Reading the Weimar Election Chart

The idea

The anchor's chart of Reichstag elections is the calibration case, and three readings answer three questions. First, the Nazi line: two point six percent in nineteen twenty-eight, eighteen percent of seats in thirty, thirty-seven percent in July thirty-two, a fall in November thirty-two, forty-four percent in March thirty-three under intimidation. It never crosses fifty, so Hitler was appointed, not elected. Second, the timing: the jump comes between twenty-eight and thirty, exactly when the Depression arrives, so the economy, not the message, moved the vote. Third, the other lines: the Communists rise too, the moderate middle collapses, and the Social Democrats hold. That is the exam's answer in a picture. Voters did not turn to the Nazis for anti-Semitism, which the party muted, nor for unions, which it banned; they turned away from a parliament of thirty-two parties that had failed at hyperinflation and now failed at the slump. Disenchantment with liberalism as weak and ineffective is what the chart shows.