Hitler played a long game to position himself as a leader who shunned lawless violence. So, to achieve the violent ends of which he dreamed, he had to shift the public understanding of what was "lawful." Of course, that takes more than simply changing the law.

Hitler's concerns were practical and political. Germans for the most part balked at the idea of having respectable Jewish friends and neighbors - think the friendly local tailor - attacked by the local SA thug - think the local brawler of brittle masculinity. On the other hand, it probably won't surprise you to hear that Hitler needed to balance that approach with accommodating his most ardent followers, who were rabid in their hatred of Jews. So, to the extent he could play off attacks on communists or Jews as attacks on Germany's enemies, he did so, and indeed often embraced the rhetoric warmly. By pursuing this strategy, by framing himself as a man of restrained violence, of violence only when necessary to protect the German race, he succeeded eventually in reframing the "lawfulness" of violence against Jews and political enemies (which were lumped together).

In 1932, for instance, during Von Papen's Chancellorship, several Nazi toughs murdered a communist, an event remembered as the Potempa murders. These killers claimed Hitler as their inspiration, and Hitler welcomed it, publicly congratulating them in a letter and condemning the government that imprisoned them. This was red meat to his SA rowdies but exposed a great weakness. He needed President Hindenburg's support if he ever hoped to become Chancellor, and the stolid President, representing the respectable middle-class, churchgoing Protestant German, despised such lawless violence.

He did overcome that skepticism, eventually, with some help from the army. But the political tension there was an expression of a real underlying problem for Hitler: most Germans did not tolerate violence of this sort. That was true even when it came to Jewish people. It is not true that Germans were frothing antisemites. Germany was and is a civilized place. It took many years of disseminating pseudo-science and conspiracies for the Nazi's racial theories to gain any currency at all. In the early 30's, Germans, by and large, found violence against the Jews repulsive. The wave of random attacks on Jews by SA men upon Hitler's accession to the Chancellorship in 1933, for instance, was met with a great deal of disgust. Claudia Koonz explains in her fascinating book The Nazi Conscience:

As tempting as it might be to generalize about "ordinary" Germans' attitudes toward Jews, any generalization distorts a complex reality. Aside from a hardcore minority of fervent Jew-haters, Germans reacted negatively to what they perceived as unsanctioned violence, but they came to came to accept measures with an aura of legality.

Why so? Koonz explains:

During early 1933, Stormtroopers assaulted Jews, vandalized and defaced Jewish-owned property, and humiliated Jews in public. IN the wake of this brutality, scores of municipal and occupational restrictions against Jews appeared as the lesser of two evils. After a second upsurge of violence in the summer of 1935, again many bystanders expressed relief at the decrease in lawlessness and anticipated that the Nuremberg Race Laws could provide an acceptable framework of bureaucratic order Finally, in 1938, the savage attacks that accompanied the annexation of Austria in March and the "Crystal Night" pogrom of November 9-10 increased Jews' desperation, and the ensuing decline in unsanctioned violence created the impression that public policy was being carried out by the appropriate authorities. Because they were accustomed to the rule of law, Germans, whether they were Jews or non-Jews, found it hard to grasp the reality that lawful, orderly persecution would turn out to be more deadly than random cruelty.

Especially after he cleared house of the SA leadership in 1934, Hitler pursued a "lawful" strategy, incarnated in the Nuremberg Laws. The state - that is, Hitler - would act reasonably to deal with the Jewish menace. Any violence would be of the deliberate and bureaucratic sort to which civilized people are well accustomed.