Politics & Power Quote by Fritz Sauckel

A chilling little act of laundering happens in that sentence: mass coercion gets rebranded as mass consent. “The citizen parties” sounds civic, plural, almost wholesome - as if a broad democratic spectrum naturally converged on one outcome. The phrase dodges what National Socialism actually did to parties, newspapers, unions, and street life: it didn’t simply win; it crowded out alternatives until “choice” was a narrow corridor policed by fear.

“By an absolute majority” is the key credential, deployed like a stamp of legitimacy. It’s legalistic rhetoric meant to close the argument before it starts: if the numbers add up, the moral ledger must, too. Yet the timing matters. The Nazis never won an outright majority in a free, fully competitive election; Hitler became chancellor through elite dealmaking in January 1933, and the March election that followed unfolded under intimidation, emergency decrees, and targeted violence against opponents. Sauckel’s grammar compresses that messy, brutal sequence into a clean democratic fable.

Sauckel, a soldier and later a top Nazi labor official, had practical reasons to speak this way. Men like him needed a story that made collaboration sound like patriotism and criminal policy sound like administration. The subtext is exculpation: if “citizen parties” elected the regime, then the regime’s crimes become a national verdict rather than a conspiracy, and the perpetrators become functionaries of the popular will. It’s propaganda designed for both the faithful and the future - a preemptive defense, anticipating the day someone would ask who put the Nazis in power, and why so many helped them stay there.