The idea that a state may need to deal with unforeseen and critical problems is ancient; for instance, the Republican Roman concept of the dictatorship allowed a single person to take extraordinary measures, under strict controls.
However, while monarchy implies elements of unaccountability and extralegal powers, modern republican constitutions attempt to remove these factors, raising the question of how to deal with such emergencies.
Given the difficult circumstances of post-World War One Germany, it is understandable that the Weimar Constitution included Article 48, allowing emergency powers; however, these were never legally defined.
"In Schmitt's terms," Masha Gessen wrote in Surviving Autocracy (2020), when an emergency "shakes up the accepted order of things...the sovereign steps forward and institutes new, extralegal rules.
Although couched as a temporary measure, the state of exception remained in place until Hitler’s defeat in 1945, allowing him to rule under what amounted to continuous martial law.