NAZIS ELECTED | Germany Votes in Führer, 85 Years Ago

Elections to the Reischstag, by party, 1928-1933. In 1929 the Nazis won only 
12 seats in the Reichstag. The worldwide crash in stock market prices and
high unemployment drove seats up to 108 in 1930, 230 in 1932 and 288 in 
March 1933.  Later in 1933, all parties other than the Nazis were banned.

March 5, 2018 — This date in 1933 (a Sunday then, a Monday this year) was the day after FDR took the reins as President of the United States.

It was also, chillingly, the day German voters elected 288 Nazi Party members to the Weimar Republic's parliament, the Reischstag.

Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler had been appointed Reich Chancellor by German President Paul von Hindenburg, the formal head of the German Government since 1925. An aristocrat (the "von" prefix signifies in Germany that someone has the title of, at least, Baron), von Hindenburg did not think much of upstart Adolf Hitler. However, he was at his wit's end dealing with Hitler's appeal to a totally demoralized German people. Hindenburg hoped to establish control over the Nazis by bringing Hitler into his tent.

Hitler swiftly trashed the tent...

He laid out his 1933 campaign early in the year, in a radio Appeal to the German People on February 1, which he reportedly wrote mostly himself:

• He accused the Weimar coalition that ruled the country under the Social Democrats since Nov. 9, 1918, of generating 14 years of "Marxist" rule.
• He said that unless the German People reacted against this "Bolshevism", there would be anarchy. 
• Finally, he said that Germany's fate was in the hands of Almighty God and the German voters.

Hitler's Appeal seems contemporary in the buttons he pressed. His Appeal includes these sentiments:

Our inheritance [from the Weimar Republic] is appalling. The task before us is the most difficult facing German statesmen in living memory. But we all have unbounded confidence, for we believe in our nation and in its eternal values. Farmers, workers, and the middle class must unite to contribute the bricks with which to build the new Reich. The National [Nazi] Government will regard as its first and supreme task to restore to the German people unity of mind and will. It will preserve and defend the foundations on which the strength of our nation rests. It will take under its firm protection Christianity as the basis of our morality, and the family as the nucleus of our nation and our state. Standing above estates and classes, it will bring back to our people the consciousness of its racial and political unity and the obligations arising therefrom. It wishes to base the education of German youth on respect for our great past and pride in our old traditions. It will therefore declare merciless war on spiritual, political and cultural nihilism. Germany must not and will not sink into Communist anarchy. [Bold face added.]

Hitler pays his (last) respects to democracy, 1933.

That 1933 election was the last that West Germans were given a choice to vote for until 1949, and it was the last free election in a united Germany until 1990.

The March 1933 election made the Nazis not only the largest party, but a party large enough  to prevail comfortably over any likely coalition. With a popular vote of just 33 percent of the German voters, because of the German voting mechanism the Nazi Party gained 44.5 percent of the votes in the Reichstag.

This was a huge leap. Hitler's Nazi Party had previously gotten nowhere, with less than 3 percent of the German electorate before the Crash of 1929 (see table above). Between 1928 and 1930, the Nazi Party grew from the ninth-largest party to the second-largest, with 18 percent of the vote in the Reichstag. 

Support of the Nazis in the Reichstag more than doubled between 1930 and March 1933, and became the largest party. The reason was a series of financial disasters that became global with the Wall Street Crash of October 1929. The disasters crushed the  German economy. The Weimar Government seemed powerless to do anything about it. When the cost of rampant speculation in the 1920s is evaluated by history, the rise of Hitler, the Holocaust and the Second World War should be put on the negative side of the ledger sheet.

Nazi "Ballot", 1938 edition. Vote "YES"
[Ja] for Hitler, or "No" [Nein] for 
Trouble. [Vote No, and we will find you.]

To gain absolute power after the March 5 election, Hitler engineered the Enabling Act on March 23, 1933. This made Hitler dictator of Germany, subject only to the approval of President von Hindenburg. Approval of the Reichstag became unnecessary.

Within months, Hitler banned all the opposition parties. By November 1933, the Reichstag was nothing but an echo chamber for Hitler.

