Socialist Workers' Party of Germany

Last updated
Socialist Workers' Party of Germany
Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands
Leader
Founded1931;93 years ago (1931)
Banned1933;91 years ago (1933)
Merger of KPD-O (1932)
USPD
Split from SPD
Headquarters Berlin, Weimar Republic
Newspaper Sozialistische Arbeiter-Zeitung
Youth wing Socialist Youth League of Germany [1]
Paramilitary Sozialistischer Schutzbund [2]
Membership25,000 (1931)
15,600 (1933)
Ideology Centrist Marxism
Democratic socialism
Political position Left-wing
International affiliation International Revolutionary Marxist Centre
Colours  Red

The Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (German : Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands, SAPD) was a centrist Marxist political party in Germany. It was formed as a left-wing party with around 20,000 members which split off from the SPD in the autumn of 1931. In 1931, the remnants of the USPD merged into the party and in 1932 some Communist Party dissenters also joined the group as well as a part from the Communist Party Opposition. Nevertheless, its membership remained small. From 1933, the group's members worked illegally against Nazism. [3]

Contents

History

1931–1933

The Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (SAPD) emerged as a left-wing splinter of the SPD in the autumn of 1931. It was formed when six members of the SPD Reichstag faction (Kurt Rosenfeld, Max Seydewitz, August Siemsen, Heinrich Ströbel, Hans Ziegler and Andreas Portune) were expelled for breaking party discipline. The newly-founded party was joined by other SPD left-wingers (including some well-known politicians such as Anna Siemsen and Käte Frankenthal), its youth association, the SAJ, a part of the KPO around Paul Frölich, Jacob Walcher, August Enderle, August Ziehl and Heinrich Galm, some groups and individuals from the reconciliation faction of the KPD such as Heinrich Stahmer, the remaining USPD around Theodor Liebknecht, the Socialist League of Georg Ledebour, the Working Group for Left Socialist Politics around Fritz Küster, an entryist group of the Red Fighters around Bernhard Reichenbach (expelled in 1932) as well as well-known independent Marxist intellectuals such as Fritz Sternberg.

The SAPD was largely unable to achieve a breakthrough at the electoral level. It won state parliament seats in Hesse and city and district council seats in its municipal strongholds of Offenbach, Geesthacht, Breslau, Dresden, Zwickau and, above all, some smaller communities in the Vogtland; in the Vogtland village of Morgenröthe-Rautenkranz, the party received an absolute majority of votes and seats in the municipal elections on 13 November 1932. It did not succeed in attracting independent leftists or critical SPD and KPD members.

The SAPD vehemently advocated a united front of the SPD, KPD, trade unions and other mass organizations of the workers' movement against fascism; this was not successful due to the rejection of this strategy by the leading party bureaucracies. Together with the KPO and the Lenin League, the SAPD held a series of anti-fascist rallies and discussion events at which the idea of ​​a united front was propagated.

At the beginning of 1933, factional disputes within the SAPD came to a head when the majority of the executive committee around Rosenfeld and Seydewitz advocated a dissolution of the party in favour of the SPD and KPD. The left wing opposed this and, already under illegal conditions, held a party conference at which a new executive committee was elected. Barely a tenth of the then 15,600 members supported the right wing's call for dissolution. The background to this dispute was the dissatisfaction of a majority of members with the moderate left-wing social democratic and pacifist course of the party leadership and former Reichstag deputies. The SAPD left (around the former KPO members Fröhlich and Walcher, the intellectuals Sternberg and Klaus Zweiling and the leadership of the SJVD) sought to build a new revolutionary party and a new communist international. In this context, it is worth noting that the SAPD belonged to the London Bureau, an alliance of left-wing socialist and independent communist parties such as the POUM, the British ILP and the Dutch RSP and OSP, and in 1934 conducted merger negotiations with Leon Trotsky's International Communist League. The SAPD was also affiliated to the International Revolutionary Marxist Centre, but it broke with the main party of that international (the Independent Labour Party) over the question of the united front and popular front.

The SAPD published the daily newspaper Sozialistische Arbeiter-Zeitung , the weekly newspaper Die Fackel, several regional newspapers such as Kampfsignal (Berlin), and the previous theoretical organ of the SPD left, Der Klassenkampf. Young members and sympathizers of the SAPD joined together to form the Socialist Youth Association (SJVD), which had around 8,000 to 10,000 members (the SAPD had around 25,000 at its peak). The SAPD exerted a certain influence on the pacifist German Peace Society (DFG), especially since its executive chairman Fritz Küster was also a member of the SAPD board, and in various cultural organizations of the labor movement (Freidenker, Arbeitersportbewegung). The SAPD's influence in the unions remained rather moderate. The party had its headquarters in Berlin-Mitte on Schillingstrasse.

