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Hitler’s rise in the spring and summer of 1930 was significantly aided by mistakes made by the Brüning government. Immediately after taking office, the new chancellor sought to combat the effects of the Depression with a rigid austerity programme. State expenditures were slashed, taxes and levies increased, and civil servants and salaried employees were forced to make emergency financial contributions. What followed was inevitable. On 16 July, the Reichstag refused to approve the government’s draft proposal for covering its obligations. Brüning declared that he was unwilling to engage in any more negotiations with parliament and pushed through the proposal by emergency presidential decree. The SPD faction then sponsored a successful motion to lift the state of emergency, whereupon Brüning announced that he was dissolving the Reichstag. It was a short-sighted decision. After the election results in Saxony, it was clear to all political observers that the NSDAP would emerge as the big winner from fresh elections, which were called for 14 September 1930.26
“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.27 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.”28
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.”29
Some historians have advanced the thesis that Hitler consciously played down the Jewish question in the 1930 election to avoid putting off potential voters.30 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.”31
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.”32 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.33 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.34 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.35 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.”36
While the SPD remained the strongest party with 24.5 per ce
nt, 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.37 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.38
“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.”39 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.”40 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!”41 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.42 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.”43
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.44 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.”45 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.”46 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.”47 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.
Nazi electoral success also occasioned worries abroad. The British ambassador to France, Ronald Hugh Campbell, wrote from Paris that the Nazi triumph was seen as an “unpleasant surprise” and a turning point that could have significant consequences for international relations.48 French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand felt “personally hurt” and informed his German counterpart Julius Curtius that Paris would be forced to act with “the greatest possible reserve” in its future dealings with Germany.49 In Britain, too, the election results were seen to make normal relations with Germany much more difficult. In his initial analysis on 18 September, the British ambassador in Berlin, Horace Rumbold, attributed Nazi success to the widespread mood of protest against economic misery, which Hitler and his movement in their youthful élan had been able to harness and turn into votes. The Foreign Office feared that Hitler’s radical agitation against the Treaty of Versailles would harden French attitudes towards Germany as well as lead Brüning to adopt a more uncompromising foreign policy. A Foreign Office memo read: “There will be…a stiffening of the German foreign policy for Brüning will surely try to exploit the Nazi bogey.”50
The British press also emphasised that the election had been dominated by protest. The Manchester Guardian wrote that the NSDAP had been able to mobilise a million disgruntled non-voters, while The Times had an alternative explanation for Nazi success: “They have succeeded, momentarily at any rate, in winning a large section of Young Germany.” Controversially, in the Daily Mail on 24 September, the newspaper magnate Viscount Rothermere praised the Nazi triumph as an important milestone in the rebirth of the German nation that would usher in a new epoch in British–German relations; the article was reprinted the following day in the Völkischer Beobachter. For Rothermere, the NSDAP represented a new generation of Germans who would extend a hand of reconciliation towards Britain. A strong Germany was in Britain’s interest as a bulwark against Bolshevism, he argued. “Western civilisation” could only profit if a government inspired by “healthy principles” came to power in Berlin, as it had done eight years ago with Mussolini in Italy.51 Such remarks were a harbinger of efforts made by some in the British Establishment to curry favour with Hitler’s Germany after 1933.
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The spectacular results of September opened up the prospect that Hitler could come to power legally. “The constitution only stipulates the means, not the end,” the Führer declared on election night. “And no power in the world can force us from the path of legality.”52 Yet Hitler was unable to reap any immediate benefits of his election triumph. The shock at the NSDAP’s unexpected success led the moderate parties to
close ranks. In early October 1930, the SPD faction in the Reichstag decided to tolerate the Brüning government. The Social Democrats would no longer support any vote of no confidence or block the unpopular austerity measures Brüning had instituted via emergency fiat. It was a difficult decision since it opened the SPD up to attacks by their left-wing competitors, the KPD. But there was no alternative if the Social Democrats wanted to maintain their last bastion of power, the government of Prussia under State President Otto Braun, who led a coalition with the Centre Party and the DSP. The policy of tolerance made the SPD a “silent partner” in the Brüning government. But this had not been Hindenburg’s original plan of tactic presidential governance and was the source of potential friction between the president and the chancellor.53
On 5 October 1930, in the course of coalition negotiations with the Reichstag parties, Heinrich Brüning met Hitler for the first time, accompanied by Wilhelm Frick and Gregor Strasser, in the apartment of the minister for the occupied territories, Gottfried Treviranus. The chancellor informed Hitler that the rigorous domestic austerity programme was an attempt to get the Allies to reduce and eventually cancel Germany’s reparations payments, and he appealed to the “former front-line soldier” to support the project with constructive opposition, thereby holding out the “prospect of working together in the future.” Hitler answered with a monologue that went on for an hour. “He began so shyly and hesitantly that Treviranus and I felt sorry for him and began to encourage him with brief interjections,” Brüning later recalled. “After a quarter of an hour we realised that this was the wrong approach. His voice was getting louder and louder.” Hitler slipped into his public-speaking mode. As Brüning remembered:
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