today Adolf Hitler sits and stands,” boasted the gauleiter, or Nazi regional leader, Arthur Dinter, at a “general roll call” of the SA (Sturmabteilung) and SS. “This is the beginning of a new era.”

In September 1927, Hitler dismissed Dinter, who was also the author of the antisemitic bestseller Die Sünde wider das Blut (The sin against blood), from his post because his sectarian idea of restoring the “pure doctrine of salvation” was upsetting people in the party leader’s circles.

As his replacement, Hitler appointed the former managing director Fritz Sauckel, an unconditional true believer who would enjoy a long career. It was also in the Weimar Nazi Party administration that an inconspicuous functionary began a career as a cashier and accountant, which would see him become one of the most powerful men in the Third Reich. His name was Martin Bormann.

Likewise, the young Baldur von Schirach, a son of the last grand-­ducal theater director, also found his way to Hitler in Weimar. He wrote verses of homage to the Führer, who would later, in October 1931, appoint him Reich Youth Leader of the Nazi Party. Along with the racist literary historian and avowed antisemite Adolf Bartels and his pupil Hans Severus Ziegler, deputy gauleiter since 1925, it was Schirach who gave Hitler access to conservative, upper-­middle-­class circles in the city. “I love Weimar,” Hitler proclaimed in 1928. “I need Weimar like I need Bayreuth. And the day will come when I’ll give this city and its theater a lot more support. I still have big plans for Weimar and Bayreuth.”

Although the Nazis won only six seats in the regional parliament, they were still in a key position.

The Nazis took 11.3 percent of the vote in the Thuringian state elections on December 8, 1929. This was more than three times as much as in the regional elections in February 1927 (3.5 percent). In Weimar, they got no less than 23.8 percent. Their success wasn’t accidental. Under Sauckel’s leadership, the party had built up a powerful machine and had aggressively campaigned and stirred up unrest in small rural Thuringian communities.

Its success came primarily at the expense of the mainstream parties—­a sign of how voter behavior was shifting and a harbinger of the coming landslide in the Reichstag elections of September 14, 1930. The Berliner Tageblatt was thus very wrong when it dismissed the result as “a fad surrounded by carnival hype that has to be tolerated.”

Although the Nazis won only six seats in the regional parliament, they were still in a key position. As in 1924, the mainstream parties of the center and right lacked a majority. Their twenty-­three seats (Rural Association: nine; Business Party: six; DVP: five; DNVP: two; DDP: one) were outweighed by the twenty-­four seats for the SPD (eighteen) and the KPD (six). Since they had ruled out a coalition with the Social Democrats, they needed the support of the six National Socialist MPs to form a government. This time around, Hitler did not want merely to tolerate a coalition. On the contrary, from the very outset, he wanted to be part of the government.

Hitler was unusually frank about his motives in a letter, dated February 2, 1930, to a supporter of the Nazi movement living overseas, in which he noted a “great turnaround” in the public perception of Nazism. It was “astonishing how the knee-­jerk, arrogant, snobbish, or stupid rejection of the party of just a few years ago has given way to expectations and hope.”

However, he added, such hope would be disappointed if they were to remain in the opposition out of principle. But in return for the party’s participating in coalition negotiations, Hitler demanded two key posts, the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of National Education. “The Ministry of the Interior is responsible for the entire administration, the personnel department, that is, the appointment and dismissal of all civil servants and the police. The Ministry of Public Education is responsible for the entire school system, from elementary schools to the University of Jena, as well as the theater system. Whoever is in possession of these two ministries and uses his power ruthlessly and persistently can achieve extraordinary things.”

Hitler was thus interested not only in participating in government but in taking over the executive from within. “We will pass the first test of our mettle,” predicted Berlin gauleiter and later Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels on January 8, 1930. Hitler added that “only a National Socialist through and through with both great expertise and unconditional National Socialist convictions” could be considered as a candidate to take over the dual ministry.

Fresh elections were the last thing the mainstream parties wanted, since they were sure to further strengthen the Nazi Party.

Hitler believed he had found the right person in Frick, an early party supporter, the former head of the political division in the Munich police headquarters, and the acting chairman of the Nazi parliamentary group in the Reichstag, calling him “an energetic, bold, and responsible civil servant of extraordinary ability and a fanatical National Socialist!”

