A Woman’s Right to Vote and Germany’s 1932 Presidential Elections
“Women! Millions of men without work. Millions of children without a future. Save the German family. Vote for Adolf Hitler!”
I’m still working my way through the articles Sigrid Schultz published under her by-line in the Chicago Tribune as part of my research for the new book. I’ve reached the days just after the run-offs for presidential election of 1932, in which Paul van Hindenburg defeated Adolf Hitler by a margin of 6,000,000 votes. People thought it was all going to be okay. Schultz quoted more than one politician who said something along the lines of “The republic is saved!”
Writing on April 11, 1932, Schultz reported that five people died on the day of the run-off. (Many more had died during the campaigns leading up to the election.) Her description of one of the deaths caught my attention for a number of reasons, including the fact that it wasn’t a result of the frequent street battles between Nazis, Communists, Steel Helmets (veterans of the German Imperial army who longed for the good old days of the Kaiser*) and the Reichsbanner men (armed civilian supporters of the Weimar Republic). Instead:
The wife of a 67 year old Munich laborer struck her husband with his cane when he attempted to tell her how to vote and he fell dead.
Women gained the right to vote with the revolution that established the Weimar Republic. Thirteen years later, Hitler and his minions wanted to take away women’s right to vote and offered them marriage and “chivalrous devotion”in its place.** Apparently one woman took her right to vote seriously.
* When push came to shove, most of them voted for a Fascist dictator since they couldn’t put the Kaiser back on the throne.
**As Schultz pointed out in an article dated March 12, it wasn’t clear how the Nazis were going to organize enough husbands and “chivalrous devotion” to go around, given that women outnumbered men in Germany by more than two million.
Hitler’s “Anti-Lie Bureau”
Hitler on the campaign trail April 4, 1932. General Paul von Hindenburg defeated his bid for the German presidency by six million votes.
From the Chicago Tribune, April 10, 1932:
The Fascist chieftain has been forced to establish an “anti-lie bureau” to issue daily answers to his opposition’s accusations that his movement is illegal, following a series of sensational raids on Nazi headquarters in Prussia and the publication of the Bavarian and Hessian governments of seized documents which were presented as proof of the subversive tendencies of the Nazis.
Déjà Vu All Over Again: Zoom-Bombing 1930’s Style
Like most of us, I had not heard about “Zoom bombing” until the Covid pandemic caused many of us to take our social and work lives to the internet. As the use of Zoom and its fellows grew, so did the intrusion of internet trolls into online video conference spaces. Disruptions have ranged from the mildly annoying to the truly horrific.
Turns out Zoom-bombing had its counterpart back in the days when radio was (relatively) new.
On December 31 1931, General Paul von Hindenburg,* president of the Weimar Republic of Germany, gave a radio address to the nation. Or at least he attempted to. Shortly after he began, he was interrupted by an unidentified voice saying “Hello, hello, the sign of the red front is over Germany.” To the modern reader, the interruption seems mild compared to the often disturbing and hate-laden images and messages that Zoom-bombers have inserted into hijacked video-calls in recent months. From the perspective of Weimar Germany, when Red and Fascist agitators called for the government to be overthrown and indulged in violent street fighting on a regular basis, it was a threatening message.
The following day, Berlin police found that communist technicians** had attached a microphone to a cable leading to a German radio station and patched through to the president’s speech.
Apparently getting your communication technology hacked is nothing new. Alas.
* For the detail-minded among you: His full name was Paul Ludwig Hans Anton von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg and he rose to the rank of field marshal in the Imperial German army in World War I. I would argue that he was the political equivalent of President Dwight D. Eisenhower: an admired military leader who became a moderate—and admired—national political leader. But that’s a discussion for different day.
**Home-grown German communists, not Russian provocateurs