April 11, 1932

1932 German presidential election

Paul von Hindenburg wins Germany’s presidential runoff

The 84-year-old Hindenburg was re-elected largely with help from the parties that had opposed him when the right elected him in 1925.

The runoff was on the 10th

Germany held the second ballot of its 1932 presidential election on Sunday 10 April, not 11 April as the listing has it. Both the German Federal Archives and the German Historical Museum date the runoff to the 10th.

Incumbent president Paul von Hindenburg defeated Adolf Hitler and Ernst Thälmann, taking about 53 percent of the vote to Hitler's 36.8 percent and Thälmann's 10.2 percent.

A first ballot on 13 March had left Hindenburg at 49.6 percent, just short of the required absolute majority.

Inverted fronts

The victory was not simply a win for the traditional right. The 84-year-old independent was supported in 1932 by the SPD and other republican or centrist parties that had opposed him in 1925 — the "inverted fronts" historians emphasise.

Theodor Duesterberg, the Stahlhelm candidate on the first ballot, withdrew before the second and so was absent from the decisive result.

Preliminary official returns reported by the U.S. embassy gave Hindenburg 19,359,642 votes and Hitler 13,417,460.

What the result did not decide

The officeholder did not change; Hindenburg secured another seven-year term and Hitler was denied the presidency. But more than one in three participating voters had backed him.

Hitler did not become chancellor by winning any presidential election. Hindenburg appointed him on 30 January 1933, after two more Reichstag elections, a decline in the Nazi vote in November, failed Papen and Schleicher governments and bargaining among conservative elites.

Three days after the runoff, an emergency decree banned the Nazi SA and SS — an action later reversed under the next chancellor.

Sources

Researched 24 Aug 2026 7 sources not yet audited Date corrected

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →

Date corrected. The research places this at 1932-04-10.

What the sources leave uncertain

The date is not genuinely disputed: the voting and victory occurred on 10 April. The supplied 11 April date is one day late, possibly reflecting next-day reporting.
The exact vote figures in contemporary preliminary returns differ slightly from later final tabulations, so the fact sheet identifies the quoted exact totals as preliminary and uses rounded percentages for the main account.