William "Bill" Smaldone (born 1958) is the E. J. Whipple Professor of European history at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, United States.
Bill Smaldone received his Bachelor of Science (1980) and Master of Arts (1983) degrees from the State University of New York at Brockport. [1]
He received his Ph.D. in Modern European History from Binghamton University. [2] From 1989-1991, following the completion of his Ph.D., Smaldone took up an academic post as a visiting professor at Rampo College in New Jersey. [1] In 1991, he moved to Salem, Oregon and joined the history department faculty at Willamette University. [3]
In the mid-1990s, he initially became active in Oregon's local politics as a member of the Socialist Party of Oregon [3] and in 1998 was elected to the Salem City Council where he served on the Budget Committee and numerous commissions. [4] In 2001, Smaldone served as Council President until his re-election bid loss to Jim Randall in 2002. [5] Smaldone attributes the defeat to old-fashioned "red-baiting" tactics reminiscent of Cold War America by stating, "Jim Randall and his allies knew that anti-socialist rhetoric still resonated with a large part of the populace. Using that theme, they succeeded in mobilizing their supporters more effectively than we did ours." [3]
The Weimar Republic, officially named the German Reich, was a historical period of Germany from 1918 to 1933, during which it was a constitutional federal republic for the first time in history; hence it is also referred to, and unofficially proclaimed itself, as the German Republic. The period's informal name is derived from the city of Weimar, which hosted the constituent assembly that established its government. In English, the republic was usually simply called "Germany", with "Weimar Republic" not commonly used until the 1930s.
The Social Democratic Party of Germany is a centre-left social democratic political party in Germany. It is one of the major parties of contemporary Germany.
Heinrich Aloysius Maria Elisabeth Brüning was a German Centre Party politician and academic, who served as the chancellor of Germany during the Weimar Republic from 1930 to 1932.
The Communist Party of Germany was a major political party in the Weimar Republic between 1918 and 1933, an underground resistance movement in Nazi Germany, and a minor party in West Germany in the postwar period until it was banned by the Federal Constitutional Court in 1956.
Ernst Johannes Fritz Thälmann was a German communist politician, and leader of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) from 1925 to 1933.
The Centre Party, officially the German Centre Party and also known in English as the Catholic Centre Party, is a Catholic political party in Germany, influential in the German Empire and Weimar Republic. It is the oldest German political party to be still in existence since its founding date. Formed in 1870, it successfully battled the Kulturkampf waged by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck against the Catholic Church. It soon won a quarter of the seats in the Reichstag, and its middle position on most issues allowed it to play a decisive role in the formation of majorities. The party name Zentrum (Centre) originally came from the fact Catholic representatives would take up the middle section of seats in parliament between social democrats and conservatives.
The German National People's Party was a national-conservative party in Germany during the Weimar Republic. Before the rise of the Nazi Party, it was the major conservative and nationalist party in Weimar Germany. It was an alliance of conservative, nationalists, reactionary monarchists, völkisch and antisemitic elements supported by the Pan-German League.
Otto Wels was a German politician who served as a member of parliament from 1912 to 1933 and as the chairman of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) from 1919 until his death in 1939. His 1933 speech in the Reichstag in opposition to Hitler and against the Enabling Act marked the end of the Weimar Republic prior to the Act passing into law.
This Weimar Timeline charts the chronology of the Weimar Republic, dating the pre-history before the adoption of the actual Weimar constitution. This timeline stops when Hitler establishes the Third Reich.
Presidential elections were held in Germany on 13 March 1932, with a runoff on 10 April. Independent incumbent Paul von Hindenburg won a second seven-year term against Adolf Hitler of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP). Communist Party (KPD) leader Ernst Thälmann also ran and received more than ten percent of the vote in the runoff. Theodor Duesterberg, the deputy leader of the World War I veterans' organization Der Stahlhelm, ran in the first round but dropped out of the runoff. This was the second and final direct election to the office of President of the Reich, Germany's head of state under the Weimar Republic.
