The Reichstag election of 1930

On 14 September 1930 Germany elected a new Reichstag, the previous one having been dissolved two months earlier at the wish of Chancellor Heinrich Brüning and President Paul von Hindenburg. The result surprised everyone, the winners included. Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party, which in 1928 had received 2.6 per cent of the vote and 12 seats, won 6.4 million votes – 18.3 per cent – and 107 seats. From a sect on the fringe of political life it became the second party in Germany, behind the Social Democrats. The Communists also gained, while the parties of the moderate right and the liberals collapsed. After this election no majority capable of governing could be formed in the Reichstag, and the Weimar Republic moved over to rule by presidential decree. For Hitler it was a breakthrough: from then on he was one of the most important politicians in the country, someone everyone had to reckon with, from the generals to foreign banks.

The slump and the fall of the grand coalition

Since the election of May 1928 Germany had been governed by a grand coalition led by the Social Democrat Hermann Müller, stretching from the Social Democratic Party of Germany to the industry-linked German People’s Party. It was held together by Gustav Stresemann and by foreign affairs, above all the Young Plan. Stresemann died on 3 October 1929, and three weeks later the Wall Street Crash set off the Great Depression. American banks began to recall the loans on which the German economy depended, output fell, and in the winter of 1929–1930 unemployment passed three million. The unemployment insurance fund, set up in 1927, had no money to pay benefits. The Social Democrats and the trade unions wanted to raise contributions; the German People’s Party demanded cuts in benefits. On 27 March 1930, after the SPD’s parliamentary group rejected a last compromise, Müller’s government resigned. It was the last government in the history of the Weimar Republic to rest on a parliamentary majority.

The president’s circle was ready for this. General Kurt von Schleicher, the most important politician in uniform, had for months been planning a cabinet that would depend not on a coalition but on Hindenburg’s confidence and his power to issue decrees under Article 48 of the constitution. As his candidate he named the leader of the Catholic Centre Party’s parliamentary group, Heinrich Brüning – an economist, a front-line officer and an activist of the Christian trade unions. On 30 March 1930 Hindenburg appointed him chancellor. His cabinet included Centre politicians, liberals, members of the People’s Party and conservatives from the president’s circle, but not the Social Democrats, the largest party in the Reichstag. From his first day Brüning made it known that, if necessary, he would govern without parliament.

The budget provided the pretext. Brüning wanted to balance the state’s finances in the middle of the slump: to raise taxes, cut spending and maintain the value of the mark, whose fall everyone dreaded after the hyperinflation of 1923. When the Reichstag rejected his bill, he put it into effect on 16 July 1930 by means of two presidential decrees. The constitution, however, gave parliament the right to revoke such decrees. On 18 July the Social Democrats, the Communists, the Nazis and most of Alfred Hugenberg’s German National People’s Party voted to revoke them by 236 votes to 221 (222 according to some tallies). Brüning immediately read out Hindenburg’s order dissolving the Reichstag. The election was set for 14 September. A few days later the government reissued the contested measures, in expanded form, as a new decree. The chancellor hoped that the moderate right would gain in the election and that voters would punish the parties that had obstructed the rescue of the state. He could not have chosen a worse moment.

The campaign

The summer of 1930 brought worse and worse news. Unemployment, which normally fell in summer, kept rising, and by election day it already exceeded three million. Farmers could not pay their debts, shopkeepers and craftsmen went bankrupt, and young people born just before and during the war were reaching adulthood with no prospect of work. In this atmosphere the campaign turned into a festival of radicalism, with brawls and shootings in the streets. In August in Bolesławiec in Silesia, then the German town of Bunzlau, Communists tried to force their way into a Nazi rally and three people were killed in a clash with the police.

