British press baron Lord Rothermere, who became a hero in Hungary by demanding revision of the Trianon borders in the Daily Mail
With his elder brother Alfred, later Viscount Northcliffe, he founded the Daily Mail in 1896 and the Daily Mirror in 1903, and on his brother’s death in 1922 acquired his controlling interest in Associated Newspapers. Made Baron Rothermere in 1914 and Viscount Rothermere in 1919, he served for a time during the First World War as President of the Air Council. His Daily Mail editorial “Hungary’s Place in the Sun” of 21 June 1927 called for the return to Hungary of large territories lost under the Treaty of Trianon; he became a national hero in Hungary, and over 1.2 million Hungarians signed a letter of thanks. In the 1930s he praised Hitler and in 1934 backed the British Union of Fascists. He died in Bermuda in 1940.
SPD defence minister who said “someone has to be the bloodhound” and used the Freikorps to crush the left risings of 1919
He directed the suppression of the 1919 Berlin uprising with Freikorps and army forces, then authorized summary executions by military forces in a March order.
A basket-maker from Brandenburg who became an SPD journalist, he entered the Reichstag in 1906 and was known as its military expert. Sent to Kiel as the government’s representative in November 1918, he calmed the mutiny and became governor. After the Christmas crisis he joined the Council of People’s Deputies for military affairs and, saying “someone has to be the bloodhound”, organised the Freikorps that crushed the January rising and the March battles. First defence minister from February 1919, he resigned after the Kapp Putsch of 1920, later governed the province of Hanover and was arrested after the July 1944 plot.
Career timeline
1890sHelped build the social-democratic movement and basket-makers’ union; chaired the Social Democratic Association in Brandenburg.
1906Elected to the Reichstag, where he became known as an expert on naval and army affairs.
1918.11–12Sent to Kiel as government representative, he led the sailors and Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council; on 28 December he became national commissioner for the army and navy.
1919.02–1920Appointed Reichswehr minister, he deployed Freikorps and army forces against the January uprising and March fighting in Berlin; he resigned after the 1920 Kapp Putsch.
1920–1933Served as chief president of the Prussian province of Hanover; dismissed in September 1933 under the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service.
Estonian prime minister who concluded the Treaty of Tartu, publisher of Postimees
As Soviet forces occupied Estonia in June 1940, he urged President Päts to offer at least symbolic armed resistance.
Leader of Estonia's liberal national movement through the newspaper Postimees, he was prime minister in 1919 and 1920 and concluded the Treaty of Tartu. Pushed out for opposing Päts's authoritarian regime in 1934, he was arrested after the Soviet occupation of 1940 and disappeared.
Career timeline
1896Editor and publisher of Postimees, turning it into the organ of the national movement
1906Member of the First Russian State Duma; signed the Vyborg Appeal
1917Member of the Estonian Provincial Assembly (Maapäev)
1919–1920Prime Minister; concluded the Treaty of Tartu
The admiral-prime minister who steered Japan toward surrender
On August 10, 1945, Suzuki broke the deadlock by proposing that the emperor’s decision should settle the conference.
Kantaro Suzuki was a Japanese admiral and politician who became prime minister after serving as grand chamberlain and president of the Privy Council. Publicly he upheld the wartime line, while privately managing the cabinet and Supreme War Council as defeat made continuation untenable. After the atomic bombings and Soviet entry, the Big Six remained deadlocked, and Suzuki forced a procedure in which the emperor’s decision would settle the split. Japan then accepted the Potsdam Declaration, though the process did not erase responsibility for the war of aggression or the military’s resistance.