Ernst Fraenkel was a German-Jewish lawyer and political scientist. Prior to World War II, Fraenkel served as a criminal defense lawyer for Jews who were targeted by the Nazi regime. After the war, he authored the book The Dual State on the political structure of the Nazi regime and subsequently became one of the founding fathers of German political science.
Karl Dietrich Bracher was a German political scientist and historian of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany. Born in Stuttgart, Bracher was awarded a Ph.D. in the classics by the University of Tübingen in 1948 and subsequently studied at Harvard University from 1949 to 1950. During World War II, he served in the Wehrmacht and was captured by the Americans while serving in Tunisia in 1943. Bracher taught at the Free University of Berlin from 1950 to 1958 and at the University of Bonn since 1959. In 1951 Bracher married Dorothee Schleicher, the niece of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. They had two children.
Rudolf Breitscheid was a German politician and leading member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) during the Weimar Republic. Once leader of the liberal Democratic Union, he joined the SPD in 1912. He defected to the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) in 1917 due to his opposition to the First World War, and rejoined the SPD in 1922. He served as a senior member of and foreign policy spokesman for the SPD Reichstag group during the Weimar Republic, and was a member of the German delegation to the League of Nations. After the Nazi rise to power, he was among the members of the Reichstag who voted against the Enabling Act of 1933, and soon after fled to France to avoid persecution. He was arrested and handed to the Gestapo in 1941, and died in Buchenwald concentration camp in 1944.
Antifaschistische Aktion was a militant anti-fascist organisation in the Weimar Republic started by members of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) that existed from 1932 to 1933. It was primarily active as a KPD campaign during the July 1932 German federal election and the November 1932 German federal election and was described by the KPD as a "red united front under the leadership of the only anti-fascist party, the KPD."
Kurt Nehrling was a German Social Democratic politician and member of the German resistance against Hitler. Nehrling was responsible for supplying information to the Soviet Union and hid banned books. He was later caught by the SS and killed at the Dachau concentration camp.
Sopade was the name of the exile organization of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). It operated in Prague from 1933 to 1938, from 1938 to 1940 in Paris and until 1945 in London.
The Iron Front was a German paramilitary organization in the Weimar Republic which consisted of social democrats, trade unionists, and liberals. Its main goal was to defend liberal democracy against totalitarian ideologies on the far-right and far-left. The Iron Front chiefly opposed the Sturmabteilung (SA) wing of the Nazi Party and the Antifaschistische Aktion wing of the Communist Party of Germany. Formally independent, it was intimately associated with the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). The Three Arrows, originally designed for the Iron Front, became a well-known social democratic symbol representing resistance against monarchism, Nazism, and communism during the parliamentary elections in November 1932. The Three Arrows were later adopted by the SPD itself.
The 1929 German Referendum was an attempt during the Weimar Republic to use popular legislation to annul the agreement in the Young Plan between the German government and the World War I opponents of the German Reich regarding the amount and conditions of reparations payments. The referendum was the result of the initiative "Against the Enslavement of the German People " launched in 1929 by right-wing parties and organizations. It called for an overall revision of the Treaty of Versailles and stipulated that government officials who accepted new reparation obligations would be committing treason.
Rudolf Hilferding was an Austrian-born Marxist economist, socialist theorist, politician and the chief theoretician for the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) during the Weimar Republic, being almost universally recognized as the SPD's foremost theoretician of this century. He was also a physician.
Austromarxism was a Marxist theoretical current, led by Victor Adler, Otto Bauer, Karl Renner, Max Adler and Rudolf Hilferding, members of the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Austria in Austria-Hungary and the First Austrian Republic, and later supported by Austrian-born revolutionary and assassin of the Imperial Minister-President Count von Stürgkh, Friedrich Adler. It is known for its theory of nationality and nationalism, and its attempt to conciliate it with socialism in the imperial context. More generally, the Austromarxists strove to achieve a synthesis between social democracy and revolutionary socialism. Uniquely, Austromarxists posited that class consciousness in the working class could be achieved more organically through the maintenance of national autonomy, in contrast to the internationalist perspective and the notion of the party vanguard popular in orthodox Marxist circles elsewhere in Europe.