The Saar plebiscite

On Sunday 13 January 1935 the inhabitants of the Saar Territory, administered for fifteen years by the League of Nations, decided its future in a plebiscite. Of the 539,541 people entitled to vote, 528,105 went to the polls – almost 98 per cent. A total of 477,089, or 90.7 per cent of valid votes, voted for union with Germany. Some 46,613 (8.9 per cent) supported keeping the League administration, the so-called status quo, and a mere 2,124 (0.4 per cent) chose union with France. On 17 January the League of Nations Council decided that the Saar would return to the Reich on 1 March 1935. It was Adolf Hitler’s first territorial acquisition, won without a shot being fired and with a democratic justification that nobody could dispute.

The League of Nations’ approval of the plebiscite results is sometimes placed under 7 January 1935. On that day there were no results yet. Between 7 and 9 January only certain groups voted early – prisoners, hospital patients, gendarmes, electoral officials and railwaymen, 5,853 people in all – and their ballots were sealed to be counted together with the rest. The actual vote took place on 13 January, the results were announced on the morning of 15 January, and the League Council approved them on 17 January.

A territory under League administration

The fate of the Saar was settled in 1919 at the peace conference in Paris. The French Prime Minister, Georges Clemenceau, wanted to annex this small area on the river Saar – some 1,900 square kilometres, but rich in coal and steelmaking – to France. President Woodrow Wilson and the British objected, because the population was almost entirely German. The compromise was written into Articles 45–50 of the Treaty of Versailles. The mines passed into French ownership as compensation for the mines the Germans had destroyed in northern France. The territory, carved out of the Prussian Rhine Province and the Bavarian Palatinate, was placed for fifteen years under a five-member Governing Commission answerable to the League of Nations. After that, residents who had lived in the area on the day the treaty was signed and were over the age of 20 were to choose one of three options: continued League administration, union with France or a return to Germany. If they chose Germany, the Reich would have to buy back the mines from France in gold.

Throughout the 1920s the Saar was in a customs union with France, used the franc and issued its own stamps, but its inhabitants never stopped regarding themselves as Germans. Every party demanded a return to the Reich, and petitions against the Governing Commission flowed to Geneva in an unbroken stream. By the early 1930s nobody doubted that Germany would win the plebiscite. The only question was by what margin.

Hitler raises the stakes

Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 meant that the vote was no longer a foregone conclusion. The Saar was the only patch of Germany where civil liberties still applied, and many opponents of Nazism took refuge there. In the autumn of 1933, after Germany’s withdrawal from the League of Nations, the Social Democrats led by Max Braun changed course and began urging people to vote for the status quo until Germany was rid of Hitler. The Communists joined them only in July 1934, on the instructions of the Comintern, forming a Unity Front with the Social Democrats. The Catholic milieu, the strongest in the region, was divided. The bishops of Trier and Speyer, under whose jurisdiction the Saar fell, favoured a return to the Reich. Some clergy and Catholic activists, however, were alarmed by the Night of the Long Knives, in which Erich Klausener, leader of Catholic Action in Berlin, was among those killed, and by the July Putsch in Austria, in which the Nazis murdered Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss. In November 1934 the Catholic German People’s League was founded, calling for a return to Germany – but not to Hitler’s Germany.

On the other side stood the German Front (Deutsche Front), formed in 1933 from almost all the Saar parties and joined in March 1934 by the local NSDAP as well. Behind the scenes it was run by men from the Reich. From November 1933 the government’s plenipotentiary for the Saar was Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen, and from the summer of 1934 Josef Bürckel, Gauleiter of the neighbouring Palatinate. The “Deutsch ist die Saar” (“The Saar is German”) campaign was run by Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda ministry. By May 1934 the German Front had more than 455,000 members, roughly 93 per cent of the future electorate. Employers, officials and neighbours were pressed into joining. Many policemen and officials of the Governing Commission secretly collaborated with the Front, while its strong-arm squads spied on opponents, drew up “blacklists” of “traitors to the nation” and promised that after 1935 there would be a day of reckoning. Foreign observers and the plebiscite commission recorded intimidation, kidnappings of opponents across the border and boycotts of Jewish shops.

The League prepares the vote

The League of Nations Council took up the plebiscite in January 1934 and entrusted the preparations to a Committee of Three chaired by the Italian diplomat Pompeo Aloisi. Germany, no longer a member of the League since the autumn of 1933, refused to take part in the deliberations, but on 2 June 1934, like France, it undertook not to put pressure on voters and not to persecute anyone for the way they had voted. In July 1934 a three-member plebiscite commission from Switzerland, the Netherlands and Sweden arrived in Saarbrücken, supported by several dozen neutral inspectors. The vote was set for 13 January 1935. The electoral rolls, drawn up on the basis of documents secured as early as the 1920s, listed 539,541 people. Some 55,000 of those eligible lived outside the Saar, mainly in the Reich but also in America. The German government paid for their journeys on special trains and ships.