The NSDAP was better prepared for this campaign than anyone. Since the Beer Hall Putsch Hitler had changed his method: he now wanted to win power legally, through elections, although his SA stormtroopers did not stop fighting in the streets. The party already had nearly 300,000 members, a network of branches across the country, youth, student and farmers’ organisations, and several dozen newspapers. The campaign against the Young Plan that it had waged jointly with Hugenberg in the autumn of 1929 had made Hitler a politician known throughout the country, and his speeches had found their way into the pages of the respectable right-wing press. The NSDAP had been growing in local and state elections since the autumn of 1929. In Thuringia the Nazi Wilhelm Frick had since January 1930 been the party’s first minister in a state government, and in June, in the elections to the Saxon diet, the NSDAP won more than 14 per cent of the vote.

For the first time the campaign was run by the Berlin Gauleiter Joseph Goebbels, the party’s head of propaganda since April 1930. The slogan was “Work and bread”. The NSDAP blamed the “Weimar system”, the “politicians of fulfilment” and the “Young slavery” for the nation’s misery, portrayed the slump as a conspiracy against Germany and promised a national community above classes and parties. The open antisemitism that put off some middle-class voters was toned down in this campaign on Goebbels’s instructions, though it did not disappear. The party held thousands of rallies, and from the beginning of August to 13 September Hitler spoke at more than twenty mass meetings. The Nazis seemed young, energetic and untainted by government – unlike the parties that had shared power for ten years.

The others went into the election weakened. The German National People’s Party had split: moderate conservatives unwilling to follow Hugenberg, who was allying himself with Hitler, founded several new groupings on which Brüning pinned his hopes. The liberal German Democratic Party renamed itself the German State Party, which did it little good. The Social Democrats warned against the “bourgeois bloc and the swastika”, while Ernst Thälmann’s Communists, on Moscow’s orders, regarded as their main enemy not the Nazis but the “social fascists” of the SPD.

The election also had an international dimension. A few weeks after the last French troops left the Rhineland, Gottfried Treviranus, a minister in Brüning’s government, made a speech in Berlin on 10 August calling for revision of the border with Poland and speaking of an “unhealed wound on the eastern flank” of Germany. In a campaign in which everyone, from the government to the Nazis, tried to outdo one another in nationalism, those who shouted loudest gained the most.

The result

Turnout was 82 per cent, over 4 million more people than in 1928. The main parties’ results were as follows:

• Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD): 24.5 per cent, 143 seats (10 fewer than in 1928),
• NSDAP: 18.3 per cent, 107 seats (previously 12),
• Communist Party of Germany (KPD): 13.1 per cent, 77 seats (23 more),
• Centre Party: 11.8 per cent, 68 seats, and its Bavarian sister party, the Bavarian People’s Party, 3 per cent and 19 seats,
• German National People’s Party: 7 per cent, 41 seats (32 fewer),
• German People’s Party: 4.5 per cent, 30 seats,
• Economic Party: 3.9 per cent, 23 seats,
• German State Party: 3.8 per cent, 20 seats.

The remainder of the 577 seats were shared among agrarian parties, the Protestant Christian Social People’s Service and minor groupings. The NSDAP received 6.38 million votes, eight times as many as two years earlier. Its greatest successes came in the Protestant countryside and the small towns of the north and east. In Schleswig-Holstein its share rose from 4 to 27 per cent, and it also won more than 20 per cent in East Prussia, Pomerania, Mecklenburg and the area around Hanover. It fared worse in Catholic regions, where voters stayed loyal to the Centre, and in the big industrial cities, where workers voted for the SPD and the KPD.

Historians still debate where Hitler’s voters came from. Most, it is thought, were taken from the middle-class parties and the nationalists, above all the German National People’s Party and the liberals, and from people who had not voted before, including young first-time voters. He was supported by farmers, small businessmen, civil servants and pensioners ruined by inflation, but also by some workers. The NSDAP was the first party in Germany to attract voters from every social stratum, if to differing degrees. Goebbels noted in his diary that there was frenzy in the Berlin Sportpalast, where the party awaited the results, and that the SA carried him shoulder-high through the hall.