That left only von Hindenburg in the way of Hitler's becoming emperor. In July 1934, von Hindenberg was 86 years old and dying of lung cancer. On August 1, Hitler's cabinet passed the "Law Concerning the Highest State Office of the Reich," which stipulated that upon the death of von Hindenburg, the offices of president and chancellor would be merged. Hitler would then be accountable to no one, becoming Führer und Reichskanzler des deutschen Volkes.

In 1922 Hitler's anti-Semitism was
dismissed as "not so genuine or violent".

With this Cabinet decision in his pocket, Hitler flew to Neudeck, to the bedside of von Hindenburg. 

Conveniently, the President died the next day. Hitler was dictator.

That was the end of democracy in Germany until the Bundestag was formed in West Germany after the war. Democracy for all of Germany did not return until reunification in 1990.

In the United States, meanwhile, FDR took office and quickly turned around the financial panic with the round-the-clock help of his Republican Treasury Secretary, William H. Woodin, the railcar titan. U.S. financial markets were restored to stability, and the economic downturn was immediately reversed.

But it was too late. The dim view in Europe of American democracy and capitalism since the Crash would take years to adjust. Desperate German voters were an easy mark for Nazi demagogues, who dealt with demonstrators with violence. In the wake of the Panic and Depression, a mad hater had taken control of Germany. FDR and other world leaders would have to confront this for the rest of his presidency.

Hitler's assumption of sole power had been unexpected. In the United States, on November 21, 1922, The New York Times reported that Hitler's anti-Semitic propaganda was just 

"a bait to catch masses of followers and keep them aroused, enthusiastic and in line[...]"

See the full story above.

The New York Times story refers to the "Hitler organization" as a violation of the  military clauses of the Versailles Treaty, and refers to "its predecessor" — the Orgesch. The Orgesch was named after a forgotten forerunner of Hitler, Georg Escherich (1870-1941). 

Escherish was a forester and politician with the Bavarian People's Party, which had 18 members elected to the Reichstag on the last ballot in March 1933 (see table at top). Since 1919 he headed the Bavarian Einwohnerwehren, the anti-communist home guard groups. In 1920 Escherich organized his supporters into the Orgesch (from "Organization Escherich"), an anti-Semitic paramilitary group, which violated the Versailles Treaty limit on the size of the German army to 100,000 troops referred to in the NY Times clip. The Orgesch established links with the Heimwehr in Austria, an early harbinger of the Anschluss. 

On the orders of the Allies in 1921, as part of wider moves against private armies that had sprouted up in Germany since the Armistice, the Orgesch was disarmed and disbanded. But as one devil was killed, seven new ones rose to take its place. The militias of the right, such as the Sturmabteilung and the Stahlhelm, Bund der Frontsoldaten, grew in size until they were disbanded in 1933 in favor of Adolf Hitler's personal bodyguard, the super-sadistic Schutzstaffel or S.S.

The Nazi gangs were much harder to disband than those of the Orgesch. It's too bad that The New York Times writer did not foresee that.

Two years ago, Timothy Egan in his  Op-Ed, "The Beast Is Us," suggested why everyone who is concerned about keeping American democracy should remember March 5, 1933 — the day one-third of Germans voted and elected a dictator bent on a world war, enough voters to end contested elections while Germany took the world into war.

Christopher R. Browning, Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, reviewed a 998-page book by Volker Ullrich in the April 20. 2017 issue of The New York Review of Books (10, 12, 14). The book, Hitler: Ascent 1889-1939 (Knopf), shows how Hitler rose out of a weak democracy to become Germany's Führer. 

While noting differences between Germany then and the United States recently, Browning also notes disturbing similarities between the end of the Weimar era in Germany and the election of Donald Trump as President in 2016-2017. He concludes:

Weimar parliamentary government had been supplanted by presidentially appointed chancellors ruling through the emergency decree powers of an antidemocratic president [Paul von Hindenburg] since 1930. In 1933 Hitler simply used this post-democratic stopgap system to install a totalitarian dictatorship with incredible speed and without serious opposition. If we can still effectively protect American democracy from dictatorship, then certainly one lesson from the study of the demise of Weimar and the ascent of Hitler is how important it is to do it early. (My emphasis.)

Check out this Time Line on Hitler's ascendancy to power to see how how Germany democracy eroded over many years.