Career timeline
1884–1887Entered and graduated from the Imperial Japanese Naval Academy
1904–1905Commander of the 4th Destroyer Division; fought at the Battle of Tsushima
1914–1917Vice-Minister of the Navy
1924–1925Commander-in-Chief of the Combined Fleet; Chief of the Naval General Staff
1929–1936Grand Chamberlain and Privy Councillor
1944–1945President of the Privy Council
1945.04–08Prime Minister of Japan; guided the surrender decision
1945.12–1946.06President of the Privy Council; resigned after a purge order
The brain of Action Française, the royalist theorist who denied the republic itself in the name of integral nationalism
'It is the revenge of Dreyfus!', on hearing his life sentence in the court at Lyon, 27 January 1945
A poet and polemicist from Martigues in Provence, deaf from his youth, who led Action Française for half a century after the movement formed out of the Dreyfus affair. His 'integral nationalism' called for the restoration of the monarchy and the abolition of the parliamentary republic, and named Jews, Protestants, Freemasons and foreigners as the 'four confederate states' eating France from within. The movement survived the Vatican's condemnation of 1926, and in 1938 he was elected to the Académie Française. Through January 1934 his paper named 'the thieves' day after day, and on the morning of 6 February it called on its readers to come to the Chamber that evening. He welcomed Pétain's accession in 1940 as a 'divine surprise', backed Vichy, and denounced resisters and Jews in print throughout the occupation. In January 1945 he was sentenced to life imprisonment and national degradation for collusion with the enemy.
Career timeline
1868–1890Born at Martigues; loses his hearing; begins writing in Paris
1899–1908Joins Action Française out of the Dreyfus affair; the daily is founded in 1908
1908–1939Theorist of integral nationalism, shaping the whole of the French far right
1926The Vatican condemns Action Française
1934.01–02Press offensive over the Stavisky affair; calls for the demonstration of 6 February
1938Elected to the Académie Française
1940–1944Backs Vichy; denounces resisters and Jews in print
1945.01Sentenced to life and national degradation for collusion with the enemy
1952Released in ill health and dies at Tours the same year
Leader of the Georgian Mensheviks who headed the government of the Democratic Republic of Georgia in 1918–1921
Born in Guria, western Georgia, in 1868, he took up Marxism at the Warsaw Veterinary Institute and in the 1890s led Mesame Dasi, Georgia’s first legal Marxist organization. He sided with the Mensheviks in 1903 and sat in the First State Duma in 1906. In 1917 he chaired the Tbilisi Soviet and the National Council of Georgia; in May 1918 he headed the session that declared independence, and from July he led the government of the Democratic Republic of Georgia, carrying out land reform and social legislation. After the Red Army invasion of 1921 he went into exile in France, led the government-in-exile and died near Paris in 1953.
Career timeline
1890sLeader of Mesame Dasi
1906Member of the First State Duma
1917Chairman of the Tbilisi Soviet and of the National Council of Georgia
1918–1921Head of the government of the Democratic Republic of Georgia
1921–1953Head of the government-in-exile in France
Regent who led the counter-revolutionary National Army and ruled Hungary until 1944
Regent from 1920, Horthy led Hungary in alliance with Nazi Germany and into the invasion of the Soviet Union. After Germany occupied Hungary, 437,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz; Horthy was ousted after his October 1944 armistice attempt.
An Austro-Hungarian naval officer, he became commander-in-chief of the Navy in 1918. After the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919 he entered Budapest at the head of the counter-revolutionary National Army, and in March 1920 the Diet elected him regent. His national-conservative and antisemitic administration banned the Communist Party and the Arrow Cross and sought to revise the Treaty of Trianon. Allied with Nazi Germany, he joined the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941; after the German occupation of March 1944, 437,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz. In October 1944 he announced an armistice with the Soviets, was forced by the Germans to resign, and power passed to the Arrow Cross. He went into exile in Portugal after the war and died at Estoril in 1957.
Career timeline
1920The Diet elected Horthy regent of the Kingdom of Hungary.
1940Hungary joined the Axis; Horthy's regime enforced antisemitic laws and a forced-labor system.
1941Hungary joined the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union; the government deported over 20,000 Jews to occupied Galicia.
1944After Germany occupied Hungary, Hungarian authorities deported about 437,000 Jews between May and July. Horthy ordered deportations halted in July and declared an armistice with the Soviets in October, but the Germans detained him and forced him to abdicate.
"Capitalism cannot reform itself": father of the modern Negro liberation movement who joined the Communist Party at 93
"Communism will triumph. I want to help bring that day." — from his 1961 application to join the Communist Party USA, submitted at age 93
American sociologist, historian, Pan-Africanist, and the single most important African American intellectual of the 20th century. A co-founder of the NAACP, he edited its magazine The Crisis for 24 years, shaping the direction of the black civil rights movement, while his books The Souls of Black Folk and Black Reconstruction in America transformed American sociology and historiography. He viewed capitalism as the root cause of racism and pursued a synthesis of Marxism and Pan-Africanism. In 1961, at age 93, he joined the Communist Party USA; invited by Kwame Nkrumah, he settled in Ghana to begin work on the Encyclopedia Africana, and died there in 1963.
