It is an event that most people have forgotten about to which the “Straße des 13. Januar” (Street of January 13) in Saarbrücken owes its name. Remembering the first Saar voting on Jan 13, 1935, 20 years before the famous vote which led to the re-unification of the Saarland with the (then) Federal Republic of Germany, is a grievous memory which some would like to forget about.
What hatred for the League of Nations government must have been there among the Saarland people that 90 % of them voluntarily wanted to join a “Reich” where any form of freedom and democracy had been abolished two years before?
Those “pioneers of German faithfulness and German folklore” (Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels on the Saar vote) left their country to the NS dictatorship and therefore to its downfall – which they could have foreseen. But 15 years of “Heim ins Reich” policy by all (!) leading Saar parties had done its job. The last democratic oasis in Germany sunk within the brown swamp of the “third Reich”. Therefore it is quite comprehensible (although causeless) that the so-called “Ja-Sager” (“Yes-Sayers”) during the 1955 vote feared that a re-unified Germany could become nationalistic again.
In his blog, Zippo Zimmermann already studied this topic in a 2006 entry that is really worth reading.
Tags: 1935, Deutschland, Nationalsozialismus, Nazis, Saarabstimmung, SaarstatutRelated posts
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