Paul von Hindenburg

Under Hindenburg, emergency decrees increasingly sustained governments without their own parliamentary majorities from 1930 onwards. Article 48 worked alongside the presidential power to dissolve the Reichstag, shifting effective government away from legislative coalition-building. The significance is the cumulative change in routine practice before Hitler's dictatorship: an exceptional constitutional mechanism became a regular means of governing, weakening the parliament it was supposed to coexist with.