Chapter 18 discusses the fateful elections of 14 September 1930 from the perspective of the German Right and the various factions on the Right that were vying for power. It focuses first of all on the efforts of the young conservatives who reorganized themselves into the Conservative People’s Party in the hopes of uniting those who had left the DNVP into a single political front. But these efforts, which enjoyed strong support from Paul Reusch and the German industrial establishment, evoked little interest from the leaders of the CNBLP and CSVD, both of whom were determined not to compromise the uniqueness of their own political appeal by entering into close ties with other political parties. In the meantime, Hugenberg and the DNVP leadership tried to organize their campaign around the mantra of anti-Marxism but misread, as did most of the other parties in the middle and moderate Right, the threat that National Socialism posed to their party’s electoral prospects. As a result, the Nazis were able to capitalize upon the disunity of the non-Nazi Right to score a victory of epic proportions that gave the NSDAP fourteen percent of the popular vote and 107 Reichstag mandates.

Chapter 16 explores the tensions within the DNVP that culminated in the secession of twelve moderates from the DNVP Reichstag delegation in December 1929. It begins with an examination of Christian-Social dissent in the DNVP and moves from there to a discussion of Hugenberg’s efforts to unify a badly divided party behind the mantra of anti-Marxism at the annual party congress in Kassel in late November. These efforts were to little avail, and in the vote on the controversial imprisonment paragraph of the so-called “Freedom Law” twenty-three DNVP deputies either voted No or were absent for the vote. In the aftermath twelve DNVP deputies left the party. While the young conservatives around Treviranus struggled desperately to preserve a modicum of unity among the secessionists, they were foiled both by the CNBLP’s determination to effect a realignment of the German party system along vocational and corporatists lines and by the decision of the Christian-Socials to launch a new party of their own. In the meantime, Hugenberg continued to enjoy strong support at the local and regional levels of the DNVP party organization and experienced little difficulty in retaining control of the party.