So, Who Would You REALLY Have Voted for in Germany in 1930?

It might not be who you think you would have voted for.

It’s another election year in the United States, another year of people arguing about whose candidate is the most like Hitler, another year where almost none of them actually know anything about pre-WWII Germany.

The question is meaningful, if only barely so. Political issues, and political party alignments, haven’t changed all that much since the 1800s. Roughly the same positions and issues are called “left” versus “right” in 2016 as they were in 1930s Germany, or 1920s Spain, or for that matter 1800s France when the whole “left versus right” terminology was coined. So you can map issues onto parties.

But because Hitler is our go-to trope for “irredeemable monster evil” the political terms, the words we use to describe various parties and various positions, have been so politicized that, if you want a meaningful comparison, you can’t say that party X was “liberal” or some issue or party Y was “socialist” on some issue or party Z was “conservative” on some issue.

So let’s look at who was on the left in the election that brought Hitler into the government, and who was on the right, not in terms of labels, but in terms of what they stood for. Compare their issues to your own issues, their stances to your own stances, and then ask yourself honestly, if you believed then what you believe now and as someone who didn’t know what was going to happen next, who you really would have voted for.

And before I get started, let me point out something about massively multi-party governments like the German government during the period between World War I and World War II. In such a system, the word “party” doesn’t mean what it means in 21st century America. It means what we mean by “caucus.” After each election, when it came time to appoint someone to run the country and to appoint many people to various government offices, the parties voted more-or-less in lockstep: all the left-wing parties voted for the Social Democrat candidate and all the right-wing parties voted for the Center candidate; whichever one won (almost always the Social Democrat) handed out cabinet positions and such among the various parties (think “caucuses”) in his coalition (think “party”).

On the Left: the Social Democrats and Their Allies

When Germany first became a democracy by the Kaiser’s last decree on his way out of the country after World War I, the Social Democrats were practically the whole legislature, because “there should be a legislature” was their original defining issue: they were the pro-democracy party. But it didn’t take long for more parties to form, because once there was a legislature, everybody has to take actual sides on issues. But in almost every election until 1930, the Social Democrats were able to parlay their incumbency and popularity into a leadership position. Then came the world-wide Great Depression, and just like voters in a lot of countries, they took the blame.

But the Social Democrats had a pretty consistent set of positions:

They supported a market economy, but …
They also supported a tax system that mostly taxed rich people and very-profitable corporations, and …
They supported the right of unions to bargain collectively and to strike.
They encouraged investment in Berlin and other major cities, in order to promote the already-strong industrial export economy, and encouraged farmers and their children to move to the cities if they needed work.
They supported a strong national defense in order to protect against revolutionary movements within and to deter invasion by France or Russia, but …
They supported compliance with the Treaty of Versailles until or unless a peaceful exit from it could be diplomatically negotiated. And finally …
They supported strong separation between church and state, in order to prevent any resurgence of violence between Protestants and Catholics, and to discourage violence by either of the above versus Jews.

The Independent Social Democrats were a splinter party that broke away from the Social Democrats over the issue of national defense. They agreed with every single plank of the Social Democratic platform but one: they opposed nearly all military spending, believing that Germany would be safer without a strong national army, safer pursuing a peaceful policy of neutrality (like Switzerland), that Germany couldn’t afford an army strong enough to stand up to Germany’s many enemies. Unsurprisingly, they preferred that money be diverted from soldiers and defense contractors to schools, clinics, and hospitals.

And finally there was the Communist Party of Germany. They were a pro-Soviet reform party, which means that they renounced Communist revolution as a tactic, but supported constitutional amendments that would replace the existing government with one in which nobody who had employees or who earned the majority of their income from rents or investments could vote. In practice, they voted in lock-step with the Independent Social Democrats.

If you would have voted for any of the above parties, congratulations: you would have voted against Hitler.

