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Why were Communist deputies unable to vote on the Enabling Act?
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Third Reich
A Nazi Party rally at Nürnberg, Germany, in 1933.
Communist deputies were unable to vote on the Enabling Act because they were either arrested or excluded from the Reichstag by the Nazi government.1
Following the Reichstag fire on February 27, 1933, the government used the pretext of a purported Communist plot to seize power to suspend constitutional guarantees of individual liberty and assume emergency powers. By removing the 81 Communist deputies from the legislative process, the Nazi leadership effectively neutralized a significant portion of the opposition, facilitating the passage of the act on March 23, 1933, which provided the legal foundation for the Third Reich dictatorship.213