Hitler

looking intentionally away from the Chancellor to the left side of the chamber. Papen’s State Secretary Planck pointed out to Göring that the Chancellor wished to exercise his right to speak. Goöring retorted simply that the vote had begun. After again trying vainly to speak, Papen marched over to the Reichstag President’s platform and slapped the dissolution order down on Göring’s table. Followed by his cabinet, he then walked out of the chamber to howls of derision. Göring blithely pushed the dissolution order to one side, and read out the result of the division. The government was defeated by 512 votes to 42, with five abstentions and one invalid ballot paper. Only the DNVP and DVP had supported the government. All the major parties, including the Zentrum, had supported the Communist proposal. There had never been a parliamentary defeat like it. It was received with wild cheering in the Reichstag.
    Göring now read out Papen’s dissolution order, which he declared invalid since the government had already fallen through a vote of no-confidence. This was technically incorrect. Göring was subsequently compelled to concede that the Reichstag had indeed been formally dissolved by the presentation of Papen’s order. The no-confidence motion was, therefore, without legal standing. But this was of purely procedural significance. The government remained, as a consequence, in office. The reality was, however, that it had been rejected by more than four-fifths of the people’s representatives. Papen had been shown in the most humiliating way possible to be a Chancellor almost devoid of public support. Hitler was beside himself with joy. The cynical Nazi tactics had meanwhile given a foretaste of how they would behave in power, given the opportunity.
    New elections – the fifth of the year – loomed. Papen still had in his possession Hindenburg’s approval to postpone the election beyondthe sixty days allowed by the constitution. But after the fiasco of 12 September, the cabinet decided two days later that now was not the time to proceed with that experiment. The elections were set for 6 November. The Nazi leadership was aware of the difficulties. The bourgeois press was now completely hostile. The NSDAP could make little use of broadcasting. The public were weary of elections. Even leading party speakers found it difficult to sustain top form. Not least, noted Goebbels, previous campaigns had drained all available funds. The party’s coffers were empty.
    Electioneering reinvigorated Hitler. And in the fifth long campaign of the year, he set out yet again to do what he did best: make speeches. Once more, his indispensability as the chief propaganda focus of the movement meant he had to embark upon a punishing schedule of speeches and rallies. During his fourth ‘Germany Flight’ between 11 October and 5 November he gave no fewer than fifty speeches, again sometimes three a day, on one occasion four.
    His attack now focused squarely on Papen and ‘the Reaction’. The vast support for his own movement was contrasted with the ‘small circle of reactionaries’ keeping the Papen government, lacking all popular backing, in office. The Nazi press inevitably portrayed Hitler’s campaign as a victory march. But grossly inflated figures for attendance at Hitler rallies provided in the party press – in rural areas especially thousands were brought in from outside the area to swell the numbers – hid the plain signs of disillusionment and electoral fatigue. Even Hitler was now unable to fill the halls as he previously had done. For his speech in Nuremberg on 13 October, the Festhalle in Luitpoldhain was only half full. While a Hitler speech might have made a difference to the election result in some places, observers were already predicting in October that his campaign tour would do little to prevent the expected drop in Nazi support. The day before the election, Goebbels, too, was anticipating a defeat.
    When the votes were counted, Nazi fears were realized. In the last election before Hitler came to power (and the last fully free election in the Weimar Republic) the NSDAP had lost 2 million voters. In a reduced turn-out – the lowest (at 80.6 per cent) since 1928 – its percentage of the poll had fallen from 37.4 in July to 33.1 per cent, its Reichstag seats reduced from 230 to 196. The SPD and Zentrum had also lost ground slightly. The winners were the Communists, who had increased theirvote to 16.9 per