Initially, the DVP rejected the ministerial appointment of someone who had taken part in the 1923 putsch and been convicted of high treason. “So I went to Weimar myself,” Hitler reported in the letter on February 2, “and succinctly assured the gentlemen in no uncertain terms that either Dr. Frick would become our minister, or fresh elections would be held.”

Fresh elections were the last thing the mainstream parties wanted, since they were sure to further strengthen the Nazi Party. Hitler gave his prospective mainstream parties a deadline of three days, from January 10 to 13. Otherwise, he would have a motion introduced to dissolve the regional parliament. But the DVP still had its scruples.

Hitler was in a strong bargaining position, however, and he furthered his cause with a speech to leading representatives of Thuringia’s business and industry associations on January 10, which made a huge impression. “In the evening, Hitler spoke to a closed circle,” a very satisfied Goebbels noted. “In front of 150 bigwigs, reeking of respectability. Hitler spoke fabulously. I’ve rarely heard him that good.”

Business circles were also ramping up pressure on the DVP, and when the ultimatum expired, the party caved in. On January 23, 1930, the coalition government was confirmed in office. “Frick is now a minister in Weimar,” Goebbels recorded in his diary. “It was a difficult birth.”  Frick’s party comrade Wilhelm Marschler was appointed state councillor, a position that gave him a vote in the cabinet.

There was no lack of warning voices in the DVP. “It hurts my soul to see you in such company,” shouted DVP Reichstag deputy Siegfried von Kardorff to the delegates from Thuringia at the party’s conference in Mannheim in March 1930.

But the fact that the DVP was doing deals with the Nazis at all showed how far the party had drifted to the right under Stresemann’s successor, Ernst Scholz. Making common cause with the National Socialists at regional level while being part of a grand coalition with the Social Democrats at Reich level was a complete contradiction. In that respect, the Thuringian experiment already foreshadowed the imminent demise of Hermann Müller’s government.

Hitler demanded, “In the same vein, we will purge the teaching staff of Marxist-­democratic elements just as we will adapt the curriculum to our National Socialist beliefs and ideas.”

Minister Frick did not disappoint expectations. At the third reading of the laws to enact the Young Plan in the Reichstag on March 12, 1930, he took a seat on the benches of the state representatives and made a statement of vigorous protest immediately before the final vote, railing against the “Enslavement Act,” the adoption of which would bring “the greatest national misfortune and end the independence of Germany’s regional states.” The Thuringian Ministry of State had not authorized him to make this statement. Although the DVP parliamentary group leader, Witzmann, disapproved of his unilateral action a few days later, Frick faced no consequences.

Hitler had set his party colleague two tasks. As Thuringian minister of the interior, Frick was to “carry out a slow purge of the administrative and civil service from all red revolutionary elements.” There was “a great deal to do,” Hitler said, especially in policing. And as minister of national education, he was to push ahead with the “nationalization of the school system.” Hitler demanded, “In the same vein, we will purge the teaching staff of Marxist-­democratic elements just as we will adapt the curriculum to our National Socialist beliefs and ideas.”

Frick set to work with great energy to remake Thuringia in this sense. In his inaugural speech to the civil servants in his two ministries, he made it clear that a “new spirit” now applied in Weimar, and that it would be fundamentally different from the “treacherous November spirit” of the German republic.

On March 18, 1930, he introduced to the state parliament the draft of an enabling act intended to largely free the state government from parliamentary control for six months. The law was passed by a simple majority (28 votes to 25) on March 29. Under the guise of reforming and streamlining the administration, civil servants loyal to the republic were dismissed and replaced by followers of the NSDAP.

The Reich government, however, did not stand idly by as Frick went about doing what he did. On March 18, 1930, the Social Democratic Minister of the Interior Carl Severing informed the Thuringian government that he had received news “giving rise to justified doubts as to whether the conditions for the granting of a Reich subsidy for police purposes” were still fulfilled. Thuringian State Premier Erwin Baum from the Rural League “solemnly appealed” to the Reich not to block the funds.

The Nazi battle cry “Germany awaken” was intended to instill nationalism in schoolchildren.

Although the new minister of the interior, Joseph Wirth of the Center Party, who had been in office since March 30, 1930, reached an agreement with the Thuringian state government in April to lift the ban on the Reich subsidy, no agreement was reached on the fundamental question of whether National Socialists should be allowed to join the police force. Frick created a fait accompli by filling the offices of the police directorates of Weimar and Gera with his allies.