Reactions

Abroad the result came as a shock. The Paris daily Le Temps wrote that it had exceeded the worst expectations. Foreign investors and banks, fearing that the Nazis and Communists would tear the state apart, hastily began to withdraw short-term credits from Germany. German securities fell on the stock exchanges, and the Reichsbank lost gold and foreign-currency reserves. The flight of capital deepened the slump and forced the government into even harsher austerity. On 23 September Hindenburg declared in a statement that rumours of a planned right-wing coup were pure invention. Some observers saw Hitler as an ally. The British press baron Lord Rothermere wrote in the Daily Mail that the Nazis were a bulwark against Bolshevism.

Hitler knew he had to reassure the army and the middle classes. The opportunity came quickly. From 23 September three young officers from Ulm stood trial before the Reich Court in Leipzig, accused of agitating for the NSDAP within the Reichswehr. One of them was Lieutenant Hanns Ludin, who during the war would be German envoy to Slovakia. Hitler, called as a witness, swore on oath on 25 September that his party would win power solely by constitutional means. He immediately added, however, that once it had done so, the “November crime” of 1918 would be avenged and “heads will roll”. Neither the court nor the prosecutor reacted. Many Germans heard only the first half of this declaration.

The new Reichstag met on 13 October 1930. The 107 NSDAP deputies entered the chamber in brown shirts, defying the ban on party uniforms in force in Prussia, which as deputies they could do with impunity. On the same day SA men in central Berlin smashed the windows of Jewish shops, including the Wertheim department store, and beat passers-by they took to be Jews. As early as 1928 Goebbels had written that the Nazis were entering the Reichstag to destroy democracy with its own weapons, coming “like the wolf bursting into the sheepfold”. Now this was possible on a grand scale. NSDAP and KPD deputies tabled motions to revoke every decree, votes of no confidence and interpellations, turning the proceedings into uproar.

Rule by decree

Brüning had no majority. The Nationalists, the Nazis and the Communists, together more than 220 deputies, opposed him on principle. He was saved by the Social Democrats. They judged that another election would bring the Nazis even more votes and decided to tolerate the government as the lesser evil: they did not vote for its decrees, but they rejected motions to revoke them and motions of no confidence. On this basis Brüning governed for the next year and a half. The Reichstag met less and less often – in 1932 for only a dozen or so sittings – and legislative power passed in practice to the president. In 1930 nearly a hundred laws were still passed against a handful of decrees; in 1932 only a few laws were passed against several dozen decrees.

Brüning’s policy – austerity, cuts in wages and benefits, tax rises and a campaign to abolish reparations – did not halt the slump. In July 1931 Germany suffered a banking crash, and at the beginning of 1932 the number of registered unemployed passed six million. Hitler’s party grew together with unemployment. In April 1932 Hitler won almost 37 per cent of the vote against Hindenburg in the second round of the presidential election; in May the president dismissed Brüning; and in July 1932 the NSDAP won 37.3 per cent of the vote and 230 seats, becoming the largest party in the Reichstag.

Significance

The election of 14 September 1930 was a turning point in the history of the Weimar Republic and of Europe as a whole. It made the NSDAP a mass party and turned Hitler into a politician without whom it was hard to govern Germany. It also showed that an economic crisis could transform the political landscape of a large, modern state within a few months. A parliament in which almost 40 per cent of the seats were held by parties that rejected the republic ceased to be a centre of power, and the question of who governed Germany came to be decided by a narrow circle around an ageing president. It was this circle that, on 30 January 1933, entrusted Hitler with the office of chancellor.

The election also had immediate consequences for international relations. The flight of capital hastened the collapse of the Young Plan and of the entire reparations system. In Paris and Warsaw people began to reckon seriously with the possibility that revisionism, already gathering strength since Stresemann’s death, might soon become the policy of the German state, pursued by a man who in Mein Kampf had announced the conquest of “living space” in the east. From the autumn of 1930 Hitler was no longer merely an agitator but the leader of one of the two largest parties in Germany. Less than nine years later, on 1 September 1939, his army crossed the Polish border.