During Hitler’s consolidation of power both the Reichstag and the Reichsrat remained intacts as legislative institutions, and even their members remained remarkably similar to those of the Weimar Republic. The Foreign Minister, Interior Minister, Finance Minister and ministers for Economics, Justice, Defence, Food, Posts, Labour and Transport were kept. This shows that hitler didn’t try to destroy the previous Weimar Republic, and acted in a legal way when consolidating his power.
In order to prevent an illegal revolution from happening, Hitler removed the army officers from the SA during the Night of the Long Knives. This shows his struggle to keep his political changes legal.
Even though it seemed that Hitler‘s deeds were in coordinance with the constitution, his aims were not. The changes introduced by him weren’t to amend the charter, but to get rid of it. The use of emergency powers lost their use as precautionary and under Hitler they became a regular process intented to destroy democracy - something that clearly wasn’t their original aim. With the authority gained from the Enabling Act, he turned Article 48 from something temporary - that was used to preserve democracy- into a permanent weapon against a parliamentary government. Laws issued under the Enabling Act abolished the rights of the Länder legislatures and subordinated the state Ministers-President to the Ministry of Interior in Berlin. This destabilized the entire federal system which had been a central part of the Weimar consitution. Finally he pushed forward a law against the formation of parties, thus nullifying the purpose of voting, and extended the franchise of men and women over 20. The term of proportional representation lost its meaning under Hitler, something that - again- was a characteristic of the Weimar. Hitler worked constantly to destroy the constitution, and therefore it is absurd to call his political changes legal, when the aim of them was to destroy the meaning of legality.
It is not even certain that the Nazis tried to keep in accordance with the constitution, as Hitler’s ‘legal’ changes were accompanied by a considerable degree of mobilised pressure - of the very type that the constitution was originally conceived to prevent. Article 48 was was intended for presidential use to put down mass activism, not to unleash it against selected constitutional targets. The Nazis control over the key organs of the state gave them control over the police, and an auzixiliary police force was created, the Gestapo made up of SA and SS members. Threat of violence was also used to intimidate the Social Democrat deputies to favor the Enabling Act. Therefore even if the Act itself was part of the contitution, it cannot be said that it was passed in a legal manner.
The Nazi revolution included also the essentials of ther mass movement which was entirely incompatible with the principle of legality. Town hall revolutions took place, where the SA purged the local governments, and by the boycotting of Jewish stores from from April 1933. The reason why Hitler tried to get rid of extremist members of the SA during the Night of the Long Knives, wasn’t due to his keen desire to protect the standard of legality, but to keep himself safe. In any case, the word ‘legal’ can hardly be used to describe the methods by which the leaders of the SA were eliminated (unjustified executions).
Finally, the Nazi apparatus came to be dominated by a body which was as far from the constitutional apparatus of the Weimar Republic as it is possible to conceive, proving that Hitler’s aim was never to follow the priciple of legality, but to alter it according to his needs. He only tried to show a façade of legality at the beginning of his consolidation to power, as he had to be cautious till he gained the SS to his side as well. After this he openly boasted with the fact that he eliminated other parties, showing that he never tried to rise to and consolitade his power in a legal manner, but in a rather pragmatic one.