Career timeline
1895–1897Wilberforce University; University of Pennsylvania researcher, published The Philadelphia Negro (1899)
1897–1910Atlanta University professor; published The Souls of Black Folk (1903); founded Niagara Movement (1905)
1910–1934NAACP co-founder, editor of The Crisis; organized Pan-African Congresses
1934–1944Atlanta University professor; published Black Reconstruction in America (1935)
1944–1948NAACP Director of Special Research; attended UN founding conference
1950–1951Peace Information Center chair; indicted under FARA, acquitted
1961–1963Joined CPUSA; emigrated to Ghana, began Encyclopedia Africana
German Eastern Front chief of staff who placed his soldier's boot on the Brest-Litovsk negotiating table
"The General on several occasions put his soldier's boot on the table around which the discussion was taking place": Trotsky, who wrote that 'Hoffmann's boot was the only reality to take seriously'
An outstanding strategic staff officer who, as Chief of Operations of the German Eighth Army, devised the plans that destroyed the Russian armies at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes. As Chief of Staff of the Eastern Front from late 1917, he was the driving force behind the German position at the Brest-Litovsk peace talks: on 18 January 1918 he spread a map before the Soviet delegation and demanded the severance of Poland, the Baltic states, and Ukraine from Russia. After Trotsky's 'neither war nor peace' declaration, Hoffmann commanded Operation Faustschlag, an unopposed advance that compelled the Bolsheviks to accept far harsher final terms. He embodied the asymmetry between revolutionary diplomacy and imperial military force, most memorably by placing his soldier's boot on the negotiating table.
Career timeline
1899–1914Served in Russian Section of German General Staff; observer with Japanese army, Russo-Japanese War
1914–1916Operations officer, 8th Army, 9th Army & Ober Ost; architect of Tannenberg & Masurian Lakes
1916–1918Chief of Staff, Eastern Front (Major General); led German side at Brest-Litovsk negotiations
1918.02–03Commanded Operation Faustschlag; imposed final treaty terms on Soviet Russia
1919–1920Brigade commander on Polish border; retired March 1920
1920–1927Campaigned for anti-Soviet coalition intervention (Hoffmann Plan); wrote memoirs
The appeasement architect whose bid to avoid war helped open the way to it
Returning from Munich in 1938, he declared the agreement to mean “peace for our time.”
Neville Chamberlain was a British Conservative politician whose career combined domestic administrative reform with finance before he became prime minister. Seeking to avoid another European war and gain time for rearmament, he pursued appeasement, but the strategy failed to restrain Nazi Germany's expansion. His government's acceptance of the Munich settlement in 1938, and its limited response to Soviet proposals for collective security, formed part of the international conditions surrounding the 1939 crisis and the Nazi-Soviet Pact. After declaring war on Germany following the invasion of Poland, he resigned in 1940 amid criticism of the Norway campaign.
Career timeline
1911–1915Birmingham city councillor; chair of the Town Planning Committee
1915Lord Mayor of Birmingham
1916–1917Director of National Service
1923–1924Minister of Health; Chancellor of the Exchequer
1924–1929Minister of Health
1931–1937Chancellor of the Exchequer
1937–1940Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
1938–1939Led the Munich settlement and appeasement policy toward Germany
The UGT worker-leader they called the Spanish Lenin, a prime minister broken between revolution and war
In November 1936 Largo Caballero appointed four CNT leaders to his cabinet: anarchists whose programme was the abolition of the state took ministerial office in one. One of them, the health minister Federica Montseny, was the first woman to hold a ministry in Spanish history.
