There were brave men in Germany last week who risked their lives for an ideal. The shrewdest brains of the Nazi secret police were trying to find out who they were. Meanwhile in the midst of the greatest exhibition of organized mob hysteria Germany has ever seen, small slips of paper, some printed, some mimeographed, some typed, continued to be circulated surreptitiously from hand to hand. All had the same theme: "Comrades, write NO on your ballots! Every vote of NO is a vote against war, against misery, against famine, concentration camps and murders."
In 1932 some 6,000,000 Germans voted for bullet-headed Ernst Thälmann for Chancellor. Communist Thalmann was still alive last week in a Nazi jail because Nazi strategists dared neither bring him to trial nor chop off his head. Despite all the exiles, all the concentration camps, all the executions, there were still enough undercover followers of Ernst Thalmann left at large in Germany last week to spread a thin layer of anti-Nazi leaflets from Switzerland to the Baltic.
A forced election on ballots on which voters could mark only Ja might seem a farce to democracies, but to Adolf Hitler and his propaganda minister, Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, it was a chance to stage the greatest mass demonstration of national solidarity the world has ever seen.
Only a little more explicit than the warnings issued to German voters everywhere was the manifesto by the Nazi leader of the Berlin suburb of Klein-Machnow:
"Voting begins at 9 in the morning and ends at 6 in the evening. No German Comrade dare be absent, and I urge all voters most strongly to vote during the morning hours. By 1 o'clock in the afternoon the election must be over. During the afternoon I will have all laggards dragged to the ballot box. None shall escape us. Klein-Machnow is surrounded and shut off. . . ."
The Show. For weeks a mounting wave of election propaganda filled the German Press. It spread like a rash to billboards, walls, streamers in the streets. Daily there were parades and speeches. Overworked Realmleader Hitler tried to limit his own campaigning to one speech every two days, leaving the rest of his time to tackling the intricate foreign situation. Stagemanager Goebbels peremptorily told him that it was not enough. Obediently, der Führer wired his embassy in London that all diplomacy would have to be postponed until after election day.
Flag Day. Shrewd Stagemanager Goebbels arranged his campaign week to lead up to two great climaxes centring around Adolf Hitler's last two speeches, the first in the Krupp Steel Works at Essen, the second in the exhibition hall at Cologne. Every German had his stage directions. At 3:45 o'clock on the afternoon of the Essen speech radios all over Germany echoed the shrill yip of Minister Goebbels: "RAISE FLAGS!" On that instant from every flagstaff in Germany and from the windows of thousands of little cottages unrolled the swastika banner. Then followed the voice of Dr. Goebbels, solemn as a priest: "Adolf Hitler is Germany!"