Ben Wilson

All right, so let's walk through the timeline.

After the July elections, the NSDAP is now the largest party in government in Germany, but they don't have anyone

in the chancellor's office, in the prime minister's office, essentially.

That is run as a president's cabinet.

So von Hindenburg has appointed his own man, whose name is von Papen.

Von Papen is making some missteps and some errors.

And so he becomes deeply unpopular.

And so the communists, the far left, approach Hitler with a proposition, a joint vote of no confidence against Von Papen's government.

And Hitler agreed.

Now,

Von Papen tries to get ahead of this by obtaining a disillusion order from Hindenburg before the vote could happen, because he knows if there is a vote of no confidence in Von Papen, it's just gonna lead to chaos and his government is gonna fall and he's never gonna be able to be chancellor again.

So he says to Hindenburg, you know, quick, give me an order to dissolve the Reichstag, which the president can do, so that I can dissolve them before they can vote against me.

So in a scene of almost farcical parliamentary chaos,

Goering, who was acting as Reichstag president, you know, he's presiding over the Reichstag as a leader of the biggest party in the Reichstag.

He pushed forward with the no-confidence vote, even as von Papen physically marches into the chamber and slapped a disillusion order down in front of him.

Goering simply ignored it and called the vote, and the result was 512 to 42 against von Papen.

His government had been rejected by more than four-fifths of the people's representatives.

And then in a move of pure procedural audacity, Goering read out Papin's disillusion order and then declared it invalid because the government had already fallen through the no confidence vote.

Actually, if you follow procedure, Goering is technically incorrect.

Technically, based on the timing, it was dissolved and it was an illegitimate vote, but it doesn't matter because for propaganda purposes, this is still just a huge repudiation of von Papin's government.