Eddie, I'd contend that what you should be paying attention to is an event that happened less than one month after Hitler was appointed chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933. I'm referring, of course, to the Reichstag fire.
On Feb. 27, 1933, the German parliament building, the Reichstag, burned down.
This is a key moment in the rise of Nazi Germany and one of the points at which Germany shifts from the Weimar Republic to a totalitarian state.
The Reichstag had been the heart of democratic Germany, a representative body that ─ even in 1933 ─ still held the belief that it answered to the people, not the state. The Nazi party held a minority of seats in that body. It had even lost 34 seats in the November 1932 election while the Communist Party gained 11 (for a total of 100).
The Reichstag was by no means perfect. The Weimar government had shown its flaws, and the rise of Nazism had shown the Reichstag's conservative members to be willing to go along with the radical Nazis. The conservatives in the Reichstag believed Hitler was a buffoon, someone controllable even if he got into power as chancellor. They were not captivated by his speeches (in general) and believed he was less extreme than he actually was. With Hindenburg as president, the conservatives believed that Hitler would be checked, and the Nazis could be brought into the fold safely. Things worked out differently, of course.
When the fire took place, Hitler and his closest advisers saw that it was a golden opportunity. A young Dutch Communist had been arrested at the scene, and so they were quick to declare the fire an arson, a communist plot designed, as Goebbels wrote in his diary, "to sow confusion in order, in the general panic, to grasp power for themselves."
Many people have claimed in the years since the fire that it was entirely orchestrated by the Nazis as a pretext to seize power. Many others have claimed that there's little evidence of a conspiracy, and that the Nazi leadership was simply opportunistic. Richard Evans' 2014 review of Burning the Reichstag is a wonderfully detailed breakdown of the arguments.
In the end, I'm not sure whether it matters all that much. In either case, the Nazis called the fire an act of terrorism, and in order to fight terrorism, they needed to improve security. In order to improve security, they needed new powers for the state, and they needed to make arrests. Nazi party members were enrolled as auxiliary policemen, and overnight they arrested hundreds ─ if not thousands ─ of communists and left-wing politicians and political organizers. Disregarding parliamentary immunity, the Nazis seized the leaders of the Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party.
The morning after the fire, the German cabinet ─ which, like the Reichstag, had a non-Nazi majority ─ drew up an emergency decree designed to ensure security. It abolished freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, legalized phone-tapping, suspended the freedom of some of the German states, and in general meant the end of free government in Germany.
Using the terrorist attack at the Reichstag as a pretext, the Nazis pushed through the emergency decree, which was signed by a wavering Hindenburg.
Now, with unprecedented power as Chancellor, Hitler was able to brow-beat his opponents. Less than a week after the emergency decree passed and the Nazis had been able to unleash a firestorm of violence against their opponents, a new federal election was held. The Nazis still tallied only 44 percent of the vote, despite their actions, but it was enough.
Two weeks after the election, the Nazis were able to gain enough votes from non-socialists to pass the Enabling Acts. These acts gave Hitler and his ministers exclusive legislative power. The president and the Reichstag were sidelined.
By the summer of 1933, all opposition was crushed. More than 100,000 people had been sent to concentration camps. Thousands more were murdered. All independent political parties were dissolved. Only the Nazis remained.
It happened that quickly. There were less than four months between Germany's last free elections, in November 1932, and the passage of the Enabling Acts in March 1933. If you want to learn more about this, read Richard Evans' The Coming of the Third Reich. It's widely published and easy to understand.
Now that I've told you what I think, let me actually answer your question.
On the night that Hitler became Reich Chancellor, Goebbels organized a torchlight parade in Berlin with some 60,000 participants. Some observers noted in their journals that Goebbels had the marchers go in a circle, so as to pass the reviewing stand at least twice in order to create the impression of greater numbers. There were still plenty of cheers regardless.
Though the Nazis put on a show of force with the parade and other events, they were careful to stage the production as a show of support for Hindenburg, to say that the parades were a "tribute to Hindenburg" and that they were not truly disrupting the traditional order. There were marches in other cities as well, and occasional violent clashes with Communists. There was a shootout in Spandau, shots fired from a house in Charlottenburg at a march. Copies of the communist party newspaper were seized and burned.
Generally, however, the leftist parties and left-center parties tried to keep a low profile, fearing a government crackdown on their operations. There was local opposition, but nothing organized at a national level.
Four days after taking the Chancellorship, Hitler made moves to keep the leadership of the German Army neutral. He feared a coup, and to reduce the chance of that, he spoke to Army leaders and pledged to do many of the things they favored ─ fight the Treaty of Versailles, restore conscription, and destroy Marxism.
On Feb. 4, the cabinet issued a decree allowing the government to detain for up to three months (without trial) people who used weapons to breach the peace. It was targeted at people resisting Nazi stormtroopers.
Before Hitler became Chancellor, the Prussian police had been keeping an eye on Nazis and other paramilitaries who caused trouble. The police might not have been able to act against these armed groups because of political considerations, but they still investigated them. Hitler ordered those investigations to stop.
In the middle of February, Hitler also created an auxiliary police force made up of Nazi paramilitaries, in effect putting Nazi violence under the protection of the police.
In the beginning of February, the Nazi minister of the Interior, Wilhelm Frick, and Hermann Goring (the minister of the Interior for Prussia) began banning Social Democratic newspapers. The Social Democrats responded by suing, which had some success.
As the month went on, the Social Democrats began to join the Communists as targets of violence from Nazi paramilitaries. In response, the Social Democrats tried to stick to a legalistic defense. They did not want to respond to Nazi violence with violence of their own, an act that would encourage a heavy-handed response from the federal government.
In Wurttemberg State, the president, Eugen Bolz, declared the new government to be an enemy of freedom. Hitler responded that Bolz had no room to talk, since he hadn't protected the Nazi Party when it was persecuted in the 1920s.
"Those who made no mention of our freedom for 14 years have no right to talk about it today. As Chancellor I need only use one law for the protection of the national state, just as they made a law for the protection of the Republic back then, and then they would realize that not everything they called freedom was worthy of the name," Hitler said in a speech.
While the Nazi paramilitaries were making enemies of the Social Democrats and the Communists (and to a lesser extent, the Centre Party), there were plenty of people in Germany who delighted in what he was doing. Remember, this was the Great Depression, and there were many in Germany who enjoyed his actions.
Evans quotes the diary of a woman named Louise Solmitz:
"I’m delighted at Hitler’s lack of a programme, for a programme is either lies, weakness, or designed to catch silly birds. ─ The strongman acts from the necessity of a serious situation and can’t allow himself to be bound."