On 3 December 1934 Germany and France concluded an agreement in Rome under which, if the Saar returned to the Reich, Germany would pay 900 million francs for the mines, largely in coal deliveries. France – which since the death of its foreign minister Louis Barthou in the Marseille assassination had been seeking an understanding with Germany and Italy – was nevertheless unwilling to send its own troops to the Saar. It proposed an international force instead. On 8 December the League Council approved its creation. Britain sent 1,500 soldiers, Italy 1,300, Sweden about 260 and the Netherlands 250. The force of some 3,300 men under the British General John Brind arrived before Christmas. It did not replace the police; its presence was simply meant to deter the paramilitary squads from attempting a coup. It was called out five times and on each occasion calmed the situation without bloodshed. It was one of the first international peacekeeping missions in history.

Polling day

On 13 January the polling stations opened at 8.30 a.m. The German Front had told its supporters to vote as early as possible, so queues formed outside the stations from the morning. Front stewards were everywhere, “directing” the flow of voters and ordering them to keep silent, because the commission annulled the ballots of anyone who demonstrated their choice inside the polling station – with a Hitler salute, for example. For many opponents of Nazism their very presence was a warning. Public transport was free that day, and the sale of alcohol was banned throughout the territory. In the evening the ballot boxes were taken under guard to the Wartburg hall in Saarbrücken, where counting began on the afternoon of 14 January. It went on until five in the morning. On some ballots voters had written “For Germany, against Hitler”.

On the morning of 15 January the plebiscite commission announced the results on the radio in German, French and English. In every district at least 83 per cent had voted for Germany. Almost at once a ceremonial broadcast went out from the Reich: Bürckel reported to Hitler that the Germans of the Saar were returning to the “altar of unity”, Hitler thanked them from the Obersalzberg, and Goebbels gave a speech followed by the ringing of bells. The streets of the Saar towns were filled with cheering, and in the villages effigies labelled “Status quo” and “Matz Braun” were burned. After the results were announced, Hitler gave an assurance that with the Saar back, Germany had no further territorial claims on France.

On 17 January representatives of the commission presented the results in Geneva. The French Foreign Minister, Pierre Laval, accepted them without reservation, and the League Council decided that the Saar would be returned to Germany with effect from 1 March. The crates of ballot papers were destroyed in Geneva.

Return to the Reich

On 1 March 1935 Aloisi, on behalf of the League, handed the Saar over to the Reich Interior Minister, Wilhelm Frick. That same day Hitler arrived in Saarbrücken, welcomed by tens of thousands of members of the SA and SS. The Saar was not given back to Prussia and Bavaria. It became the “Saarland”, placed directly under a Reich Commissioner – Bürckel – and Saarlouis was renamed Saarlautern to erase the French ring of the name.

Opponents of Nazism had to flee. The Governing Commission warned Max Braun and the Catholic journalist Johannes Hoffmann that it could no longer guarantee their safety, and both left for France. Some 4,300 people left the Saar in the first weeks, and between 4,000 and 8,000 in total according to various estimates. France received them reluctantly. The League of Nations issued them with Nansen passports, and in 1936 it paid for some of them to emigrate to Paraguay. Germany’s promise that nobody would be persecuted for how they had voted or for their origins remained in force for a year, until 1 March 1936. By then many Saar Jews had managed to leave, taking their property with them free of the restrictions that applied in the Reich. Those who stayed came under the Nuremberg Laws. In October 1940 Bürckel and the Gauleiter of Baden, Robert Wagner, deported more than 6,500 Jews from their districts to the Gurs camp in France. The Saar had returned to Germany not as a free land but as part of a dictatorship.

Significance

In a formal sense the plebiscite was fair: the votes were counted under the eyes of neutral officials, and the result was too clear-cut to be put down to fraud. Most inhabitants simply wanted to return to Germany, and for many Catholics and workers national belonging mattered more than the nature of the regime in Berlin. Yet the result also demonstrated the effectiveness of the Nazi combination of propaganda, money and intimidation – and this even before the Reich had taken control of the territory. The scale of the victory surprised neutral observers and reportedly the Nazis themselves.

For Hitler it was a propaganda triumph of the first order. He could present it as proof that the German nation stood solidly behind him and that revising Versailles was merely the fulfilment of the right to self-determination invoked by the victors of 1919 themselves. Two months later, on 16 March 1935, he announced the reintroduction of universal conscription and the creation of an army of 36 divisions, openly breaking the treaty’s disarmament provisions. In 1936 he marched into the demilitarised Rhineland, and in 1938 he annexed Austria, holding a plebiscite there only after the fact, in which officially more than 99 per cent voted in favour. Hitler repeated his assurance that he had no further claims on France many times, and broke it in 1940 when, after defeating France, he effectively incorporated Lorraine into the Reich, attaching it to Bürckel’s district.

The Saar also became an industrial base for German rearmament and a frontier zone: the Westwall was built along its border with France. After the Second World War the territory again came under French control as a protectorate, and its inhabitants voted a second time to return to Germany, in a referendum in 1955. On 1 January 1957 the Saarland became a federal state of the Federal Republic of Germany.