On the Right: the Center Party and its Allies

For most of the time between 1918 and 1930, the Center Party was the leader of the opposition groups; after World War II, it absorbed most of the rest of the non-Nazi right-wing parties and became the Christian Democratic Union party that runs Germany now. Originally, the Center Party stood for opposition to everything that the Social Democrats stood for, including democracy itself — the party ran, in part, on a platform of bringing back the absolute monarchy and making the elected government merely advisory, as it had been under the Kaiser. But once that was a moot point, they carved out a niche for themselves as Germany’s rural conservative party, running on two issues:

They stood for direct government funding of Catholic education (and not for schools run by any other religion) and for taxpayer-funded pensions for Catholic priests and nuns (and not any other clergy). They insisted that this was necessary to preserve German culture and virtues against Protestant and Jewish “tolerance” for deviance, what they were the first to call the Culture War. And …
They proposed reducing government support for big-city industries in favor of more subsidies and price-supports for struggling German farmers, both to promote rural virtues and to free Germany from dependence on imported food.

On almost every other issue, they deferred to their coalition partner, the German National Party. In practice, the German National Party supported the Center Party’s religious policies, but they did so knowing that if the Center Party was in power, they would vote against it the same way that the Independent Social Democrats voted against every defense budget. (And, in fact, it was mostly by reaching out to the National Party that the Social Democrats were able to pass military funding bills.) The National Party agreed with the Social Democrats on some issues:

They supported a market economy.
They supported a strong national defense, for the same reasons as the Social Democrats, and subject to the same restriction:
They supported obedience to the Treaty of Versailles and only diplomatic efforts to seek relief from it.

But on business and the economy, they were in opposition:

They supported lower taxes on investors and on business, believing that this would stimulate more investment and a stronger economy.
They wanted union strikes made illegal again; they wanted the government to intervene on behalf of companies against workers.

And finally, there were the National Socialists, or, as they came to be called, the Nazis. In practice, they voted in lock-step with the National and Center parties. They did not run for office on a platform of “here is how we think government should work” as much as on a list of complaints about the government, both Social Democrat and Center, that they felt were not being addressed:

They wanted Germany out of the Treaty of Versailles, by force if necessary. They blamed the Social Democrats in the World War I era advisory legislature for the loss (the “stab in the back” theory). They insisted that if Germany threatened to go on the attack if the treaty’s sanctions weren’t lifted, then the weak, soft, peace-loving British and French and Americans would surrender and lift the sanctions.
They demanded stronger action against the Communists, who they felt had gotten off easy after a failed communist revolution in 1918; that the Communist Party of Germany voted in lock-step with the Social Democrats “proved” that the Social Democrats were traitorous stooges of Moscow. And, …
They blamed all of the above on the Jews, and promised an unspecified “final solution” — usually interpreted by the press as meaning “mass deportations.” They accused the Jews of subverting Germany’s traditional Christian religious values, of plotting with Germany’s enemies, of planning a campaign of pro-communist terrorism. They told the public that the other parties were naive: the next World War had already begun, and Germany was losing.

If you would have voted for any of the above parties? You would have voted for Hitler. Because when the votes were counted here was the choice the parties faced:

The Social Democrats won the election. But they didn’t get enough votes to form a government, even with the support of the Independent Social Democrats and the Communists. The only way they could form a government would be if the Center Party and the National Party agreed to a centrist coalition.
The Center Party and the National Party could not form a government by themselves. The only way that they could have a center-right government would be if Hitler and his Nazis would agree to form a coalition with them, and that was unthinkable: a vote for Hitler was a vote for a war that they knew Germany would lose. And besides, the man’s race-baiting was intolerably ignorant.

And so Hitler himself cut the knot. Even though his party came in 2nd in the elections, even though it was the largest right wing party, he didn’t insist on forming a Nazi government. He offered to hand the government to the Center Party in exchange for one purely symbolic position, the chancellorship: a job that mostly consisted of going to state funerals and cutting ribbons, except during national emergencies, when it incorporated the job that we would call FEMA director.

Then came the Reichstag Fire, which Hitler insisted was the first terrorist act of a pro-Moscow communist uprising to come. Then came the declaration of national emergency. The next election was held with Nazi death squads in the streets, murdering anybody they suspected would vote for any center-left or left-wing party. The next election after that was never held until we held it for them, after millions of people had died.

So If Today’s American Candidates had Run in 1930 Germany

If you compare our remaining American 2016 presidential candidates to the positions of the various parties in the 1930 German national elections, I think it’s pretty clear:

Hillary Clinton would be the Social Democrat.
Bernie Sanders would be the Independent Social Democrat.
Jill Stein would be the Communist.
Ted Cruz would be the Center Party candidate.
Marco Rubio would be the Nationalist.
Donald Trump would be the Nazi.