The "Reichstag" fire on 27 February 1933 gave Hitler a pretext for suppressing his political opponents. The following day he persuaded the Reich's President Paul von Hindenburg to issue the "Reichstag" Fire Decree, which suspended most civil liberties. The NSDAP won the parliamentary election on 5 March 1933 with 44% of votes, but failed to win an absolute majority. After the election, hundreds of thousands of new members joined the party for opportunistic reasons, most of them civil servants and white-collar workers. They were nicknamed the "casualties of March" () or "March violets" (). To protect the party from too many non-ideological turncoats who were viewed by the so-called "old fighters" "(alte Kämpfer)" with some mistrust, the party issued a freeze on admissions that remained in force from May 1933 to 1937.