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Please use Talk:Gleichschaltung for discussion. -- djmutex 2003-04-30

"Enabling act" is a common legal phrase. Your current article will have to be renamed and "Enabling Act" turned into a disambiguation page...something like "Enabling Act (Reichstag)". —B 19:19, Oct 23, 2003 (UTC)

Discussion Enabling Act

I suggest discussion should open here if there is need to comment etc . I say legally at the opening is disputable, ... legal appearance it is. EffK 03:12, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

Though I had favoured restricting this article on the Act itself, it is a valid enterprise to expand it to include the event leading up to it (although these are already covered elsewhere). Hence I will not remove your edits, but they definitely need a clean-up language-wise, structure-wise, content-wise. I will come back to this later. Str1977 10:21, 14 November 2005 (UTC) .

OK -you are so good at it -why dont you fix the present grammatical errors.

I have been asking for qualification of the dormancy for a very long time , anf or clarification of its contradiction with article 2 . I refer to the changes of procedure , which destroyed the Institution . I think German speakers could help with that . Cvilised Europeans should have an understanding of german- I lack this .

You seem to be quicker to criticise my language than to have repaired the ridiculous prior version. Your edits have now lead to a similar illogic, see if you can spot it . You alas seem to think that articles on WP should be as brief as possible- does this come from the nature of the Personal Computer format/screen  ? Does WP have to be childish , abbreviated  ? There are many long articles in Britannica .I remind you that this AE is much studied in Univerities , and even schools around the world . It requires therefore, the political background as it had developed . And this investigation of dormancy must be clarified absolutely from Institutional legislation . I repeat that I have long asked, such as Djmutex , to , to fill us in with a translation of these procedural changes. When , what , signed by Hindenburg? Another decree ? Please supply and include it here, wherever else it may be needed . Plase include what Bruning said about such dormancy- presunmably as this is cardinal , he referred to it at the time and afterwards in his memoirs. And does he confirm the monarchist allegations, I mentioned first so loong ago. You afre so good, please deal with this according to source on B's page when you can . I will visit elsewhere now .EffK 10:58, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

Just three quick items: 1) Yes, being concise is one of the features of any encyclopedia, including WP. 2) Procedural changes are done by the Reichstag itself, no President or Chancellor (officially) involved. 2)I will have a look into the cleaning-up business but I can't do it now. Please have some patience. Str1977 11:04, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

Str-that's all well and good, but your answer to how procedure changed has one problem . Isn't it the case that the procedure supposedly allowing for "arrest/dormancy" of certain deputies thus acted upon them to keep them quasi-legally from the Reichstage chamber at 23 Enabling Act ?

This would appear to be the course of history as laid out in WP from the rider/cprallory mentioning the further procedural change , no ? But what you qualify here has a problem , which is that the Reichstag had not been sitting and thus had not been able to effect your defined change . Are you saying that the dormancy came from the previous Reichstag prior to the 5 March elections? That's fair enough , but when did it happen, when did the Reichstag sit to make such change, and vote on it ? Are you saying that the engineered co-alition appointed by Hindenburg on 30 January won a vote c Reichstag Fire Act to change procedure? When did the Reichstag sit then ? Did it sit then ? Can we be concise ? Decrees , yes, signed by the president( and badly forgettting habeas corpus , and , did the Reichstag assemble for the winding -up by Hitler's choice (to pressure the centre) and to appeal directly to the electorate ? Your reply pushed us closer and I look forward to your further qualification as to when the Reichstag itself sat to make/made the procedural change prior to the 23 April first sitting or prior to Hitler's calling elections for 5 March from an other-wise non-sitting assembly . Or was the previous Reichstag in function, in which case we can check and specify the day the dormancy procedure preceded the general elections for ther subsequent reichstag . I remind you that when I entererd WP that the Communists were supposedly proscribed prior to the Elections ! Could you ask this on Deutsch WP , or supply a concise means for the claim / fact .EffK 09:50, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

EffK, I haven't been able to do much digging, but some things I can state:

• The RTFire Decree authorized the arrest of anyone - and the Communists bore the brunt of these actions. This was the factual ban on the KPD, but not the legal one (I haven't been able to locate when this took place), as the KPD still participated in the March elections and was represented in the Reichstag.
• The deputies of KPD and (to a lesser degree) SPD that were arrested were nonetheless legal members of the Reichstag, counting in votes where "a majority of the members of the house" was needed (some decisions need only majority of those present, but changes to the constitution certainly need "majority of the members of the house")
• The SPD tried to hinder the Enabling Act by staying away from the Reichstag session. Since they had 120 seats and the Communists 81, these missing 201 members would have rendered the Reichstag unfit to pass the bill, which required the presence of at least 2/3 of members (without SPD and KPD the number came short by one member)
• the government countered this strategy with an idea of Wilhelm Frick, minister of the Interior: it proposed a change to procedures, under which deputies absent without excuse (factually that was to be decided by RTPresident Göring) would be counted as present. This was approved of by the other parties, either in a plenary session or in the "council of elders" (the body chaired by the RTPresident, administering the parliament's affairs). SPD Deputies (those not arrested, of course) therefore dropped their thwarted strategy and took part in the session.
• as for dates, the Reichstag constituted itself on March 21 (Day of Potsdam) and it assembled again on March 23, to debate and pass the Enabling Act. The procedural changes must have been made early on the 23rd. (My lecture notes didn't give a date).
• this however is not the same as a legal dormancy of the Communist seats. I haven't found anything on that and it might be that there was no legal dormancy. If there was, my guess is, that it was declared by the Reichstag itself. In any case, in December or November a new Reichstag was elected with only the Nazis running in the election (as in the Communist states later).
• I haven't found anything on either this or the legal ban of the KPD. Books gloss over this probably because it is of no factual importance: de facto, the KPD was banned with the Fire Decree, apart from its candidate list showing up in the elections. My guess is, that the legal ban occured either before May Day (in correlation to the dissolution of the trade unions) or around the time the SPD was banned (June 22). In any case, it should be before July 14, when the forming of new parties was banned. But they might not have bothered with a legal ban at all.
• under the legal thinking back then ("legal positivism"), the arrest of the Communist deputies was not illegal, neither was the procedural change, nor the Enabling Act itself. That doesn't make it good or legitimate, but I'm afraid to say it, it does make it legal.

Str1977 11:20, 21 November 2005 (UTC)