Hindenburg re-elected

On 10 April 1932, in the second round of the presidential election, Germany once again chose the 84-year-old Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg as head of state. He received 19.36 million votes, or 53 per cent. Adolf Hitler won 13.4 million votes (36.8 per cent) and the Communist leader Ernst Thälmann 3.7 million (10.2 per cent). It was the second and last direct presidential election in the history of the Weimar Republic. Seven years earlier Hindenburg had won as the candidate of the right, against the republican centre and the left. This time his votes came above all from Social Democrats and Catholics, who saw the old marshal as the only barrier against Hitler, while many of his former voters backed the Nazi leader. The victory saved Germany from a President Hitler, but it did not save the republic. Hindenburg resented his new electorate, and within a few weeks he had turned against the people who had elected him.

The end of the first term

Hindenburg had been elected in 1925 for seven years, and his term expired in the spring of 1932. In the meantime the Great Depression had transformed the significance of the office. Since March 1930 Chancellor Heinrich Brüning had governed without a majority in the Reichstag, using decrees issued by the president under Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution. Since the September 1930 election parliament had hardly met, and real power lay with the president and his entourage: his son Oskar, the head of his office Otto Meissner and General Kurt von Schleicher. Whoever became president would therefore decide who governed Germany.

Brüning wanted to avoid an election campaign in a country where unemployment exceeded six million and paramilitary squads ruled the streets. In the autumn of 1931 and in January 1932 he tried to persuade the parties simply to have the Reichstag extend Hindenburg’s term. This required a constitutional amendment and hence a two-thirds majority – which meant the votes of the right as well. Alfred Hugenberg, chairman of the German National People’s Party, and Hitler refused. Hitler was prepared to negotiate on condition that the president dismissed Brüning and called new Reichstag elections. Hindenburg would not agree to that. An election became unavoidable, and the Nazi leader could even pose as a defender of the constitution.

For a long time the old marshal was reluctant to stand. He felt tired, and he did not want to be the candidate of the left against the right from which he himself came. He set great store by the support of the veterans’ organisations and “national” circles, but the Stahlhelm, the league of former front-line soldiers, refused under Hugenberg’s influence. The Lord Mayor of Berlin, Heinrich Sahm, headed a non-partisan committee which on 1 February 1932 called on Hindenburg to run again. The appeal was signed by, among others, the writer Gerhart Hauptmann, the painter Max Liebermann, the industrialist Carl Duisberg and two former Reichswehr ministers, Otto Geßler and the Social Democrat Gustav Noske. Within two weeks more than three million signatures had been collected. He was also backed by the Kyffhäuser League, the largest veterans’ organisation. In mid-February Hindenburg announced that he would stand.

The candidates

Hitler hesitated for longer. In Germany Hindenburg was an almost mythical figure, and defeat at his hands could damage a movement that had so far seemed to march from victory to victory. Gregor Strasser, head of the party organisation, advised against standing, while Joseph Goebbels was in favour. On 22 February Goebbels announced at a rally in the Berlin Sportpalast that Hitler would be a candidate. There was, however, a formal obstacle: Hitler, who had renounced his Austrian citizenship in 1925, had been stateless for seven years and could not be elected. The problem was solved by the state of Brunswick, governed by the Nazis together with the German Nationalists. At the end of February its government appointed Hitler a counsellor at Brunswick’s legation in Berlin. A civil servant automatically became a German citizen. This sham appointment, in which Hitler never did any work, opened the way for him to stand.

The Harzburg Front, the alliance of nationalists and Nazis formed against Brüning in the autumn of 1931, fell apart at the first test. The German Nationalists and the Stahlhelm had no wish to help Hitler win the highest office and put up their own candidate, the Stahlhelm’s deputy leader Theodor Duesterberg. The Nazis responded with a campaign pointing to his grandfather’s Jewish origins. The Communists, as in 1925, fielded Thälmann for the second time. They reckoned that Social Democratic workers would not want to vote for a monarchist and the Kaiser’s field marshal. Their slogan ran: “A vote for Hindenburg is a vote for Hitler; a vote for Hitler is a vote for war.”

