Alt Text:

Sarcastic bluesky post saying [time traveling back to 1933 to make sure to tell Germans to protest Hitler less vigorously so as not to alienate bougie centrists who want to go to brunch undisturbed, thus preventing the rise of fascism]

  • TranscendentalEmpire@lemmy.today
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    56
    ·
    1 day ago

    I think that’s a massive mischaracterization of the elections in 33. Hitler mainly rose to power because the traditional nationalist party and centrist party thought they could control him and use his popularity to ward off a coalition from leftist and unionists. The centrists were among the first parties to vote in favor of the Enabling act, which granted legislative powers to Hitler’s government.

    It’s a bit pedantic to say that Hitler rose to power without the majority because he only received 43.9% of the vote… especially considering that over 17 million people voted for him and the next most popular candidate only received 7 million votes.

    That really only makes sense if you are reviewing the election through the lens of someone used to a two party system. If we are going to evaluate it as if it were a two party system and combine the right and left into two coalitions…the Nazi, Centre, DNVP, and BVP would make up nearly 26million voters while the SPD and kpd would only make up nearly 12 million people.

    Even though the Centre party was much more willing to work with the Nazi than the SPD, if we added their votes to the left coalition you’d still have 22m on the right and 16m on the left.