== Consolidation of Power ==
In the lead up to the 1933 election oppression and harassment of political opponents increased. On February 27, 1933, six day before the Reichstag election, the Dutch National and communist Marinus van der Lubbe was caught setting the Reichstag on fire. While the exact events surrounding this event are still contended, it was blamed on a [[Comintern]] conspiracy. [[Georgi Dimitrov]], who later became General Secretary of the Comintern, was one of those arrested in the plot. <ref>[http://www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/chnn/CHNN19DIM.html The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov] Communist History Network Newsletter, Issue 19, Spring 2006. Retreived 2 May 2007. </ref><ref>[http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_n3_v46/ai_14824772/pg_2 Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas Against the West]. - book reviewsNational Review, Feb 21, 1994 by Ronald Rodosh. </ref> President Hindenburg signed the Reichstag Fire decree the next day, which increased Hitlers powers and gave him the opportunity to arrest political opponents, among them elected members of parliament.[http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/riseofhitler/burns.htm] [http://www.dhm.de/lemo/html/nazi/innenpolitik/reichstagsbrand/index.html]
In the election the national socialist failed to win a majority, but the newly formed Reichstag voted in favor of an Enabling Act with a majority of 69% (67% being the necessary quota), giving the national socialist government the power to enact new laws without interference from parliament or constitution. Only the members of the Social Democrats (SPD) and Communists (KPD) voted against the act. Hitler and the NSDAP had sucessfully tricked the members of the Bayerische Volkspartei and the Zentrum into supporting the act. In the summer of 1933 the Nazi government declared first the communist and social democratic party illegal, briefly afterwards all other parties. At the end of the year the Reichstag cast officially into law that Germany was a one-party-state.