September 14, 1930, became one of the turning points in the history of the Weimar Republic. It signified the end of the reign of democratic parties, and announced the initial death throes of the republic. By the time the election results became available, toward three o’clock in the morning, everything had changed. With a single step the Nazi party had advanced into the anteroom of power, and its leader, object of ridicule and idolatry, the “drummer” Adolf Hitler, had become one of the key figures on the political scene. The fate of the republic was sealed, the Nazi press exulted. Now mopping-up operations could begin.
No less than 18 per cent of the voters had responded to the appeals of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. In the two years since the last elections the party had succeeded in increasing the number of votes it received from 810,000 to 6.4 million. Instead of 12 seats in the Reichstag, it now had 107; after the Social Democratic Party it was the second strongest in the Reich. No comparable breakthrough can be found in the history of German political parties. Of the bourgeois parties, only the Catholic Center Party had been able to maintain its position. All others had suffered severe losses. The four center parties henceforth held only seventy-two seats. Hugenberg’s rightist Deutschnationale Volkspartei (German National People’s Party) had been cut almost exactly by half; from 14.3 per cent of the vote it had fallen to 7 per cent. Its alliance with the more radical Nazis had proved to be suicidal. With only forty-one seats in the Reichstag it was now blatantly inferior to the Nazi party, and Hitler’s claim to leadership of the Right seemed to be impressively confirmed. The Social Democrats had also suffered considerable losses. The Communists were the only other party to have emerged from the elections with gains, although theirs were considerably more modest than the Nazis’. Their share in the vote had risen from 10.6 to 13.1 per cent. The Communists hailed the results in their usual fashion: “The only victor in the September elections is the Communist Party.”
On the whole, most observers recognized the historic importance of what had happened. With varying accents they attributed it to the deep crisis of the party system or saw it as the expression of a spreading lack of faith in the liberal and capitalist systems, coupled with a desire for a fundamental change in all conditions of life. “Most of those who have given their vote to the extremist parties are not at all radical; they have only lost faith in the old way.” No less than a third of the people had rejected the existing system in principle without knowing or asking what would follow it. There was talk of the “bitterness vote.”
At this point it is pertinent to recall once more the circumstances that had marked the birth of the republic ten years before; it came into being as a state no one had really wanted. Now those origins rebounded against it. It had never won more than the nation’s tolerance, and many seem to have considered it merely a transitional phase with “nothing inspiring” about it, which had brought forth “no bold crime,” “no memorable slogan” and “no great man,” to quote the rhetoric of Oswald Spengler. On both Left and Right visibly growing numbers waited for the state to recall its fundamental meaning and assert its old power. All the repressed doubts of the democratic party system, all the slumbering contempt for “un-German” parliamentarism, came to the fore once more and could not be argued away. Hitler’s thesis, repeated thousands of times, that this republic was a sop to Germany’s enemies and the worst shackle of the Treaty of Versailles, was widely and eagerly embraced.
Interestingly enough, a good deal of foreign opinion, particularly as expressed in the British and American journals, took a similar tone, interpreting the electoral results as a reaction to the impossible harshness of the peace-treaty provisions and the hypocritical conduct of the victorious powers. On the whole, only France was incensed, although she, too, cherished a secret hope that the extreme rightist tendencies might give her a reason for a more rigorous policy toward her neighbor across the Rhine. Out of the chorus of reactions there arose, for the first time, one of those voices that was to be heard for ten years to come, condoning all of Hitler’s excesses and provocation’s own purposes. Thus, Lord Rothermere in the Daily Mail of September 24, 1930, pointed out that Hitler’s victory should not be regarded as a danger; it should be recognized that the man offered all sorts of advantages; that he was building a bulwark against Bolshevism; that he was eliminating the grave danger that the Soviet campaign against European civilization might reach into Germany.8
The Nazi party’s victory was to a large extent due to its mobilization of the youth and of the nonpolitical elements who ordinarily did not go to the polls. Compared with 1928 the votes cast had increased by more than 4.5 million, to 80.2 per cent of the electorate. The Communists, too, had picked up votes—though considerably fewer—from among the same group; remarkably enough, they had waged their campaign with outspokenly nationalistic slogans. The Nazis were so little ready for their sweep that they had not even put up the required 107 candidates and did not have people immediately available. Hitler himself had not run for office since he still did not hold German citizenship.
The results of this election have often been described as a landslide; its consequences were in fact even more fateful. In the consternation of election night wild rumors arose of Nazi plans for a putsch; the result was massive withdrawal of foreign funds from Germany, which worsened the already catastrophic credit crisis. All at once, everyone was interested in this new party. The adventurers, the fearful, and the opportunists made a quick adjustment to the new situation. This was especially true of the horde of eternally alert journalists who now hastily attempted to ride “the wave of the future,” and by their extensive reporting made up for the traditional weakness of the Nazi press. In many quarters it became chic to join the Nazi party. In the spring one of the Kaiser’s sons, Prince August Wilhelm (“Auwi”), had become a member, remarking that where a Hitler led anyone could find a place. Now came Hjalmar Schacht, then president of the German Federal Bank (Reichsbank), one of the co-authors of the Young Plan which the Nazis had so viciously attacked. Many others followed. “Nobody likes being a failed politician,” Hitler sneered as he watched the flurry. During the two and a half months to the end of the year the membership of the NSDAP rose by almost 100,000, to 389,000. Special interest groups also tried to adjust to the shift in power and to the obvious trend. “Almost automatically the NSDAP now acquired those cross-connections and positions necessary for the further extension and consolidation of the ‘movement.’ ”
“Once the great masses swing over to us shouting hurrah, we are lost,” Hitler had declared two years earlier, at the 1928 meeting of the leaders in Munich. And Goebbels now spoke contemptuously of the “September-lings.” Often, he remarked, he thought back “with nostalgia to the good old days when we were only a small sect throughout the Reich, and National Socialism in the capital had hardly a baker’s dozen followers.”
What worried them was that the unprincipled masses would swamp the party and corrupt its revolutionary will, only to desert it again at the first setbacks, like the unforgotten “inflation recruits” of 1923. “We must not allow ourselves to be weighted down with the corpses of a ruined bourgeoisie,” a memorandum stated five days after the election. But contrary to such fears, the party had little trouble bringing the new members—as Gregor Strasser wrote—“into the great pot of the National Socialist idea” and melting them down. While the adversaries of the movement were still looking for soothing explanations, the party continued its tempestuous advance. Faithful to his maxim that the best time to attack is right after the victory, Hitler staged a wave of party actions after September 14 and garnered new successes for the party. In the Bremen mayoralty election of November 30 the party’s percentage of the vote was almost double what it had been in the recent Reichstag election. It won more than 25 per cent of the seats in the city council; all the other parties suffered losses. The results were similar in Danzig, Baden, and Mecklenburg. In the intoxication of such triumphs Hitler at times seemed to believe that the regime could now be “voted to death,” without any external aid.