When Wirth then had police funds blocked again in June 1930, Baum filed a complaint with the State Court in Leipzig. The conflict between Thuringia and the Reich was settled in December 1930, when the former guaranteed the “nonpolitical conduct of individual civil servants without fail while on duty” and the latter agreed to lift the freeze on police subsidies.

Frick was unperturbed by all the objections from Berlin and continued his policy of “cleansing” the civil service. Goebbels, who visited him in Weimar at the beginning of June 1930, was impressed: “He is in good spirits, has the courage of his convictions, provokes people, and behaves insolently toward the bigwigs in Berlin. A true German minister indeed.”

Civil servants who were members of or close to the SPD were hit particularly hard by the staff cuts the state of Thuringia also had to make due to the precarious financial situation. Frick appointed three of his party comrades to the Ministry of Education, including the deputy gauleiter Hans Severus Ziegler, as “expert advisers.” They acted as a kind of shadow government, with access to personnel files, which they used to tar-­brush undesirables among the teaching ranks. Suspicion and denunciation became pervasive in the Thuringian administration.

Parallel to his administrative and personnel purges, Frick set about to radically change the country’s cultural policy. On April 16, 1930, school prayers were reintroduced by a decree in the official gazette of the Ministry of National Education. The reason given was that “forces alien to the species and people” had long been trying to “destroy the spiritual, moral, and religious foundations of our German thinking and feeling in order to uproot the German people and thus make it easier to control us,” the decree stated. The German people could resist these pernicious influences only “if they kept the religious and moral driving forces of their nature pure and passed them on to the next generations of youth.”

Three of the suggested prayers were clearly directed against the democratic constitutional order of the Weimar Republic, which was viewed as anathema to the spirit of ethnic jingoism. The second of these rhyming prayers went:

Father, in your almighty hand
Stand our people and fatherland
You were our ancestors’ honor and strength
You are our constant weapon and defense
Therefore free us from betrayal and deceit
Make us strong for the liberating deed
Give us the Savior’s heroic bravery
Let honor and freedom be our highest commodity!
Let our vow and watchword be:
Germany, awaken! Lord, make us free!
May God make it so!

The Nazi battle cry “Germany awaken” was intended to instill nationalism in schoolchildren. Frick left no doubt as to who was meant by the “forces alien to the species and people” in the state parliament in May 1930. The “prayers for freedom,” he explained, were intended to serve as a “defense against the fraud” that had been “committed against the German people by Marxism and the Jews.”

The Nazis’ coalition partners offered little opposition to the mandatory bastardized school prayers, and protests from the Thuringian Teachers’ Association and the Protestant regional church were also limited. Conversely, the coalition parties shot down a motion by the SPD parliamentary group to rescind the decree.

Frick did, however, lose a lawsuit filed with the Leipzig State Court. In its ruling of July 11, 1930, three particularly offensive prayers were rejected because they impinged on the “sensibilities of dissenters” and thus violated Article 148, paragraph 2, of the Reich Constitution.

Before that, in February 1930, Frick had issued an injunction against Erich Maria Remarque’s famous anti-­war novel All Quiet on the Western Front, which had been published in spring 1929 and quickly become a bestseller. School boards in Thuringia were instructed to report which schools had purchased the title and which teachers had used the book in class. Further inclusion of the book in reading lists was prohibited.

These regulations were in line with the views of the German Fighting League for German Culture, which had been founded in August 1927 under the leadership of the Nazi Party’s chief ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg. At its Whitsunday conference in Weimar in 1930, held under Frick’s patronage, the league demanded that the “German will to self-­defense must be hardened.”

Nazi cultural watchdogs considered Remarque’s bestseller capable of impairing that “will.” The same strictures also applied to the film version of the novel. The Nazi Party, led by Goebbels as the gauleiter of the German capital, railed against the film, which premiered in Berlin in December 1930, and on December 11, the Supreme Film Board gave in to SA intimidation and banned it. “The Nazi street fighter is dictating the government’s actions,” crowed Hitler’s propaganda expert.

Frick’s next serious intervention in cultural life came at the beginning of April 1930 with the decree “Against Negro Culture and for German Ethnic Identity.” In its preamble, it claimed that for years, “foreign racial influences,” capable of “undermining the moral fortitude of the German people,” had been “increasingly asserting themselves in almost all cultural areas.”