Exile and illegality

From 1933 onwards, the SAPD's members worked illegally against the Nazis. Over half of the party's membership took part in the resistance, a much higher proportion than in the SPD and KPD. In Berlin, there was close cooperation between members of the SAPD and the left-wing socialist Red Shock Troop, which at the time had up to 500 members. This resulted in an official "fighting alliance", which was announced on July 18, 1933 in the SAPD leaflet "Information from Politics and Economy". Together, both groups planned the "renewal of the workers' movement on the basis of revolutionary principles". The alliance became largely ineffective at the end of 1933 and beginning of 1934 due to mass arrests in Berlin resistance circles. [3] Many SAPD members, especially those known to the public, emigrated; many of those who remained in Germany were locked up in prisons or concentration camps; some, such as Ernst Eckstein and Franz Bobzien, were murdered. After most of the SAPD structures had been broken up in 1937 and 1938, only smaller groups and circles remained, which continued to be active (some until the end of the war in 1945).

In exile (the exiled executive was in Paris), the SAPD took part in the Lutetia Circle, an attempt to found a German popular front. Members of the party fought during the Spanish Civil War in the workers' militia of the POUM, in the Rovira unit. A relief fund, the Ernst Eckstein Fund, was set up to support comrades in need or who had been captured . In 1937, a group of members led by Erwin Ackerknecht, Walter Fabian and Peter Blachstein were expelled from the party after they had criticized the SAPD's overly uncritical stance towards the KPD and the Moscow Trials. The expelled members formed the Neuer Weg group. In 1939, the contacts between exile and underground groups largely broke down due to the outbreak of the Second World War; the exile structures themselves showed tendencies towards disintegration (among other things, the exile leadership broke up into rival groups around Walcher and Frölich), while the still active groups in Sweden (which still maintained individual contacts with members in northern Germany) and Great Britain (which had already joined the Union of German Socialist Organisations in Great Britain in 1941) moved closer to the SPD again. As a result, the SAPD was not re-founded after the end of the war.

Postwar

After the end of the war in 1945, most members of the SAPD in the western zones joined the SPD after a discussion between the later SPD chairman Kurt Schumacher (operating from his office in the Linden-Mitte district of Hanover) and Otto Brenner, representing the SAPD. Others, especially in the Soviet zone, also joined the KPD or later the SED, such as Klaus Zweiling, Jacob Walcher, Max Seydewitz and Edith Baumann. Attempts to re-establish a decidedly left-wing socialist party at local level, such as the Workers' Party (AP) under Heinrich Galm in Offenbach or the SAP under August Ziehl in Geesthacht, failed. Some former SAPD members, such as Fritz Lamm, played an important role in the independent radical left of the 1950s and 1960s, while others joined the Workers' Politics Group, which followed in the tradition of the KPO.

Willy Brandt and the SAPD

In his home town of Lübeck, the young Herbert Karl Frahm, later known as Willy Brandt, joined the SAPD against the advice of his mentor Julius Leber. In his autobiography, Brandt wrote:

In autumn 1931, Nazis and German nationalists, the SA and Der Stahlhelm joined together to form the "Harzburg Front". [...] It was just at this time that the left wing of the social democrats split off, as a result of measures connected to organisation and discipline by the party leaders. A few Reichstag assemblymen, a number of active party groups – above all in Saxony – and not least a large proportion of young Socialists followed the people who were calling for the founding of a Socialist Workers' Party.[ citation needed ]

In 1934, the youth of SAPD took part in the foundation of the International Bureau of Revolutionary Youth Organizations. The congress was held in the Netherlands and broken up by Dutch police. Several SAPD delegates were handed over to German authorities. The congress then re-convened in Lille. Brandt was elected to the Secretariat of the organization and worked in Norway for the Bureau.

Willy Brandt eventually became the leader of the SPD, one of West Germany's major political parties of the modern era, being elected Chancellor of Germany in 1969.

Notable members

Party leaders

Reichstag deputies

Landtag deputies

Intellectuals

Journalists

Trade unionists

Youth leaders

Other members

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Communist Party of Germany</span> Political party in Germany (1919–1956)

The Communist Party of Germany was a major far-left political party in the Weimar Republic during the interwar period, an underground resistance movement in Nazi Germany, and a minor party in West Germany during the postwar period until it was banned by the Federal Constitutional Court in 1956.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Theodor Liebknecht</span> German socialist politician

Theodor Karl Ernst Adolf Liebknecht was a German socialist politician and activist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Communist Party of Germany (Opposition)</span> Political party in Germany

The Communist Party of Germany (Opposition) (German: Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (Opposition)), generally abbreviated as KPO or KPD(O), was a communist opposition organisation established at the end of 1928 and maintaining its existence until 1939 or 1940. After the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party to power in January 1933, the KPO existed only as an illegal and underground organization. The group initially sought to modify, later to replace, the mainstream Communist Party of Germany (KPD) headed by Ernst Thälmann. The KPO was the first national section affiliated to the International Communist Opposition (ICO).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Members of the 4th German Reichstag (Weimar Republic)</span>

This is a list of members of the 4th Reichstag – the parliament of the Weimar Republic, whose members were elected in the 1928 federal election and served in office from 1928 until its dissolution in 1930.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Max Seydewitz</span> German politician (1892–1987)

Max Seydewitz was a German politician. Between 1947 and 1952 he was the Minister-President of Saxony in the German Democratic Republic.

