Word: reichstag
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...next 20 years Bismarck used all his craft and guile to maintain the peace among Europe's constantly maneuvering rulers. But his Reich was deeply undemocratic: he despised the legislators of the Reichstag, and was not responsible to them, but only to the Kaiser, whom he bullied and cajoled. Everyone expected that when the aged William finally died, his relatively liberal and high-minded son Frederick would lead the empire into a more enlightened era. But when William did die, in 1888, Frederick was already mortally ill with throat cancer, and so the throne soon passed to his temperamental...
Hitler's National Socialist Party, which had only 17,000 members in 1926, metastasized to 120,000 in 1929, to 1 million in 1930. Wealthy industrialists began contributing handsomely. In the Reichstag, the Nazis held an insignificant twelve seats until the elections of 1930. By 1932 they had 230 seats, the largest bloc in the Reichstag...
Hitler could not believe it. The French had been defeated, the war won, and the British must see reason. In a speech to the Reichstag, he jeered at the idea of Churchill's fighting on in Canada, but he offered to make peace. "I can see no reason why this war must go on," he said. Churchill decided not even to answer, leaving it to Lord Halifax to declare, "We shall not stop fighting until freedom is secure." Hitler was again lying. Just three days before his "peace speech" on July 19, he had officially told his commanders, "I have...
...their last free (or semifree) elections, held March 5, 1933, the Germans gave their new dictator 44% of their votes. Hitler never won a majority in an election, but that 44% brought the Nazis, along with their right-wing allies of the Nationalist Party, their first majority in the Reichstag. So Hitler presented the Reichstag with an "enabling act" that would surrender most of its powers to what was now very much his Cabinet. Some Communists and socialists -- those not already in jail -- protested, but while the Nazi delegates cheered and shouted, the Reichstag docilely voted itself out of business...
...next day in Berlin, in the ornate Kroll Opera, where the Reichstag had met ever since a mysterious outbreak of arson gutted its traditional headquarters in 1933, Chancellor Hitler arrived wearing the "sacred coat" of the German infantryman and used the crudely faked fracas in Gleiwitz to justify his invasion of Poland. "For the first time Polish regular soldiers fired on our own territory," he told the brown-shirted deputies. "Since 5:45 a.m. we have been returning the fire, and from now on bombs will be met with bombs...