Hitler

reckoned in April with about forty seats when it looked as if there would be a dissolution of the Reichstag at that time. A week before polling-day in September he expected ‘a massive success’. Hitler later claimed he had thought 100 were possible. In reality, as Goebbels admitted, the size of the victory took all in the party by surprise. No one had expected 107 seats. Hitler was beside himself with joy.
    The political landscape had dramatically changed overnight. Alongside the Nazis, the Communists had increased their support, now to 13.1 per cent of the vote. Though still the largest party, the SPD hadlost ground as, marginally, did the Zentrum. But the biggest losers were the bourgeois parties of the centre and Right. The DNVP had dropped in successive elections since 1924 from 20.5 to only 7.0 per cent, the DVP from 10.1 to 4.7 per cent. The Nazis were the main profiteers. One in three former DNVP voters, it has been estimated, now turned to the NSDAP, as did one in four former supporters of the liberal parties. Smaller, but still significant gains, were made from all other parties. These included the SPD, KPD, and Zentrum/BVP, though the working-class milieus dominated by the parties of the Left and, above all, the Catholic sub-culture remained, as they would continue to be, relatively unyielding terrain for the NSDAP. The increased turn-out – up from 75.6 to 82 per cent – also benefited the Nazis, though less so than has often been presumed.
    The landslide was greatest in the Protestant countryside of northern and eastern Germany. With the exception of rural parts of Franconia, piously Protestant, the largely Catholic Bavarian electoral districts now for the first time lagged behind the national average. The same was true of most Catholic regions. In big cities and industrial areas – though there were some notable exceptions, such as Breslau and Chemnitz-Zwickau – the Nazi gains, though still spectacular, were also below average. But in Schleswig-Holstein, the NSDAP vote had rocketed from 4 per cent in 1928 to 27 per cent. East Prussia, Pomerania, Hanover, and Mecklenburg were among the other regions where Nazi support was now over 20 per cent. At least three-quarters of Nazi voters were Protestants (or, at any rate, non-Catholics). Significantly more men than women voted Nazi (though this was to alter between 1930 and 1933). At least two-fifths of Nazi support came from the middle classes. But a quarter was drawn from the working class (though the unemployed were more likely to vote for the KPD than for Hitler’s party). The middle classes were indeed over-represented among Nazi voters. But the NSDAP was no mere middle-class party, as used to be thought. Though not in equal proportions, the Hitler Movement could reasonably claim to have won support from all sections of society. No other party throughout the Weimar Republic could claim the same.
    The social structure of the party’s membership points to the same conclusion. A massive influx of members followed the September election. As with voters, they came, if not evenly, from all sections of society. The membership was overwhelmingly male, and only the KPD was asyouthful in its membership profile. The Protestant middle classes were over-represented. But there was also a sizeable working-class presence, even more pronounced in the SA and the Hitler Youth than in the party itself. At the same time, the political breakthrough meant that ‘respectable’ local citizens now felt ready to join the party. Teachers, civil servants, even some Protestant pastors were among the ‘respectable’ groups altering the party’s social standing in the provinces. In Franconia, for example, the NSDAP already had the appearance by 1930 of a ‘civil-service party’. The penetration by the party of the social networks of provincial towns and villages now began to intensify notably.
    There are times – they mark the danger point for a political system – when politicians can no longer communicate, when they stop understanding the language of the people they are supposed to be representing. The politicians of Weimar’s parties were well on the way to reaching that point in 1930. Hitler had the advantage of being undamaged by participation in unpopular government, and of unwavering radicalism in his hostility to the Republic. He could speak in language more and more Germans understood – the language of bitter protest at a discredited system, the language of