This coming August sees the centenary of the post-Great War constitution for Germany approved in Weimar. No doubt there will be detailed examination in the print and broadcast media of the liberal expectations raised by Weimar and the way they were dashed, but Mrs May's lecture to the nation last night highlighted one of the flaws in the constitution which Hitler took advantage of.
Article 73 introduced the concept of referendums to ratify laws passed by the Reichstag; in some cases they were compulsory, in others at the whim of the President, and even to initiate new law. Hitler took advantage and extended the use of this provision. As a scholarly article of 1935 (JSTOR access required) summed up the situation:
this revolutionary change in Herr Hitler's political theory has an intensely practical explanation. In his evolution as dictator of the German people, the time had arrived when he needed a fresh mandate of authority - one, moreover, from an unassailable source. The death of President von Hindenburg had removed the link which originally legalized his succession to power in the Reich, and the "Roehm revolt" of June 30, 1934, moreover, made it perfectly clear how unstable a mere party mandate for the exercise of that power might ultimately prove to be. Hitler accordingly ordered the referendum with a view to removing any possible constitutional stain from his official position of leadership and at the same time to free himself from subordination to the shifting clanship of a political party. His action makes it possible to regard him as the first of the contemporary dictators to attempt seriously to establish his power on some basis other than an authoritarian political party, a military following, royal prestige, or a sham parliamentary mandate. The German Reichsfuehrer has gone beyond these familiar bases of modern dictatorship and has attempted to substitute for them the Napoleonic constitutional basis of the plebiscite.
From the point of view of a foreign observer, the most interesting aspect of this experience with the popular referendum in the Third Reich continues to be the extraordinary success attending the cabinet's efforts to control the political behavior of the citizens. To mobilise almost forty-five million voters and so regiment their opinions on international and constitutional issues as to secure a favorable verdict little short of unanimity is a political achievement with few, if any, parallels. Should any doubts remain as to the practical political value of the Nazi propaganda ministry, or as to its effectiveness, these referenda must certainly dispel them. Nor could any better evidence than is furnished by these same referenda be adduced to confirm the truth of the observation that illiberal suffrage laws and success in "getting out the vote" do not guarantee genuinely democratic government; that, on the contrary, such government depends primarily upon certain intangibles such as a free press and impartial officials and above all upon an informed and critical electorate. [Links added by me]
Mrs May's assertion that she represented the will of the people against our parliament had uncomfortable echoes of the justification used by Hitler and Goebbels in the 1930s. Fortunately, there is no compulsion built in to our multi-sourced constitution, though one worries that the 2016 referendum and the call for a People's Vote to contradict its verdict have set a precedent. We do have a free press - though weighted towards conservatism - but a rather less informed and objective electorate than one would wish for.
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