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Authors: Voting for Hitler,Stalin; Elections Under 20th Century Dictatorships (2011)

256

F R A N K O M L A N D

the controlled elections under the National Socialists, Schleswig-Holstein

would no longer be a Party stronghold. This raises further questions: could

the electorate vote more freely in Schleswig-Holstein than elsewhere? Or

were the National Socialist leaders so sure of victory here that they exerted

less pressure and social control? Or was there perhaps less vote-rigging

here than elsewhere? I will pursue these and further questions regarding

pseudo-elections in relation to Schleswig-Holstein and the German
Reich
.

Figure 1: Election March 5, 1933: Votes for the NSDAP (Map: Frank Omland,

Hamburg 2011).

——————

July 31, 1932: 44.3 per cent (= 51 per cent of the valid votes cast) compared to 31.1 per cent;
Reichstag
election November 6, 1932: 38.4 per cent compared to 26.5 per cent;
Reichstag
election March 5, 1933: Frankfurt/Oder (49 per cent), Pommern (48.6 per cent), Liegnitz (48.3 per cent), East Hanover (48.2 per cent), East Prussia (48.1 per cent).

“ G E R M A N Y T O T A L L Y N A T I O N A L S O C I A L I S T ”

257

The Legality and Reality of “Voting Without Choice”

After the last multi-party
Reichstag
election of March 5, 1933, the Nazi regime, as part of the process of
Gleichschaltung
, ensured that the
Länder
parliaments were reconstituted according to the
Reichstag
election result, with the seats won by the KPD being discounted. The exclusion of the workers’

parties and the self-dissolution of the middle-class parties, together with

the ban in July 1933 on the formation of new parties, led to the pseudo-

legal single-party state (Wendt 1995, 111).5 In November 1933, the parlia-

ments of the different
Länder
were dissolved without new elections and, at the end of January 1934, their rights of sovereignty were transferred to the

Reich
. Consequently, no elections took place during the Nazi period either at the level of the
Land
or the
Gemeinde
.6 Therefore, the only opportunity left open to the electorate to express their support for, or opposition to,

the NSDAP’s single-party state was to vote at the national level. The first

Reichstag
elections and a plebiscite (on the withdrawal from the League of Nations) took place on November 12, 1933. There was another plebiscite

on August 19, 1934 (on Hitler’s presidency of the
Reich
) and the
Reichstag
election on March 29, 1936 (to legitimize the invasion of the de-militarized

Rheinland
). Finally, there was the “plebiscite and election for
Großdeutschland
’s
Reichstag
” on April 10, 1938 (the annexation of Austria)and the additional election for the
Reichstag
in
Sudetendeutschland
on December 4, 1938

(Jung 1995, 109; Hubert 1992, 149).7

Each of these ballots was conducted at short notice and for purely tac-

tical reasons, which can be seen not only in the fact that the legislative

period of the
Reichstag
was not observed, but also in the election dates chosen and the subjects of the plebiscites. The purpose, rather, was to

mobilize the population to support the German national interest at times

of self-inflicted foreign and domestic political crises, and to demonstrate to

the outside world that the German
Volk
was fully behind its government.

The surprisingly good results for the National Socialists in November 1933

had precisely this effect; as did the decline in support for the regime in

August 1934, after which Hitler’s stated intention to hold plebiscites annu-

——————

5 Reichsgesetzblatt (I, 1933, 153); ibid. (I, 1933, 173). Reichsgesetzesblatt (I, 1933, 479).

6 Reichsgesetzblatt (I, 1934, 75).

7 Reichsgesetzblatt (I, 1933, 729);
Reichskanzlei
files (1983, 906)—Reichsgesetzesblatt (I, 1934, 747, 751). Reichsgesetzblatt (I, 1936, 133, 134). Reichsgesetzblatt (I, 1938, 237, 249)—Reichsgesetzblatt (I, 1938, 1636, 1567).

258

F R A N K O M L A N D

ally was quietly dropped (Jung 1995, 58; Omland 2006a, 126–27). After

that, the manipulation of ballots reached its peak in 1936 and 1938: the

results that were announced, with 97 per cent of the electorate supporting

the regime, lacked credibility both at home and abroad, and were even

regarded with some skepticism by the Party’s own supporters (Omland

2006a, 152, 185).

