In the lead-up to the March 5 vote, Hitler leveraged his executive powers to tilt the playing field. An emergency decree, co-signed by Hitler and Hindenburg, was used to restrict press freedoms and prohibit public demonstrations by political opponents. The response from the media was swift, with various newspapers taking the government to court in an attempt to have the bans overturned. Hitler also explored the possibility of rewriting election laws to suit his needs and even considered mobilizing the army to maintain "public order." However, he was met with resistance from his own defense minister, who informed him in no uncertain terms that ordering German soldiers to fire upon their own citizens in the streets was an unthinkable violation of military and civic ethics.
The tension reached a breaking point just one week before the election when the Reichstag building was engulfed in flames. The dramatic arson attack, which reduced the symbol of German representative democracy to a smoldering ruin, was widely suspected to be a pre-election surprise engineered by the Nazis themselves. In the immediate aftermath, Hitler capitalized on the chaos, convincing Hindenburg to issue a second executive order. This decree suspended constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties and due process, effectively giving the government the power to arrest and detain opponents without cause.
As the election neared, the gravity of the situation was lost on no one. The New York Times, reporting on the Sunday of the election, described the vote as a referendum on the very republican form of government that had existed since the end of the Great War. The Times noted that if Hitler failed to secure a majority, it would be because of an "immense popular disapproval" of his party and his platform. When the results finally came in, the March 5 election saw the highest voter turnout in German history since the 1870s, with nearly 89 percent of the electorate casting ballots.
The outcome was a landslide for Hitler, but it was not the one many had anticipated. Despite the massive suppression of left-wing parties and the imprisonment or hiding of their leaders, the social democrats lost only a single seat, and the communists retained 81 out of their 100 seats. The real shift occurred among the centrist conservative parties, which saw their support hemorrhage as as many as half of their voters defected to the National Socialists. Most significantly, a surge of two million new voters—predominantly young people—cast their ballots overwhelmingly for Hitler’s movement.
