Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (43 page)

“Hurrah” was how Goebbels greeted the dissolution of parliament. The propaganda director immediately started organising the Nazi campaign—it was his chance to demonstrate his abilities in the new post. Germany had never quite seen a campaign like it. “In the run-up to 14 September, there must not be a single city, village or hamlet where we National Socialists have not staged a large-scale gathering,” Goebbels demanded in an “extraordinary memo” on 23 July. The party’s central election goal was to soften up the “Marxist November state” to the point where it could be taken over. Some 1,500 NSDAP representatives gave speeches, and in the last four weeks of campaigning alone, the party held 34,000 events.
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Hitler was the main attraction. People turned out en masse wherever he made an appearance. Four days before the election, 16,000 people came to hear him speak in Berlin’s Sportpalast auditorium—Goebbels claimed that 100,000 Berliners had tried to get tickets. When Hitler arrived at the venue, the propaganda director noted, he was greeted with a “tempest of jubilation” similar to a “hurricane.”
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Hitler’s campaign speeches followed the same pattern. He began with a polemic against the Weimar “system” which he blamed for Germany’s decline and decay, comparing Western parliamentarianism to a “worn-out tailcoat.” Democracy, Hitler claimed, was fundamentally unable to solve Germany’s problems because it privileged the rule of the majority over “the authority of personality.” Hitler then went after the other political parties, which, he claimed, represented only special interests and never the people as a whole. “Twelve years of unlimited rule by the old parliamentary parties have turned Germany into an object for exploitation and made it the laughing stock of the entire world,” Hitler thundered. The NSDAP, he told his audience, represented a “new popular German movement” that overcame class conflicts and the selfish interests of specific social castes: “There is only one movement that recognises the German people as a whole, rather than individual groups, and that movement is ours.” In this respect, the NSDAP was a model for what Hitler had in store for all of Germany: the creation of a
Volksgemeinschaft
, a racially defined ethnic-popular community. This Hitler defined as a form of social “organisation that no longer knows proletarians, bourgeois, farmers, artisans, etc. but rather is constituted by people from all parts of Germany and all groups of [its] population.” The idea of the
Volksgemeinschaft
seems to have particularly fascinated Hitler’s audience. He could count on storms of applause every time he invoked it. The concept was inseparably linked with the promise of national revival, similar to that of the Prussian “uprising” against Napoleon in 1813. “What we’re promising is not an improvement in material conditions for an individual class of people, but rather the multiplication of the strength of the nation since only this will put us on the path to power and to the liberation of the entire people,” Hitler told his listeners in the Sportpalast. He often ended his speeches by appealing to his audience’s religious need for salvation with a vision of “a powerful German empire of honour and liberty, strength and power and majesty” instead of “the current state of decline.”
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Some historians have advanced the thesis that Hitler consciously played down the Jewish question in the 1930 election to avoid putting off potential voters.
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But that is far from the truth. When Hitler opened the campaign in Munich on 18 July, he complained that “the Jew in Germany can get away with anything…and is pretty much above the law.” He promised that he would unmask “the lies of the Marxist party,” which had been fashioned “with true Jewish dexterity.” One week after his Munich speech, Hitler told a crowd in Nuremberg that Marxism was nothing but “a cover for the Jew” whose only aim was “to grab all the money he can for himself.” Hitler then added that the time was already at hand when “the Jew” would be treated as he had been “hundreds of years ago.” A police observer summarised the content of Hitler’s speech in Würzburg on 5 August as follows: “He tried to depict the Jews as a race of foreign blood and described them as parasites on the body of the people.” Five days after that in Kiel, Hitler accused Jews of trying to “completely emasculate” Germany. “But they’re on the wrong track,” he bellowed. “There is still blood in our people, the blood of millennia.” A police report noted that this passage of Hitler’s speech was met with applause and cries of “Out with the Jews in Germany.” Hitler repeatedly referred to Jews as a contaminant that could have no place in the
Volksgemeinschaft
he envisioned. In early September in Augsburg, he declared: “The so-called Communist International only exists to promote the interests of a certain race that is not part of us and only aims at the destruction of everything national so that it can rule internationally.”
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Hitler was convinced that Jews dominated both the press and the financial markets. Thus everyone in his audience knew who he was referring to when he spoke of “international finance spiders” that were growing fat on the misery of the nation, or when he asserted that “Today international high finance is Germany’s lord and master.” The fact that Hitler omitted the adjective “Jewish” from such statements may indicate that he was trying to moderate his tone without altering his basic message. In any case, the hundreds of thousands of people who drank in Hitler’s words were well aware that Jews in Germany would be in for rough times if the Nazis came to power. Nor could there have been much confusion about Hitler’s foreign-policy aims when he claimed that overcoming “a lack of [living] space” was “the perennial task of every healthy people.” On 18 August, he told an audience in Cologne that “We have 20 million people too many, and our territory is limited”; three days later, in Koblenz, he emphasised, “We want the German people to fight for its living space.”
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The destruction of “Jewish Marxism” and the conquest of “living space” remained Hitler’s two main aims, and he made no secret of either during the 1930 election campaign.