The hardest decision fell to the Social Democrats. In 1925 they had fought Hindenburg; now the SPD leadership concluded that he was the only candidate capable of beating Hitler, and that he had not broken the constitution during his first term. The party called on its supporters to vote for him under the slogan “Defeat Hitler!”. The Prussian Prime Minister Otto Braun, who had himself lost to him seven years earlier, praised Hindenburg in a personal appeal as the embodiment of calm and devotion to duty. The party’s left wing protested but fell into line. The Iron Front – an alliance of the SPD, the free trade unions and the republican Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold, formed at the end of 1931 – joined the campaign. Hindenburg was also supported by the Catholic Centre Party, the Bavarian People’s Party and the liberal parties – in practice the whole camp that had voted against him in 1925. His most active campaigner was Brüning, who ended one of his speeches with the cry: “Hindenburg must win, because Germany must live!” The president himself made only one radio address, in which he assured listeners that he was standing to spare the fatherland the upheaval that the election of an “extreme party man” would bring.

The first round

Voting took place on 13 March 1932. Turnout was 86 per cent. Hindenburg won 18.65 million votes, or 49.5 per cent, falling only about 170,000 votes short of victory. Hitler received 11.3 million votes (30.1 per cent), Thälmann 5 million (13.2 per cent) and Duesterberg 2.6 million (6.8 per cent). Gustav Winter, the candidate of the victims of inflation, gathered 0.3 per cent.

The map of the results was the reverse of the 1925 map. Hindenburg won absolute majorities in Catholic Rhineland and Westphalia, in Bavaria and throughout southern Germany, and in the working-class districts where the Social Democrats and the Centre were strongest. He did poorly in the Protestant countryside of the north and east, where seven years earlier he had won his largest share. In three constituencies – Pomerania, Schleswig-Holstein and Chemnitz-Zwickau in Saxony – Hitler finished ahead of him. According to estimates by historians, including Jürgen Falter, up to half of those who had voted for Hindenburg in 1925 now voted for the NSDAP leader.

For the Nazis the result was a disappointment. Goebbels’s propaganda had promised victory, and some activists took second place as a defeat. In reality the party had gained some five million voters in the year and a half since the Reichstag election. Hitler immediately announced that he would fight on. The Communists, although Thälmann had failed to attract Social Democrats, also kept him in the race and, following the Moscow line, directed their campaign chiefly against the SPD as “social fascists”. Duesterberg withdrew from the contest.

The second round

The campaign before the run-off was short. The government banned election meetings by decree over the Easter period, so campaigning in practice lasted only from 4 to 9 April. The Nazis used this time in a way Germany had never seen before. Hitler flew from city to city in a chartered aircraft and spoke at several rallies a day. The propaganda called it “Hitler over Germany”. The party sent letters to voters, hired halls that were too small so as to show crowds unable to fit inside, and spent hours building up the atmosphere before the leader arrived. Hindenburg’s supporters in conservative circles portrayed Hitler as a party man and a socialist in disguise, while the Nazis replied that the old marshal had betrayed his voters of 1925 and allied himself with Catholics, Marxists and Jews. They avoided attacking Hindenburg himself directly, however, since he was respected by their own supporters too.

The right was divided. The Stahlhelm urged its members to abstain, Hugenberg issued no recommendation, and the powerful Reich Agrarian League (Reichslandbund), the organisation of large and medium-sized farms, came out for Hitler. Most of the big industrial associations took no position, although some industrialists, such as Fritz Thyssen, openly supported the NSDAP leader.

