Rudolf Breitscheid

Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) Social democracy Germany Germany 1874–1944 ✕ Died in a concentration camp

Co-chairman of the Weimar SPD Reichstag group who defended the party's toleration of Brüning

Starting as a liberal journalist and leader of the Democratic Union, Breitscheid joined the SPD in 1912. Opposing the First World War, he moved to the USPD in 1917 and served as Prussian interior minister in the November Revolution. Back in the SPD from 1922, he became its foreign-policy expert and, from 1928, a co-chairman of its Reichstag group. In 1930–1932 he defended the toleration of the Brüning cabinet as the way to keep the Nazis from power. He voted against the Enabling Act in 1933 and fled to France, but the Vichy authorities handed him to the Gestapo in 1941 and he died in Buchenwald in 1944.

Activities and affiliations

Career Timeline

Toleration of Brüning and the end of Weimar (1930–1933)

When the Brüning cabinet took office in 1930 and the Nazis surged in the September election, Breitscheid became preoccupied with saving the republic. In his view the SPD had no choice but to support Brüning to keep Hitler out of government. His analysis of fascism was subtler than most socialists': he saw it as an anti-democratic organisation that exploited democratic institutions and pseudo-legal means, judged the Nazis to be unprincipled power-seekers, and feared they would be almost impossible to dislodge once in power. With the Nazis and the KPD, the two other largest parties, both anti-constitutional, he argued that bringing down Brüning would make the SPD responsible for an anti-constitutional government.

As discontent grew in late 1931 he suggested in a November speech that cooperation with the KPD might be possible if it shut down its paramilitary wing, but publicly he kept endorsing toleration, and in 1932 he backed Hindenburg's re-election. In What Next? Trotsky wrote that the road to soviets did not have to pass through prior agreements with "Wels, Hilferding, Breitscheid", while still demanding united-front offers to them; the Stalinist press, for its part, accused the Trotskyists of acting "like Breitscheid".

When Hitler became chancellor in January 1933, Breitscheid refused to endorse extra-parliamentary action by the Iron Front. Re-elected in March, he voted against the Enabling Act and fled on 1 April. In Paris his efforts towards a popular front with the KPD estranged him from fellow Social Democrats. He fled to Marseille in 1940 but could not get US visas, and in February 1941 he and Hilferding were handed to the Gestapo. Held in Sachsenhausen and then Buchenwald, he died there on 24 August 1944; the Nazis announced that he had been killed in an Allied air raid.