“On 14 September let’s give a sound thrashing to all those who have an interest in deceiving the people,” the NSDAP encouraged voters four days ahead of the poll.
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Hitler repeatedly depicted the election as a day of reckoning that would become a turning point in German history. The leitmotif he chose for his speech in Nuremberg on 7 September was “The people are arising, the storm is breaking loose”—lines cribbed from a poem by Theodor Körner about Germany’s “wars of national liberation” against Napoleon.
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The signs were auspicious, and Hitler expected that the NSDAP would significantly improve its margin of the vote. The “ever-cautious Tribune,” wrote Hess on the eve of the election, anticipated winning 60 to 70 seats.
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In fact the result exceeded even the most wildly optimistic expectations. The NSDAP went from 2.6 to 18.3 per cent of the vote, earning 107 seats in parliament compared to their previous 12. There had never been such a landslide improvement for a party in a German election. “A great victory has been fought for and won,” Hitler declared in the packed Zirkus Krone on 16 September. “The National Socialist movement can say that it has put its most difficult times behind it.”
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While the SPD remained the strongest party with 24.5 per cent, its share of the vote had declined by 5.3 per cent from 1928, while the KPD had gone from 10.6 to 13.1 per cent. All in all, the left-wing parties basically trod water. The Catholic camp also remained stable, with the Centre Party and the BVP taking 11.8 and 3 per cent of the vote respectively, compared with 12.1 and 3.1 in 1928. The election’s big losers were parties of the political centre and the mainstream conservatives. The DNVP only received 7 per cent of the vote, half of its total from the already disastrous 1928 election. The DVP declined from 8.7 to 4.5 per cent, while the DDP, which had changed its name to the German State Party (DSP) in July, went from 4.9 to 3.8 per cent.
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The National Socialists were the main beneficiaries from these parties’ electoral losses, taking increased numbers of votes in all parts of Germany where moderates and traditional conservatives declined. The NSDAP also profited from the high turnout since they received a greater percentage of ballots than the other parties from previous non-voters. The historian Jürgen Falter has shown that a third of all regular DNVP voters, a quarter of all DVP and DDP voters, a seventh of all non-voters and a tenth of all SPD voters cast their ballots with the NSDAP. The conservative and liberal middle classes were thus more susceptible to the Nazi lure than those coming from the Social Democratic milieu. The National Socialists also made their biggest gains in overwhelmingly Protestant northern and eastern Germany, while voters in Catholic areas proved more resistant.

In his contemporary analysis of the election results, the sociologist Theodor Geiger wrote of “a middle-class panic,” but that was only half the story. The NSDAP may have attracted a high number of middle-class voters, but the party also appealed to workers—less to an industrial workforce than to agricultural labourers, artisans and those employed in medium-sized businesses. By contrast, unemployed industrial workers usually preferred the KPD under Ernst Thälmann to Hitler’s party. On the whole, however, the NSDAP was more of a party for the entire German people than any of its competitors, collecting the social protest vote from all sections of society. During the campaign it had presented itself as a dynamic, young movement ready to inherit the future; and indeed, on average, Nazi Party members were much younger than the adherents of other parties, although young voters were not the decisive factor in the NSDAP’s electoral success. Young SA men on the streets may have been an integral part of the National Socialists’ image, but the party received ballots in equal measure from young and old alike.
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“Fantastic…” Goebbels described the reaction in the Sportpalast on the evening of 14 September. “Celebration upon celebration. An entrancing mood of battle. The bourgeois parties of the middle have been crushed.” The following day he wrote: “Joy for us and despair for our enemies. In one fell swoop, 107 seats, Hitler is beside himself with glee.”
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The supporters of Weimar democracy felt crushed by the election results. “A black day for Germany,” Count Harry Kessler commented. “[The country] now faces a crisis of state that can only be overcome if all forces supporting or at least willing to tolerate the republic join together and strictly adhere to the common cause.” Otherwise, Kessler wrote, there was the threat of “a civil war and, in the longer term, a new Great War.”
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In Dresden, the university lecturer Victor Klemperer had the same fears. “107 National Socialists,” he wrote in his diary the morning after the election. “What a humiliation! How near we are to a civil war!”
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The writer Thea Sternheim noted in Berlin: “A move to the right was to be expected, but not such a decisive one. Most people from a Jewish background are fully disoriented” and fear for the worst.
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Bella Fromm, the society columnist writing for the liberal
Vossische Zeitung
, detected panic after the election. “Should we leave Germany and wait it out abroad?” she asked. Fromm, like many assimilated Jews, could not yet bring herself to think of emigrating but, as she recorded in her diary, “It’s astonishing how many people now think that it might be clever to do this.”
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The
Frankfurter Zeitung
wrote of an “election of embitterment,” in which the majority of voters had articulated their dissatisfaction with “the methods of governing or rather non-governing, the indecisive parliamentary palaver of the past few years.” The journalist also believed that economic hardship had pushed many desperate Germans into Hitler’s waiting arms.
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A “hazardous adventure” was how Carl von Ossietzky described the NSDAP’s electoral triumph in
Die
Weltbühne
: “This was a Waterloo not just for the bourgeois parties, but for the whole idea of government by the people…Germany’s bourgeoisie has opted for Hitler’s fascism. It has chosen to be stripped of its rights and humiliated.”
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Another
Die Weltbühne
writer tried to explain Hitler’s success as the result of a “deep depression” that had gripped “the apolitical segments of society” in particular: “The petty bourgeoisie followed in droves the pied piper of Munich and his Berlin disciple Goebbels.”
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Count Harry Kessler, on the other hand, saw the political breakthrough of National Socialism as “the fever outbreak suffered by the mortally ill German lower-middle classes.” These were beyond salvation, Kessler thought, although they could “bring unspeakable misery upon Europe as they resisted their demise.”
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But interpretations of Nazism that viewed the phenomenon as a sociological by-product of the decline of this or that class ignored what was new about the movement: its diffuse character as a populist party enabled it to integrate heterogeneous interests and subordinate them to the charismatic figure of the Führer.