The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy by Hans Mommsen

Author:Hans Mommsen
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2017-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

The Nazi Breakthrough

THE breakthrough of the NSDAP as a mass movement was the decisive event in the last phase of the Weimar Republic. At times the NSDAP was able to mobilize more than a third of the electorate at the expense of the moderate bourgeois parties. Its inroads among these voters revealed that large sectors of the moderate bourgeoisie were unwilling and unable to accept the social and political conditions of postwar Germany. Now that a stagnating economy and the consequences of the war had led to intensified conflict over the allocation of resources, the social restructuring that had been under way since the imperialist epoch made itself more keenly felt than before. This, in turn, produced an unprecedented rise in protest voting that benefited first and foremost the NSDAP, a party that was extremely adept at exploiting the social resentments of the German middle classes.

As late as 1928, no one would have imagined that the NSDAP could possibly break out of its marginal position. In the Reichstag elections of May 1928, the NSDAP had received no more than 2.6 percent of the votes, which was even less than its share in the elections of December 1924, even though it had made every conceivable effort to achieve a breakthrough into the national political arena. Disciplinary measures against the NSDAP no longer seemed necessary. The Prussian Ministry of the Interior, for example, saw no reason to continue banning Hitler from speaking in public after the original prohibition of the party as a whole had been lifted in 1925. Nevertheless, its severe defeat of 1928 bore the seeds of the NSDAP’s future rise.

In 1928 the NSDAP had organized its campaign around the goal of winning the support of the working masses. The most important of those groups the National Socialists targeted, however, remained largely impervious to the party’s propaganda. The election results in the large urban centers were an unmitigated disaster for the party. In greater Berlin, for example, the NSDAP polled only 1.4 percent of the popular vote, with similar results in other major west German cities. Only in Munich and Augsburg, and in some middle-class towns like Coburg and Weimar, was it able to register as much as 4 to 6 percent of the popular vote. The party’s poor showing in urban areas, however, was offset by some unexpected gains. In several rural regions the NSDAP did disproportionately well, particularly in Dithmarschen and other parts of Schleswig-Holstein and in southern Lower Saxony, Upper Hesse, Franconia, and Baden.

In addressing the party’s leadership conference that took place in Weimar in the early fall, Gregor Straßer, who in January 1928 had moved over from the post of propaganda chief to assume leadership of the party organization, interpreted these seemingly disappointing election results in a surprisingly good light as a relative success for the party’s work over the past four years. From the perspective of the NSDAP leadership, the party’s growth since the fiasco of 9 November 1923 was quite encouraging. At that time, after all, the movement was on the brink of dissolution.

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