The 'Third Reich' did not begin everywhere in 1933. Even before that, there were regions in Germany where the NSDAP became the dominant political force. However, the conditions for the National Socialists were nowhere as favorable as in the small town of Coburg in Upper Franconia: in 1929, they captured an absolute majority of the city council seats, soon appointed the First Mayor, and began to synchronize the municipal structures. Between 1929 and 1933, a National Socialist island emerged here, amidst the republican environment, where developments largely anticipated those that would only begin in the rest of Germany in 1933. For Hitler, the seizure of power by his Coburg party comrades was a lesson for the power takeover he intended in the Reich.