90 years ago today, on March 21, 1933, a fight between the chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler, and who would be the last president of the Weimar Republic, Paul von Hindenburg, became a symbol of the beginning of the Third Reich. The scene unfolded in front of the Garrison Church in Potsdam, a historic city 35 kilometers from Berlin, where the Nazis decided to hold a civil ceremony at the beginning of the legislature, because the Reichstag – the official seat of the Parliament – had burned in a suspicious fire a few weeks earlier on February 27. This evangelical church, erected in the 18th century and linked to the Prussian monarchy, resisted hosting the event, but it was useless. The building – which no longer exists – was thus marked for history.
The photo of the moment Hitler bows his head deferentially to Hindenburg – when he was actually gaining near-absolute power – is one of the most revealing graphic documents of the Nazi assault on institutions. The Reichstag fire, which Hitler and his followers attributed to a young communist, would later serve as a propaganda excuse to suppress the opposition, in a dictatorial path that the Nazi party (NSDAP) accelerated after winning the parliamentary elections of March 5, although without obtaining an absolute majority.
It was the third call to the polls in a few months. In the midst of political upheaval, the previous year, in 1932, there had already been two elections and in both the Nazi party was also the most voted force, so Marshal Hindenburg ended up appointing Hitler Chancellor on January 30 1933. The scene of the greeting between the two in Potsdam portrays, according to the opinion of German historians, the pact between the Nazis and the conservative elites that allowed the liquidation of the Weimar Republic – the name that years later historiography gave to this period – and establish the dictatorial regime of the Third Reich.
La Vanguardia, in the edition of the following day, March 22, 1933, published several dispatches about the events and speeches in Potsdam, and also a cable dated the 21st to Berlin in which allusion to the dictatorship that begins: “Hitler’s dictatorship. The bill that must be approved by the Reichstag has been drawn up, granting dictatorial powers to the Hitler Government until April 1, 1937. In the event of the resignation of the current Government, these powers would expire. A message from President Hindenburg extolling the new Germany will be sent to the country.” Indeed, on 23 March the Reichstag passed the enabling law, which de facto handed legislative power to Hitler and broke the separation of powers.
Hitler and his Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, chose the city for the ceremony because of its historical resonance with the old kingdom of Prussia. The date of March 21 was also chosen with intention. On March 21, 1871, the first parliament of newly unified Germany was inaugurated in the royal palace in Berlin, with Otto von Bismarck as chancellor.
For the building in Potsdam that was to act as a stage, the subsequent evolution continued in sync with the turbulent German history of the century. The church was damaged by Allied bombing in the Second World War, but from 1950 a chapel began to function there in the buttressed tower. In 1968 the tower was definitively demolished by the authorities of the communist GDR, and a computer center (Rechenzentrum) was built on the site, which years after the reunification of the country was converted into a nursery for artists, musicians, Ioena writers.
What was left of the Garrison church was demolished “for ideological reasons, like 60 other churches in the GDR, blown up in the name of socialist utopia”, remembers the foundation that with public funds and donations has been promoting it since 2008 the reconstruction of the tower. Its promoters defend it as “a forum for the promotion of human rights, freedom, peace and democracy, in which the history of the church will be critically examined and bridges will be built towards current problems”. The controversy with which the project began 15 years ago has subsided. Its neighbors, the artists of the Rechenzentrum, endorse the works and the new meaning.
