For those who expected me to talk about the consequential 1932 presidential election between then-President Herbert Hoover and the Democratic challenger Franklin Roosevelt, they will be disappointed. I want to address the 1932 election in Germany. It is a sobering lesson for the time we live in. There were two elections that year. The percentages changed from one election to the next, but the number-one party stayed the same.
The second event I want to address is what happened on November 8 and 9. I am not referring to Kristallnacht, which occurred in 1938, but the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. In order to understand how the Nazi Party ended up as the most popular party, you need to start with that event.
In the June 1920 election, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (the Nazi Party) had a negligible number of votes in the Reichstag election.
In the election after the Beer Hall Putsch, in May 1924, they received 6.5% of the vote. The Beer Hall Putsch was an amateurish coup attempt by Hitler which resulted in him being convicted of treason and incarcerated. One would have expected that Hitler—now a convicted felon who tried to overthrow the government—would be a pariah. Instead, he became more popular. There were those who hated the government and thought Hitler was a hero trying to “drain the swamp” by force.
Hitler wrote Mein Kampf during his incarceration in 1925, which served as the blueprint for what he intended to do if he gained power. If one bothered to read the book, one would see how dangerous he could be if he ever took control.
The Nazi Party’s vote percentage declined afterward, until June 1930, when the first election after the 1929 market crash was held. The Nazis became the second-largest party in the Reichstag with 17% of the vote. In the next election, July 1932, the Nazis became the largest party with 37.3% of the vote—16 percentage points more than the next party.
What changed during those two years was that the Depression was in full swing. You had the “double whammy” of high unemployment and high inflation. Today, we call that the affordability crisis. The traditional political parties—politicians with experience—seemed unable to deal with it.
Hitler was an outsider with no governmental experience. He was not even born in Germany. He talked about “making Germany great again” and addressing the economic crisis. The Nazis were experts in using media to their advantage, while the traditional politicians and parties were stuck using old methods.
Even the party name—National Socialist German Workers’ Party—appealed to the masses. “Socialist” and “Workers’ Party” sounded like it was a party for the people. The word “fascist” was nowhere to be found.
There were many German voters who knew about Hitler’s coup attempt and his manifesto but did not care. For them, it was the economy. Others genuinely believed Hitler’s antisemitic ideology and supported him because of it. It is unclear how many Jews voted for the Nazi Party in July 1932. The assumption is that very few did. Some historians claim that in mixed Jewish neighborhoods, the level of antisemitism was higher because non-Jews interacted more with Jews. I do not agree with that thesis. I have seen no study showing a correlation between antisemitism and frequency of interaction.
Although it is hard to fathom now, there were Jews who supported Hitler because they had no confidence in the other parties and wanted change. They, like many Germans, did not take seriously the threats Hitler made in Mein Kampf about what he would do to the Jews if he ever gained power.
We see this pattern in our own time. Candidates speak about the economy—affordability and inflation—and voters focus only on that, ignoring everything else the candidate has said or done. These “outsiders” then use modern media to spread their message, while traditional politicians remain stuck in outdated strategies. They present themselves as independent of “the system,” knowing how little regard the public has for career politicians.
The 1932 German election is a warning of what happens when an electorate becomes hyper-focused on the economy and ignores character and ideology. That is how you end up with someone who believes the people elected him to engage in destructive conduct. Had German voters considered Hitler’s past and the explicit blueprint laid out in Mein Kampf, he could have become just another failed demagogue who faded into obscurity. Instead, they helped him become Chancellor—and eventually take total control—with devastating consequences for the Jewish people and the world.