end of the registration period on 29 October, 10.02% of eligible voters had entered their names on the lists, 0.02 percentage points more than was needed for the initiative to succeed. The Reich Committee was most successful in Germany's eastern states. East Prussia, Pomerania and Mecklenburg alone accounted for three quarters of all votes. In accordance with the provisions of the constitution, the bill was debated in the Reichstag on 29 November. The Reich Committee submitted an explanatory statement on the Freedom Act in which it once again presented its views. Foreign Minister Julius Curtius of the DVP spoke for the government in Severing's stead. The government wanted to make it clear that the dispute would not be a fight between Severing and Hugenberg or of a Marxist and an anti-Marxist. Curtius accused the originators of the initiative of "throwing the constitutional order and separation of the Reich's political powers into complete disarray”. The campaign, he said, was "an attack against the authority of the state”. Speaking for the DNVP was not Hugenberg, who had not spoken in parliament for nine years, but Ernst Oberfohren and Axel von Freytagh-Loringhoven. Gottfried Feder spoke for the NSDAP. During the debate a representative of the NSDAP made it clear that the party's participation in the initiative was a matter of the "abolition of the system by legal means". The position of the governing parties was presented by Thomas Esser of the Catholic Centre Party. He emphasized that the initiative wanted to replace "a policy of negotiation and understanding" with one "of sabotage and provocation". "It creates the illusion that Germany can, by mere protest, throw off the burden of war reparations and all at once completely liberate the Rhineland and the Saar region." As expected, on 30 November parliament rejected the bill by a large majority on its second reading. Hugenberg did not have all members of the DNVP behind him in the vote. While they approved the first three paragraphs of the bill, it was not the same with the fourth paragraph which spoke of treason charges against ministers. Of 72 DNVP members, only 52 voted yes. Hugenberg's intra-party critics around chairman Kuno von Westarp accused him of pushing a policy that exacerbated antagonisms and made cooperation with other middle-class parties impossible. The threat of punishment in paragraph 4 of the Freedom Act hitched the party "to the wagon of the National