The failure of a Nazi “killer” amendment

We describe a remarkable instance of a motion-proposing and agenda-setting strategy by the Nazi party, NSDAP, during the Weimar Republic. Their purpose was to kill a motion of toleration of the new 1928 government, that would have allowed the government to continue in office without expressing confidence in it. The Nazi party was supported by their fiercest enemies on the far left, the communist party, but the combined killer strategy ultimately failed because of another agenda-setting counter-move undertaken by the Reichstag’s president. In order to understand and analyze that case we also briefly study killer amendments under various informational regimes and postulated voter behavior. In particular, the chances of success of killer amendments are shown to differ across several well-known binary, sequential voting procedures and across legislative agendas.