Capitalism in Decay

Berlin called on its adult population to give their opinions on three issues: the NSDAP (or technically, the slate of deputies to the Reichstag consisting only of NSDAP members), withdrawal from the Geneva Conference on Disarmament, and finally withdrawal from the League of Nations. German voters overwhelmingly approved of all three; the Reichstag election returned the first completely one‐party German parliament, and at least 89.9% voted ‘Yes’ on Germany’s withdrawal from the League of Nations from yestermonth.

A few words immediately come to mind: rigged, fraudulent, fake, illegitimate, tampered. I can’t blame you for your cynicism. While there is a kernel of truth in these suspicions, I believe that the number of legitimate votes was still much higher than any of us would like to admit, for reasons which I’ll soon explain. It is true that, for example, there was pressure on Esterwegen III’s hundreds of prisoners to vote yes, but the Fascists could not possibly have hoped to bully millions of people into submission, nor would it have been necessary.

Quoting William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, page 212:

The response of […] German [adults], after fifteen years of frustration and of resentment against the consequences of a lost war, was almost unanimous. Some 96 per cent of the registered voters cast their ballots and 95 per cent of these approved Germany’s withdrawal from Geneva. The vote for the single [Fascist] list for the Reichstag (which included Hugenberg and a half‐dozen other non‐[fascists]) was 92 per cent. Even at the Dachau concentration camp 2,154 out of 2,242 inmates voted for the government which had incarcerated them!

It is true that in many communities threats were made against those who failed to vote or who voted the wrong way; and in some cases there was fear that anyone who cast his vote against the régime might be detected and punished. Yet even with these reservations the election, whose count at least was honest, was a staggering victory for Adolf Hitler. There was no doubt that in defying the outside world as he had done, he had the overwhelming support of the German people.

With the benefit of hindsight it is nearly inconceivable how so many adults would intentionally vote for this anticommunist, but with notable exceptions such as Franz Werfel (alav hashalom) most people had no clue just how atrocious the Third Reich would become.

The November 1933 plebiscite for the NSDAP is often called an ‘election’, but in reality it was more like a public opinion poll since by then the NSDAP had outlawed all of the other political parties; those were no longer options.

Quoting David Altman’s Direct Democracy Worldwide, pages 89–90:

In October 1933, then‐[Fascist] Germany decided to withdraw from the League of Nations and end its participation in the Disarmament Conference. A full month after taking these actions, the government asked for popular approval. A plebiscite was held in conjunction with the parliamentary elections of November 12, 1933. The question was officially formulated as follows: “Do you, German man, and you, German woman, approve this policy of your government, and are you ready to declare it as the expression of your own views and your own will and to joyously adhere to it?”³

The results were rather clear: 95.02 percent agreed that only 4.92 percent rejected the question. From 1933 through 1938, [grown‐up] Germans were called to vote three more times, with similar results both in participation rates and percentage of affirmative votes. Professor Schiller considers that in the plebiscites of 1933 and 1934, it was possible to express dissent without proving much fraud. Despite internal propaganda and pressure to vote, there seems to have been substantial support for the [Fascist régime] (which came to office in January 30, 1933).

Similarly, Wolfgang Benz agreed in A Concise History of the Third Reich, page 48:

An overwhelming majority of voters, 95.2 percent, approved of [Berlin’s] move. Evidence most [grown‐up] Germans were in agreement with [this new] leadership; all opposition had either been silenced, or, like the voices of Communist and Socialist opponents of the new order, reduced to futile and dangerous protests employing leaflets, wall slogans, and so on, whose sole purpose was to demonstrate that the opposition still existed underground, in a state of illegality.

As Shirer hinted above, it is quite plausible that many German grown‐ups were willing to give Fascism a shot since at that point it felt like things could not have gotten much worse, but there was also plenty of clergy around ready to urge people into voting for the NSDAP and its latest policies. Aside from that, the NSDAP would also award its voters with public employment. Thus, not too much coercion (à la ‘Revolutionary’ Junta of El Salvador) was necessary.

Despite the pressures and incentives to vote ‘yes’, a few did not. Who voted ‘no’? We did. Some Danes did, too. Quoting Frank Omland’s “Germany Totally National Socialist”—National Socialist Reichstag Elections and Plebiscites, 1933–1938: The Example of Schleswig‐Holstein (from the obnoxiously titled Voting for Hitler and Stalin: Elections Under 20th Century Dictatorships):

It is worth looking more closely at the results of the ballots of 1933 and 1934, since it was still possible then to vote against the [Third Reich].

[…]

According to these figures, between 80 and 90 per cent of those who voted against the [Fascists] were former supporters of the two banned workers’ parties, the KPD and the SPD. This is confirmed when we evaluate the patterns of voting according to occupation: in predominantly agrarian areas, support for the [Fascists] was at its highest, while in areas where the sectors of “industry and manufacturing”, or “service and trade”, were predominant, the support was at its lowest.

The greatest rejection of the [Fascists] came from the workers, both employed and unemployed, who in the rural areas in 1933 constituted almost the only notable opposition to [Fascism]. They were responsible for 69 and 97 per cent of all the “no” votes respectively, and were usually followed by the (unemployed) white‐collar workers.

These results indicate that the former Communist and Social Democratic voters in particular used the opportunity to express their dissent. The majority of opposition votes and abstentions in Schleswig‐Holstein came from supporters of the KPD and, to a much lesser extent, from those of the SPD, as well as from the Danish minority in certain regions. To do so, they used every opportunity available to them: they boycotted the ballot, voted “no”, or spoilt the ballot paper.

Although Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick tried to minimize voter intimidation, and these plebiscites were fairer than subsequent ones, voting ‘no’ still carried risks:

In Schleswig‐Holstein, the electorate’s room for maneuver was still large enough in 1933 and 1934 to allow dissenting voters to express their disapproval in every ballot. They had to be prepared, though, for possible consequences: there was still the threat that non‐voters would be identified, that the secrecy of the ballot would be broken, and that deviant behavior would be punished.

Therefore, to vote “no”, to post an invalid ballot paper, or to abstain from voting at all, required great personal courage. Although it was only a small minority who expressed their dissent towards the [Third Reich], the Volksgemeinschaft that the [Fascists] sought to establish could not be achieved in the face of such deviant behavior.

In contrast,

everybody else, including supporters of the catholic Zentrum Party, were no longer prepared to express their dissent in the pseudo‐elections.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

While most, if not all dictatorships of the bourgeoisie do in one way or another rig their elections and plebiscites in favor of anticommunism, they do have good reasons for leaving some otherwise untampered. The most important reason is that these glorified opinion polls can signal to the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie that it has little to fear from the masses; these give it the green light to go ahead or keep going with its actions, so it would be a hasty conclusion to write these off as worthless ceremonies. All of this is why I believe that the margin of error here is small.