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Abstract

After the Reichstag rejected the budget plan presented by the minority government under Chancellor Brüning in July 1930, Brüning attempted to push through the budget by emergency decree. The Reichstag then exercised its constitutional right to repeal the emergency decree. Brüning in turn asked Reich President Hindenburg to dissolve the Reichstag. After the Reichstag was dissolved on July 18, 1930, new elections were held on September 14, 1930. The 1930 Reichstag election turned out to be a breakthrough for the NSDAP. It increased its seats by more than 15% to 107, making it the second strongest party in the Reichstag after the SPD. The KPD also gained some votes while most of the more moderate parties suffered significant losses. This article, which was published on September 16, 1930 in the Völkischer Beobachter, the NSDAP party newspaper, proclaimed the election result as a victory for the NSDAP in an election that was tantamount to a “referendum.” The author, Nazi ideologue and editor-in-chief of Völkischer Beobachter, Alfred Rosenberg, described the SPD and other parties in the Reichstag as “traitor parties” and declared that the NSDAP would now lead the German people, who had been robbed of their freedom, to their “rebirth.”

“The Referendum of September 14” (September 16, 1930)

Source

An unprecedented event in political history – Our victory, the productive Germany awakens!

What took place in Germany on September 14, 1930 was not a Reichstag election, but a referendum, a referendum the likes of which had never been seen before in the history of political parties in Germany – and not only in Germany. In just over two years, a ridiculed, mocked political movement, persecuted with all the means of the power of money, the press, radio and state terror, went from being a ridiculed party to the strongest anti-Marxist organization of the entire nation. From only 809,000 people in 1928, the number of believers rose to 6,401,000, and the number of Reichstag representatives grew from 12 to 106. This declaration of support was not the usual “vote,” nor was the result a “lurch to the right” or a “lurch to the left,” but signified the overall turning away of the nation, but also a terrible turning away of the unrestrained, anarchically desperate from the system that still rules purely administratively today. The K.P.D.’s increase in votes is a cry of despair of the whipped-up chaos for which the traitor parties in power today are solely to blame. They have been promising for 12 years, heaping fraud upon fraud, and the misery and anger of those now thrust into the K.P.D. is the fruit of the Dawes and Young policies of the S.P.D., the Center and the middle classes. But in yet another way this system of compliance and delusion has become the answer: Read the results about the avalanche-like growth of the National Socialist movement. When one reads that the Liegnitz constituency grows from 7,000 votes to 142,000, when Dresden return 35,000 votes in May 1930 (!) and now already 74,000, when Mühlheim a. d. Ruhr rises from 461 to 16,000 votes, Mainz from 300 to 16,000, etc., this and a thousand other things can only be understood as a passionate protest of the gagged, lied to, raped nation against the overall spirit of today, unprecedented in this monumentality.

As a protest, but not of chaotic despair, but as the strongest affirmation of a new will of the state, a new idea of the state.

On September 14, 1930, the National Socialist movement also received external legitimization of its earlier demands: today it is the sole representative of the German idea of freedom, the idea of social justice, the demand to cleanse our entire life of corruption and perfidy. Yesterday it was given the right to say to the whole world:

In our camp stands the Germany of the future. Make way, you antediluvians, for the forces of rebirth,

Your time is up.

A. R.

Source of original German text: Alfred Rosenberg, „Der Volksentscheid des 14. September,“ Völkischer Beobachter, September 16, 1930.

Translation: GHI staff