Otto Wels

Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) Social Democrats 1873–1939 ○ Died in exile

Social Democratic chairman who alone spoke against the Enabling Act in the Reichstag in 1933

The son of a Berlin innkeeper, he joined the SPD in 1891 as an apprentice paper hanger. After posts as a union official and party secretary he entered the Reichstag in 1912, and he chaired the party from 1919 until his death. He was military commander of Berlin in the first days of the 1918–1919 revolution and helped organise the general strike that defeated the Kapp Putsch in 1920, but in 1932 he judged a general strike against the Prussian coup futile amid mass unemployment. On 23 March 1933, amid arrests and intimidation, he alone spoke against the Enabling Act: "No Enabling Act gives you the power to destroy ideas that are eternal and indestructible." In exile he founded the Sopade in Prague, and he died in Paris in 1939.