The
head of state of the
Weimar Republic was the Reich President, established by Part I, Section 3 of the
Weimar Constitution of 1919. The Reich President was also the
Supreme Commander of the German
Reichswehr, held the power to appoint and remove the chancellor, could dissolve the
Reichstag and call new elections and held the power of
pardon. In the summer of 1934, the presidency was held by
Paul von Hindenburg, who had been
elected in 1925 to a seven-year term and
reelected in 1932. Now 86 years old, he had become ill with lung cancer in April 1934 and his health was rapidly deteriorating. In early June, he withdrew from
Berlin to his country estate in Neudeck,
East Prussia (today
Ogrodzieniec, in Poland). The constitution had originally decreed that in the event of a presidential vacancy, the chancellor was to temporarily execute the duties of the office until a new presidential election could be arranged. This was the procedure that was followed when the first Reich President
Friedrich Ebert died in 1925. However, according to a constitutional amendment passed in December 1932 regarding any future presidential succession, the President of the
Reichsgericht (Supreme Court) replaced the chancellor as the interim Reich President. In 1934, this would have been
Erwin Bumke, then a member of the
German National People's Party. Ironically, the Nazis had proposed this change ahead of Hitler's assumption of power, in order to allay fears of the presidency also falling under Hitler's control were he to become chancellor. Hitler, who had been appointed Reich Chancellor on 30 January 1933, now saw this arrangement as a potential threat, since the new president would have the authority to dismiss him. For some time he had been apprehensive of the president and conservative forces in the army replacing him with a military dictatorship. Accordingly, as early as in April 1934, Hitler began to lay plans for altering the rules of succession yet again, after he had learned that Hindenburg would likely die before the year was out. To that end, Hitler sought to persuade the top military commanders to support him as Hindenburg's successor. According to the emergency powers granted to it by the
Enabling Act, the Reich government (i.e., the Chancellor and his cabinet) could enact laws, without the involvement of the
Reichstag or the Reich President. In certain circumstances, these laws could deviate from the constitution. However, one such exception was in Article 2 of the Act, which stipulated that "the rights of the President remain unaffected." This provision has long been interpreted to forbid Hitler from attempting to tamper with the presidency. The passage of the Enabling Act and the banning of all other parties left the president's power to dismiss the chancellor as the only remedy by which Hitler could be legally removed from office, and thus the only check on his power. This fact was made clear to Hitler in July 1934, when Hindenburg was so outraged by escalating Nazi excesses that he threatened to sack Hitler and declare martial law unless Hitler acted immediately to defuse the tension. Hitler responded by ordering the
Night of the Long Knives, in which several
SA leaders, most notably
Ernst Röhm, were murdered along with several of Hitler's other past rivals. On 1 August 1934, Hindenburg's physicians told Hitler that the president had less than twenty-four hours to live. Hitler convened the cabinet that very evening. It immediately enacted the "Law Concerning the Head of State of the German Reich" that formally combined the positions of Reich President and Reich Chancellor under the title of
Führer and Reich Chancellor and granted the new post to Hitler, cementing his near-unilateral rule. == Text ==