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The Chancellor's last speech of the campaign was shouted from atop a dynamo in Berlin's vast Siemens & Halske electric works. To hear him by radio all German factory workers stopped work for one hour. This time-out the workers had to make up later by working an hour overtime without extra pay. "German workmen!" shouted Orator Hitler. "International conflicts are fomented by a small group of international gypsies!"
Getting the idea, Siemens & Halske workmen guffawed and shouted, "Jews! Jews!"
"Either we shall have equal rights," continued the Chancellor, "or the world will never see us again at a conference! . . . We will never go [back to the Disarmament Conference] as bootblacks or inferiors!"
As his final trump Chancellor Hitler played a gruff, five minute radio speech to the Fatherland by President von Hindenburg. "It is a lie, it is a vilification," rumbled der Feldmarschall, "if the outside world imputes warlike intentions to us [but] true peace can be achieved only on the basis of equality. Let your votes be a profession with me and with the Chancellor for the principle of equality and for peace with honor!"
After that it was all over but the voting and the buttons. After voting every German had an opportunity to buy for five pfennigs (2¢) a button stamped "Ja, 1933!" Few failed to buy. Scowling Nazi strong-arm men warned, "to vote Nein and wear a Ja button is to wear a lie!"
Returns came in very slowly, due to the fact that every polling place was staffed by inexperienced new clerks, Nazi clerks. Their figures showed that 40,601,577 Germans voted Ja, 2,100,765 voted Nein.
Also voted on was the question of electing a new Reichstag all members of which had been picked by Chancellor Hitler and lumped together on the ballot under a single circle in which the voter could write "Ja." If he wrote anything else or nothing his paper was thrown out as "spoiled." Official score for the new Reichstag: 39,626,647 Jas and 3,348,362 spoiled ballots.
Grimly French statesmen waited to see what, if anything, Chancellor Hitler would write on the blank check thus signed over to him last week by German voters. In his "Heads will roll in the sand" declaration he promised that when he came to power his government would "seek to abrogate or revise the Treaty [of Versailles] by diplomatic negotiations. I solemnly assert that if these fail we shall proceed to ignore or circumvent the Treaty, with legal means if possible; failing that with illegal means. The world may call that 'illegal' but I am answerable solely to the German people for my actions!"
A post-election sensation was the taking into "protective custody" (often the prelude to a Nazi prison camp) of H. R. H. Duke Albrecht, head of the former Royal House of Wurtemberg, because he refused to vote. Jailors of prison camps proudly reported that the Communists, Socialists, Jews and other anti-Hitlerites in their custody had voted "Ja" in nearly all cases. Thus at the dread prison camp in Brandenburg only 1.2% of the prisoners plucked up courage to vote "Nein."