Heinrich Brandler was a German communist, trade unionist, politician, revolutionary activist, and political writer. Brandler is best remembered as the head of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) during the party's ill-fated "March Action" of 1921 and aborted uprising of 1923, for which he was held responsible by the Communist International. Expelled from the Communist Party in December 1928, Brandler went on to become co-founder of the Communist Party of Germany Opposition, the first national section of the so-called International Right Opposition.

<i>Sozialistische Arbeiter-Zeitung</i> Newspaper

Sozialistische Arbeiter-Zeitung was a daily newspaper published in Germany between 1931 and 1933. SAZ was the central organ of the Socialist Workers Party of Germany (SAPD).

Das Volksrecht was a left-wing newspaper published from Offenbach am Main, Weimar Germany between 1925 and 1933. Initially it was an irregular publication of the communist city council group, but in 1928 it became a local mouthpiece of the Right Opposition. It was published on a weekly basis until the National Socialist takeover in 1933.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Spartacus League</span> World War I German Marxist revolutionary movement

The Spartacus League was a Marxist revolutionary movement organized in Germany during World War I. It was founded in August 1914 as the International Group by Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Clara Zetkin, and other members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) who were dissatisfied with the party's official policies in support of the war. In 1916 it renamed itself the Spartacus Group and in 1917 joined the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), which had split off from the SPD as its left wing faction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany</span> Former political party in Germany

The Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany was a short-lived political party in Germany during the German Empire and the Weimar Republic. The organization was established in 1917 as the result of a split of anti-war members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), from the left of the party as well as the centre and the right. The organization attempted to chart a course between electorally oriented reformism on the one hand and Bolshevist revolutionism on the other. After several splits and mergers, the last part of the organization was terminated in 1931 through merger with the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (SAPD).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fritz Heckert</span> German politician (1884–1936)

Friedrich "Fritz" Carl Heckert was a German trade unionist and politician who co-founded the Spartacus League and the Communist Party of Germany. He was a member of the Reichstag from 1924 to 1933, a leading Comintern functionary, and briefly served as the Saxon Economic Minister in 1923.

Irmgard Enderle was a German politician, trade unionist and journalist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kurt Rosenfeld</span> German lawyer and politician (1877–1943)

Kurt Rosenfeld was a German lawyer and politician (SPD). He was a member of the national parliament between 1920 and 1932.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rosi Wolfstein</span>

Alma Rosalie (Rosi) Wolfstein was a German socialist politician.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Blachstein</span> German journalist

Peter Blachstein was a German journalist who became a politician. During the middle 1930s he spent time in the Hohnstein Concentration Camp, but he was released and participated in the Spanish Civil War on the anti-fascist side. The rest of the Nazi years he spent outside Germany, mostly in Norway and Sweden. Following the restoration of diplomatic relations between West Germany and Yugoslavia, in 1968 he became West Germany's ambassador in Belgrade.

August Enderle was a German socialist politician, trades unionist, journalist and author.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Workers Party (Socialist Unity Party)</span>

The Workers Party (Socialist Unity Party) (German: Arbeiter-Partei (Sozialistische Einheitspartei)) was a political party in West Germany. The party was founded in Offenbach in the autumn of 1945. The party sought to profile itself as a third alternative to the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) or the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Between 1946 and 1947 the party expanded to other towns in Hessen. The party gathered former members of the Communist Party of Germany (Opposition) (KPO) and the Socialist Workers Party (SAP). Heinrich Glam was the chairman of the party, former chair of the KPD branch of Offenbach and former leader of KPO and SAP. Another key leader was Philipp Pless, party secretary and chair of the Frankfurt branch.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lenin League</span> Political party in Germany

The Lenin League was a German revolutionary socialist organisation that was active during the later period of the Weimar Republic. Founded in 1928 by former left communist members of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), it experienced a number of splits over the years before going underground in the wake of the Reichstag fire and finally disappearing by the outbreak of World War II.

Hans Ziegler was a German Socialist politician and trade unionist. He was a founder of the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (SAPD).

References

  1. ↑ Beer, Helmut. Widerstand gegen den Nationalsozialismus in Nürnberg: 1933 - 1945 . Nürnberg: Stadtarchiv, 1976. p. 232
  2. ↑ Heuzeroth, Günter. Verfolgte aus politischen Gründen: Widerstand und Verfolgung der regionalen Arbeiterbewegung in Dokumenten, Lebensberichten und Analysen : dargestellt an den Ereignissen in Weser-Ems, 1933-1945 . 1989. p. 1046
  3. 1 2 Egginger-Gonzalez, Dennis (2018). Der Rote Stoßtrupp. Eine frühe linkssozialistische Widerstandsgruppe gegen den Nationalsozialismus[The Red Shock Troop. An early left-socialist resistance group against National Socialism] (in German). Berlin: Lukas Verlag für Kunst- und Geistesgeschichte. p. 87.

Bibliography

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.