On 10 April 1932, 83.5 per cent of the electorate went to the polls. Hindenburg won 19,359,983 votes (53 per cent), Hitler 13,418,547 (36.8 per cent) and Thälmann 3,706,759 (10.2 per cent). Compared with the first round, the president gained some 700,000 votes and Hitler more than two million, while Thälmann lost almost 1.3 million. According to electoral research, about half of Duesterberg’s voters voted for Hitler and fewer than a third for Hindenburg. Among those who had elected the marshal in 1925, Hitler may have won as much as 60 per cent of the vote in the second round. Where votes were counted separately by sex, Hindenburg did better among women and Hitler among men.

The Social Democrats proclaimed a victory for democracy. Abroad the result was greeted with relief, since there had been fears of a President Hitler who, as supreme commander of the Reichswehr and wielder of Article 48, could blow the republic apart from within. Less attention was paid to the fact that thirteen and a half million Germans had wanted him as head of state and that his party was still growing.

The SA ban

Three days after the election the government struck at the Nazi paramilitaries. After the first round, the Prussian police, on the orders of the Prussian Interior Minister, the Social Democrat Carl Severing, had searched the premises of the party and the SA. They found evidence that the stormtroopers had been placed on alert on polling day and that in some places plans were being prepared for a seizure of power. The governments of the largest states demanded action from Berlin. On 13 April 1932 Hindenburg signed a decree for safeguarding the authority of the state, under which Wilhelm Groener, Minister of the Reichswehr and of the Interior, dissolved the SA and the SS throughout the Reich. It was the heaviest blow struck against Hitler’s forces before 1933.

The president signed the decree reluctantly. He complained that the republican Reichsbanner had not been banned as well, and Schleicher – who wanted an understanding with the Nazis and saw the SA as a reserve for a future army – immediately began persuading him that Groener had lost the confidence of the army. The ban changed little on the streets, as the stormtroopers simply moved into other party organisations. Nor did it halt the NSDAP’s advance: on 24 April 1932, in the elections to the Landtag of Prussia, the largest state of the Reich, the Nazis won 36.3 per cent of the vote and 162 seats, and Braun’s coalition, in power since 1920, lost its majority. On the same day the NSDAP also became the strongest party in Anhalt, Hamburg and Württemberg and made large gains in Bavaria.

A victory that did not help

Hindenburg received his victory without joy. He owed it to the Social Democrats and the Catholics, people he disliked, while he had lost in the milieux from which he himself came: among Protestant landowners, officers and veterans. He blamed Brüning, who had been his most zealous champion throughout the campaign, for putting him in this false position. Within a few weeks Schleicher and the president’s entourage brought about the dismissal first of Groener and then of the chancellor himself. Brüning’s successor, Franz von Papen, lifted the SA ban and called new Reichstag elections, in which the NSDAP became the largest party in Germany.

For Hitler the campaign was a lesson and a dress rehearsal. He lost, but he won almost 37 per cent of the vote, developed propaganda methods that his party went on to use in later campaigns, and showed that he was the most popular politician on the right. For a large part of the middle-class and Protestant right, which as recently as 1925 had elected Hindenburg, Hitler was now the natural candidate.

Significance

The 1932 election exposed the paradox of the Weimar Republic’s final years. The defenders of democracy could stop Hitler only by voting for a monarchist and field marshal who did not believe in democracy. The republic survived the vote, but its fate now lay in the hands of one old man and a handful of his advisers. Hindenburg, who in the spring of 1932 had promised to protect Germany from an “extreme party man”, appointed Hitler chancellor less than ten months later, on 30 January 1933. The Communist slogan claiming that a vote for Hindenburg was a vote for Hitler proved accurate in its first part, although many historians argue that the Communists’ fight against the Social Democrats also contributed to the defeat of the left.

It was the last free election of a head of state in Germany before the war. When Hindenburg died on 2 August 1934, Hitler merged the offices of president and chancellor and, as “Führer and Reich Chancellor”, also became supreme commander of the armed forces, which swore an oath to him personally. The same man who lost the election in April 1932 gave the order to attack Poland seven years later. There was never another direct election of a German president: after the war both parts of the country, and later reunified Germany, chose their head of state indirectly.