It was therefore “in the interest of the preservation and strengthening of the German ethnic identity” that everything “glorifying Negroism” should be seen as “signs of decay” to be “prevented as much as possible.” The authorities were to apply the “strictest standards” and punish all theater companies that could not be regarded as “morally or artistically reliable.”

This decree provided the basis for numerous bans. For example, the performance of Friedrich Wolf’s abortion drama, Cyanide, which Erwin Piscator’s Berliner Ensemble wanted to stage in Gera and Jena, was prohibited. Plays by the expressionists Ernst Toller and Walter Hasenclever also disappeared from the repertoire of state theaters.

On May 22, 1930, SPD member of parliament Max Greil, a former minister of popular education, excoriated Frick in front of the Thuringian state parliament, castigating him for trying to politicize all areas of cultural life “along the lines of National Socialist Party beliefs.” Frick’s “proclamation against Negro culture,” Greil argued, was actually directed against Jews, and he demanded that Frick publicly acknowledge this fact. Contrasting Nazi cultural policy with the “classical spirit of cosmopolitanism in the sense of Goethe,” Greil said, “It is the spirit of nationalist narrow-­mindedness; it is the spirit of chauvinist warmongering.”

There was hardly any resistance in Weimar to this “storming of paintings,” as it became known.

In his infamous decree, Frick had announced that he had appointed the architect Paul Schultze-­Naumburg as the new director of the Vereinigte Kunstlehranstalten (College of Architecture, Fine Arts, and Crafts) in Weimar and that it was to be developed into a “center of German culture.” Schultze-­Naumburg, whom Frick had also hired as an “art consultant,” had made a name for himself as a vehement opponent of the Bauhaus and advocate of a “racially sound” German culture. His house in Saaleck near Bad Kösen, located below the castle ruins, was a popular meeting place for extreme right-­wing nationalist circles.

In June 1930, Goebbels was a guest there. He was accompanied by Frick and Walther Darré, later the Nazi food minister. “The Schultze house is beautifully situated above the Saale River, wonderfully blended into the landscape, a true gem,” noted Goebbels in his diary. “I have never seen such a stylish house.” While in the town, the Berlin gauleiter did not neglect to visit the graves of Fischer and Kern, the men who had murdered Walther Rathenau.

In his speech inaugurating the newly designed Vereinigte Kunstlehranstalten on November 10, 1930, Schultze-­Naumburg raged against modern art, which, he claimed, consisted “only of obscure, tortured, and distorted images and the visualization of mental and physical inferiority.” He was united with Germany’s youth, he added, in the goal of “chasing all those corrupters of and traitors to the people out of the German house, in which they have no place.”

Deeds followed these words. That October, Schultze-­Naumburg had wall frescoes by Bauhaus master Oskar Schlemmer painted over in the Van de Velde building. In early November, at Frick’s behest, seventy works by modern artists, including paintings and drawings by Otto Dix, Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee, were removed from the exhibition rooms of the Weimar Palace Museum. Frick justified this preview of the Nazis’ infamous 1937 campaign against “degenerate art” by claiming that the ostracized works had “nothing in common with Nordic-­German nature” and only “depicted eastern and other inferior subhumanity.”

There was hardly any resistance in Weimar to this “storming of paintings,” as it became known. But the liberal Berlin press, including the Berliner Tageblatt, branded it for what it was: “a scandal in a cultured nation.”

But even this scandal was surpassed by Frick’s most audacious coup: the appointment of the racial theorist Hans F. K. Günther as a professor at the University of Jena. In doing so, Frick was acting on Hitler’s expectations in a letter of February 2, 1930, in which the Nazi leader had envisaged the “establishment of a chair for racial issues and racial studies” in Jena as the “first step” in the desired “intellectual upheaval.” Hitler himself had suggested Günther, the author of a “racial primer of the German people,” for the position.

When the university rector, church historian Karl Heussi, opposed Frick’s request, the students’ association, already dominated by National Socialist sympathizers, rebelled. Frick praised the Jena student body for having shown “more understanding for the need to create the conditions necessary for Germany’s renewal” than the professors.

The only concession made to the university’s teaching staff was that the original title—­Chair of Human Civilization—­was changed to Chair of Social Anthropology. Hitler personally attended Günther’s inaugural lecture, on November 15, 1930, which was entitled “The Causes of the Racial Decline of the German People Since the Migration of Peoples.”

