The worldwide Great Depression hit Germany in 1929, and by 1932 the unemployment rate had risen to 24%.[69] The Nazi Party led by Adolf Hitler became the largest party in the Reichstag after the election of July 1932, and President Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor on 30 January 1933.[70] After the Reichstag fire, a decree abrogated basic civil rights, and the first Nazi concentration camp opened.[71][72] On 23 March 1933, the Enabling Act gave Hitler unrestricted legislative power, overriding the constitution,[73] and marked the beginning of Nazi Germany. His government established a centralised totalitarian state, withdrew from the League of Nations, and dramatically increased the country's rearmament.
Papen was to serve as Vice-Chancellor in a majority conservative Cabinet – still falsely believing that he could "tame" Hitler.[100] Initially, Papen did speak out against some Nazi excesses. However, after narrowly escaping death in the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, he no longer dared criticise the regime and was sent off to Vienna as German ambassador.[101]
Both within Germany and abroad, there were initially few fears that Hitler could use his position to establish his later dictatorial single-party regime. Rather, the conservatives that helped to make him chancellor were convinced that they could control Hitler and "tame" the Nazi Party while setting the relevant impulses in the government themselves; foreign ambassadors played down worries by emphasizing that Hitler was "mediocre" if not a bad copy of Mussolini. German newspapers wrote that, without doubt, the Hitler-led government would try to fight its political enemies (the left-wing parties), but that it would be impossible to establish a dictatorship in Germany because there was "a barrier, over which violence cannot proceed" and because of the German nation being proud of "the freedom of speech and thought". Benno Reifenberg of the Frankfurter Zeitung wrote:[102]
It is a hopeless misjudgement to think that one could force a dictatorial regime upon the [German] nation. [...] The diversity of the German people calls for democracy.
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