"Consolidated Rule"

Unlike the phase of consolidation of power characterized by coordination, repression and rule by terror, the period of 1934-35 until the outbreak of war appears to have been a phase of consolidated rule (Norbert Frei). Injustice and arbitrary actions tended to be enforced by legal means rather than force.

The purge of the SA on June 30, 1934, retroactively declared a legal measure of “national self-defense” and often perceived as the termination of the “Brown Revolution” rather than pure and simple state terror, marked the turning point here. The legalization of such acts of murder itself illustrate how little the letter of the law and the spirit of the law converged. During the war, secret decrees and Führer’s orders ultimately replaced the usually legal injustice of the “consolidation phase”.