On April 1, 1931, Frick’s time in government in Thuringia came to an abrupt end, after the DVP joined a motion of no confidence proposed by the Social Democrats and Communists. Yet it was not Frick’s actions as a minister that caused the coalition to break up, but rather the insulting remarks made by Gauleiter Sauckel in an editorial in the party newspaper Der Nationalsozialist (The National Socialist).

After Frick resigned in the run-­up to the Reich presidential election in spring of 1932, it became known that he had secretly attempted to obtain German citizenship for Hitler.

In it, Sauckel had belittled representatives of the DVP as “foolish old men, traitors, and swindlers,” who “in their bottomless impudence were playing a sacrilegious game with the fate of our people.”  This proved too much even for a party that had endured months of Frick’s provocations. Amid considerable press attention, Hitler had traveled to Weimar the day before the vote to try to change the DVP’s mind, but his trip was in vain.

In the parliamentary debate preceding the no-­confidence motion on April 1, Philipp Kallenbach of the DDP described the results of Frick’s fourteen months in government as “downright disastrous.” Kallenbach said: “Peace in our state has been destroyed. The driving force behind these administrative measures is the desire to stir up people and create a spectacle, even to encourage hatred and take one-­sided actions against broad segments of the population. To a great extent in the short time in question, all areas of public life have been politicized in the interests of the Nazi Party. To advance those ends, personnel policy has been ruthless, with allies being permitted to feed at the trough more openly and self-­evidently than ever before.”

After Frick resigned in the run-­up to the Reich presidential election in spring of 1932, it became known that he had secretly attempted to obtain German citizenship for Hitler. The affair caused a sensation. A parliamentary inquiry, chaired by SPD politician Hermann Brill, was formed in Weimar to investigate, and Hitler and Frick were summoned as witnesses.

The picture that emerged started in the summer of 1930. With State Premier Baum away on vacation, Frick had sought to lay the groundwork for Hitler’s naturalization by appointing him gendarmerie commissioner in the town of Hildburghausen, while at the same time releasing him from all duties as a civil servant. Two ministry officials were ordered to initiate the necessary formalities under “strictest official secrecy.”

The grotesque story of Frick’s attempted naturalization of Hitler quickly became the talk of the town.

At a regional Nazi meeting in Gera on July 12, 1930, Frick presented Hitler with the certificate of appointment, and he confirmed receipt with his signature. Afterward, however, the Nazi leader apparently had second thoughts, worrying that the title of gendarmerie commissioner might make him look ridiculous. In any case, he tore up the document a few days later in Munich. Before the committee of inquiry, he testified that he had not wanted to accept the appointment in the first place.

The grotesque story of Frick’s attempted naturalization of Hitler quickly became the talk of the town. “Lots of hounding in the press,” an annoyed Goebbels noted. “Crazy caricatures.”  The affair was mocked as a “presumptuous masquerade” and a “prank.” But an editorial in the liberal Vossische Zeitung drew attention to the deadly serious underlying meaning.

With his “unsuccessful push” to make Hitler a German, Frick had once again proved that the National Socialists were unwilling to abide by the law. “It would be good if the true character of this party were finally recognized outside Bavaria, where people have experienced it up close,” the paper wrote. In Thuringia, no one heeded the warning. In the state elections in late July 1932, the NSDAP emerged as the strongest party, with 42.5 percent of the vote, and Sauckel became state premier.

Looking back, the Social Democratic politician, journalist, and later member of the anti-­Nazi resistance Hermann Brill described the “Frick era” in Thuringia as “one of the most important vanguard skirmishes in the great battle between democracy and dictatorship.”  Indeed, during his time in office, Frick delivered a foretaste of what could be expected if the National Socialists came to power nationally. For fourteen months, Thuringia served as a laboratory in which they could try out measures they were to implement on a larger scale at Reich level three years later.

In a personal letter dated April 2, 1931, Hitler thanked Frick for “placing Thuringia at the center of Germany’s national, political, and economic redevelopment.” The Nazi leader added, “We all firmly believe in the hour that will once again, this time forever, call you to serve our people in a responsible position.”

And Frick was in fact rewarded with the post of Reich minister of the interior—­one of the most powerful positions in the land—­in the “cabinet of national concentration” formed on January 30, 1933, under Germany’s new chancellor, Hitler.

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Excerpted from Fateful Hours: The Collapse of the Weimar Republic. Copyright © 2024 by Verlag C.H.Beck oHG, München. English translation copyright © 2025 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.