About and method

Why day by day

The destruction of German democracy is usually told as a handful of dates: the Reichstag fire, the Enabling Act, the boycott. Told that way it can seem sudden, or inevitable. Read one day at a time, it looks different: a run of decrees, arrests, threats and concessions, each one possible because of the one before, while most people went to work, to the cinema and to football as usual.

That is why every day here has two halves. Politics and power records what the government, the Nazi party and its paramilitaries did, and what happened to the people they targeted. Everyday life records what else Germany was doing: films, sport, the weather, prices, radio, science and the papers. Where the two touch, the entries say so.

A hundred days is a convention, not a historical boundary. By coincidence, Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in Washington on 4 March 1933, and his own “hundred days” ran alongside these.

Sources

Every entry cites the sources it rests on, numbered at the foot of each day. They include the official gazette of laws (Reichsgesetzblatt), full texts of laws and decrees, cabinet records, newspapers of the time, museum and memorial-site chronologies, diaries and the work of historians. Encyclopedias that anyone can edit were used to find leads, never as evidence.

The site reports events on the day they happened, which is not always the day the newspapers reported them, and it distinguishes the day a law was passed, signed, published or came into force. Where sources disagree, the entry says so. Where something could not be confirmed, it was left out.

The laws

Every law, decree and order the day pages mention has its own page in the register of laws and decrees: the German text exactly as published, transcribed from the pages of the Reichsgesetzblatt (the official gazette of laws) or, for Prussian measures, the Prussian gazettes; an English translation made for this site, set beside the original paragraph by paragraph; and the gazette page itself. German laws and decrees are official works and not protected by copyright. The translations are not official translations.

Words

The regime had its own vocabulary, designed to make what it did sound lawful or heroic. This site puts those terms in quotation marks and explains them: “protective custody” was imprisonment without trial; “coordination” (Gleichschaltung) was the forced takeover of independent institutions. Propaganda claims are reported as claims.

Photographs

Every photograph carries one of three labels, based on the archive’s own record:

Photographed on this day

The archive record dates the photograph to that day. The site checks the claim against the record and downgrades it if the record does not confirm the date.

From these weeks

The record dates it to the same month or the same week, or the event is known but not the exact day.

For context

Portraits, buildings and other pictures that explain a day without having been taken on it.

Images come from Wikimedia Commons and are used only when their own record carries a free licence. Each is credited where it appears and on the image credits page.

A note on the material

Many photographs from 1933 show swastikas and other symbols of the Nazi regime, and some record violence and humiliation. They appear here as historical documents, for education about the period, as German law permits (§86 (4) and §86a (3) of the Criminal Code). Photographs that perpetrators made to humiliate their victims are captioned to say so, and never used as a day’s lead image.

Corrections

Precision is the point of a reference work. If you find a wrong date, a wrong name or a missing source, please write to info@berlinexperiences.com. Every day page has a correction link at the foot of its sources.

Who made this

Democracy Destroyed is a Berlin Experiences project, alongside the family of Berlin history sites listed below. Berlin Experiences runs historian-led tours of Berlin and Potsdam, many of which pass the places described here: the Berlin today page lists them.