henever their objectives may be
attained in another manner and they have assiduously studied their
enemies in an effort to discover the weak points in their structure
which will enable the Nazis to accomplish their downfall. The
preceding pages have demonstrated that the Nazis have contributed
practically nothing that is original to German political thought. By
the use of unscrupulous, deceitful, and uninhibited tactics, however,
they have been able to realize many of the objectives which had
previously existed only in theory.

The Weimar Constitution provided the Nazis with a convenient basis for
the establishment of the totalitarian state. They made no effort to
conceal their intention of taking advantage of the weaknesses of the
Weimar Republic in order to attain power. On April 30, 1928 Dr.
Goebbels wrote in his paper _Der Angriff_:

We enter Parliament in order to supply ourselves, in the
arsenal of democracy, with its own weapons. We become
members of the Reichstag in order to paralyze the Weimar
sentiment with its own assistance. If democracy is so stupid
as to give us free tickets and salaries for this bear's
work, that is its affair ...[123]

And later in the same article:

We do not come as friends, nor even as neutrals. We come as
enemies. As the wolf bursts into the flock, so we come.[124]

Hitler expressed the same idea on September 1, 1933, when, looking
back upon the struggle for political power in Germany, he wrote:

This watchword of democratic freedom led only to insecurity,
indiscipline, and at length to the downfall and destruction
of all authority. _Our opponents' objection that we, too,
once made use of these rights, will not hold water; for we
made use of an unreasonable right, which was part and parcel
of an unreasonable system, in order to overthrow the
unreason of this system._[125]

Discussing the rise to power of the Nazis, Huber (document 1, _post_
p. 155) wrote in 1939:

The parliamentary battle of the NSDAP had the single purpose
of destroying the parliamentary system from within through
its own methods. It was necessary above all to make formal
use of the possibilities of the party-state system but to
refuse real cooperation and thereby to render the
parliamentary system, which is by nature dependent upon the
responsible cooperation of the opposition, incapable of