On this day in Germany, 1946 (Hitler, the SPD and the German Democrats)

[sahel]

This is a rally of the German Democratic Socialists (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands or SPD) in Munich. The man speaking is Kurt Schumacher, trying to will his party to a victory in the Bavarian State Elections in 1946. This photo was taken little more than a year after his release from the Neungamme Concentration Camp, having been brought to the point of death during more than a decade of torture and beatings during his political imprisonment on Hitler's orders from 1932 to 1945. Despite his ill-treatment, he never broke, and never collaborated with the Nazi regime.



In 1933, when the Nazis moved to pass the Enabling Act that would give Hitler absolute power as dictator, Schumacher and the democratic socialists mounted a last-ditch defence of German democracy. They first tried to boycott the session in order to deny the Nazis a quorum, but Hermann Goering changed the rules of the Reichstag so that anyone who was absent would be deemed to have voted in favour of the Act. This meant that Hitler could help secure passage of the Enabling Act simply by having his political opponents arrested. By the time of the vote, all of the communists and over 20 socialist Reichstag deputies were already imprisoned in Hitler's camps.

The SPD then desperately attempted to engage other opposition parties to vote against the Enabling Act. None would join them. Not even the liberal German Democrats (whose support base was largely Jewish) could be persuaded to oppose Hitler in the face of Nazi intimidation. Hitler himself expected this, in fact he had predicted that the urbane, middle-class liberals, in the end, would always choose comfort and personal security over principle. Ultimately the German Democrats joined with the conservatives and fascists in passing the Enabling Act. To save Hitler the inconvenience of banning them and to ensure their ability to quietly retire to the countryside, the Democrats then voluntarily dissolved themselves.

Hitler subsequently banned the SPD. Its leaders either fled or were sent to the camps. Some, like Rudolf Breitscheid, would die there, shot in the night by Hitler's secret police and their deaths passed off as due to allied bombing raids. Only Schumacher survived as the sole German leader to have neither fled nor collaborated with the Nazis.

As such, he was widely expected to be successful in leading West Germany after the war's end. But the United States as occupying power remained opposed to any socialist government, and soon set about undermining him as a red and a traitor together with the centrists and moderates who had now emerged from their country villas. Schumacher was defeated in the 1946 elections by Konrad Adenauer, a Centrist that had voted for Hitler as dictator and about whom Hitler had often spoken admiringly.

Schumacher's health finally failed and he died in 1952. The liberal and centrist quislings that had failed Germany in its time of need obligingly sent flowers, before writing poison-pen obituaries praising his courage, but criticising his obstinacy and refusal to compromise. That of course was precisely why his socialist comrades loved him. He never compromised, unlike most of his detractors, who compromised altogether too readily.