The politics of irresponsibility and anti-Semitism of the Rural People's Movement in Schleswig-Holstein, 1928--1930

An examination of an agrarian protest movement in northern Germany at the end of the 1920s allows us to realize that the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) did not have a monopoly on anti-Semitism in the political culture of the Weimar Republic. The Rural People's Movement in Schleswig-Holstein is taken as symptomatic of the crisis of legitimacy of democratic form of government whereby political activists sought to discredit the regime through politics divorced from reality yet effective for mobilization. The corollary of Nazi success at the local level is that important social groups in Germany failed to use democratic means and accept pluralism to alleviate the considerable social and economic stresses facing the country during the Great Depression. The surprising and unprecedented voter support for the NSDAP in the September 1930 Reichstag elections is partially explained by the mass desertion of constituencies from all major political parties followed by support for single-issue parties and non-affiliated movements like the Rural People's Movement.