sentences:  Hitler’s success in these elections paved the way for his Enabling Act of 1933 ("Ermächtigungsgesetz"), thus starting the Third Reich in earnest.This did not last, of course, and after the Second World War, Prussia, which all this time had existed first as a kingdom within the German Empire and then after 1918 as a province within Germany, throughout Weimar times and the Third Reich, was dissolved on 25 February 1947, although the new state of Rhineland-Palatinate had already come into being on 30 August 1946.A further change came about in the 1960s on the occasion of administrative restructuring in Rhineland-Palatinate.