In the first ballots, the National Socialists adhered to the formal and le-

gal procedures established during the Weimar Republic to maintain the

illusion that the polls were free. This gave the regime a certain amount of

credibility and made the dictatorial nature of the plebiscites and elections

less obvious to the public. The freer these ballots seemed to be, the greater

would be the political gain when the electorate delivered high levels of

support for the Party.

On the other hand, though, the electoral law formally remained by and

large unchanged between 1933 and 1938. To ensure a maximum turnout

the regime simply adhered to the concept of “the right to vote is the duty

to vote”, which had been established by the parties of the Weimar Repub-

lic. In November 1933 the regime aggressively called to the polls with the

slogan: “Each and every member of the
Volk
has a duty to vote, since the right to vote is the duty to vote! Staying at home is not an option!”8 The

Wahlschleppdienste
, already familiar to all from the Weimar Republic, forcibly mobilized the electorate to vote: they called on those who had not yet

voted and compelled them to do so. This made the right to vote in effect a

duty to vote, and led to the very high results lacking credibility. It was

difficult for the regime to get across either to its own supporters or to

anyone else that every voter had gone to the polls and that no opposition

had been voiced (Deutschland-Berichte 1936, 218, 319, 449; ibid. 1938,

426–28).

In general, most of the laws and administrative regulations of the Wei-

mar Republic stayed in place when the Nazis staged their ballots in 1933

and 1934, and also the new
plebiscite law
merely simplified the existing procedures (Schwieger 2005, 203–14; Jung 1995, 21, 31–4).9 All this was de-

signed to maintain the appearance of normality: electoral registers were

published, those entitled to vote got a polling card, what went on at polling

stations was monitored carefully by election committees, and voters cast

their votes secretly in polling booths (Omland 2006a, 36, 52–4). Moreover,

——————

Marner Zeitung
, May 19, 1928;
Altonaer Nachrichten
, November 6 and 8, 1933.

9 Reichsgesetzblatt (I, 1933, 479).

“ G E R M A N Y T O T A L L Y N A T I O N A L S O C I A L I S T ”

259

voters could be issued with a
Stimmschein
(absentee ballot), which enabled them to vote outside their own constituency or even to avoid voting without being monitored. For this reason, those voters with a
Stimmschein
were suspected by the
Gauleitung
of being potential non-voters: “In order to

prevent Marxist and other politically unreliable elements from using a

Stimmschein
to avoid voting, the
Ortsgruppenleiter
must immediately contact local police officials and suggest that
Stimmscheine
are only issued in the most urgent cases and only to persons who are politically reliable”.10

Initially, it was even more important to the
Reichsinnenminister
Frick to have a high turnout in elections than to exclude certain groups of people

from the ballot. It was only in 1936, once the Nazis had consolidated their

power, that those defined as Jewish were deprived of their franchise

(Hubert 1992, 241, 248; Omland 2006a, 130–32).11 To maintain the

appearance of a legal procedure, even political enemies, who were impris-

oned in concentration camps as
Schutzhäftlinge,
were allowed to vote as late as 1936—although this concession gave the Nazi administration some

headache: the civil servant responsible for the elections in Glückstadt con-

centration camp, for example, commented after the polls in November

1933: “The election result shows that approximately one third of all
Schutz-

häftlinge
have still not understood, or are unwilling to understand, what today has been about. Unfortunately, we are not able to identify the names

of those who are unable to learn”.12

Nevertheless, from 1936, the Minister of the Interior, Frick, was unable

to defend his formal legal positions within the Party hierarchy either

against Goebbels, the propaganda minister responsible for election cam-

paigns, or against Himmler, the leader of the SS. The latter, in 1938, de-

cided without any legal basis to exclude political
Schutzhäftlinge
from elections, and thereby denied them the opportunity to express their dissent

towards the regime. In practice already after November 1933 the Nazi

regime gave less and less consideration to their propaganda assertion that

the ballots were free and adhered less and less to the proper formal proce-

dures (Hubert 1992, 255–57; Omland 2006a, 164).

——————

10 Kreisarchiv Schleswig-Flensburg 9 /26. NSDAP
Ortsgruppe
Schleswig to the Schleswig Magistrate, November 6, 1933.