A man who left school at seven, worked as a stucco plasterer and became a union leader. At the head of the UGT he was sentenced to life for the general strike of August 1917, and under the Primo de Rivera dictatorship he took a seat on the Council of State to keep the organization alive, a choice argued over for the rest of his life. As labour minister of the Second Republic he pushed through the eight-hour day in the countryside, and around the Asturias rising of 1934 he moved so far left that his supporters called him the Spanish Lenin. In September 1936 he became prime minister and war minister, and in November brought four CNT leaders into the cabinet, seating anarchists in a government for the first time; but he clashed continuously with the communists and the Soviet advisers over rebuilding a regular army and over the pace of the revolution. After the May Days of 1937 he refused to outlaw the POUM, lost his ministers and fell. In exile in France he was seized by the Gestapo and held in Sachsenhausen until the liberation of 1945.
Career timeline
1869Born to a poor family in Madrid; left school at seven and became a stucco plasterer
1890–1894Drawn into the UGT by a builders' strike; joined the PSOE in 1894
1917Sentenced to life for leading the August general strike; released the next year on election to parliament
1924–1930Councillor of State for labour under the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, keeping the UGT alive at the cost of a lasting controversy
1925Became the leading figure of both the PSOE and the UGT after the death of Pablo Iglesias
1931–1933Labour minister of the Second Republic; pushed through the eight-hour day in the countryside and other labour laws
1934–1935Moved far left, called the Spanish Lenin; jailed after the failed Asturias rising of October and then acquitted
1936.09.04Took office as prime minister and minister of war
1936.11Brought four CNT ministers into the cabinet and moved the government to Valencia
1937.05.17Refused to outlaw the POUM after the May Days and was forced out of office
1937–1938Pushed out of the UGT leadership as well
1939Went into exile in France with the defeat of the Republic
1943–1945Seized by the Gestapo and held in Sachsenhausen concentration camp until the liberation
1946.03.23Died in Paris; his remains were returned to Madrid in 1978
A historian who linked scholarship with social democracy
In Moscow in 1940, he signed the peace treaty that ended the Winter War.
Väinö Voionmaa was a Finnish historian, professor and Social Democratic politician who helped shape the early republic. He founded institutions for workers’ education and joined scholarship to popular political work through parliament, diplomacy and social policy. As a Social Democratic member of Finland’s delegation to the Moscow Peace Treaty negotiations in 1940, he signed the settlement that ended the Winter War, embodying the difficult compromises imposed on Finland between war and great-power politics.
Career timeline
1894Earned a doctorate in history at the University of Helsinki
1903–1918Docent in Nordic history at the University of Helsinki
1917Member of the economic division of the Tokoi Senate and head of the transport commission
1919–1947Social Democratic member of the Parliament of Finland
1920Member of Finland’s delegation to the Tartu peace negotiations
1926–1927Minister for Foreign Affairs
1937–1939Minister of Trade and Industry, acting Minister for Foreign Affairs in 1938
1940Finnish delegate and signatory to the Moscow Peace Treaty
A monarch caught between constitutional authority and responsibility for Fascism
On 25 July 1943, he dismissed Mussolini, had him arrested, and appointed Badoglio to head a new government.
As king of Italy, he presided over the decline of liberal constitutionalism, the consolidation of the Fascist state, and two world wars. He approved Mussolini's seizure of power, colonial wars, the racial laws, and entry into the Second World War, making the monarchy a participant in Fascist rule. In July 1943 he dismissed Mussolini and appointed Pietro Badoglio, using the crown's constitutional powers to open a legal route for governmental change, but his flight from Rome after the armistice left the armed forces and state in disarray. He abdicated in 1946 after the monarchy failed to recover its legitimacy.
Career timeline
1889Began service as an officer in the Italian Army
1900Became King of Italy
1915King as Italy entered the First World War
1922Invited Mussolini to form a government
1936Proclaimed Emperor of Ethiopia
1940Entered the Second World War on the Axis side
1943Dismissed Mussolini and appointed the Badoglio government
Leader who took the SFIO majority into the Comintern at Tours in 1920, founding the French Communist Party, and ran L’Humanité
At the 1920 Tours Congress, he backed SFIO affiliation with the Comintern, led the majority split, and helped found the French Communist Party. Arrested in 1923 for opposing France’s Ruhr occupation, he was cleared by the Senate sitting as a High Court.
Born in Paimpol in Brittany, he joined Guesde’s French Workers’ Party in 1891 and the unified SFIO in 1905, and from 1918 ran L’Humanité for the rest of his life. As his supporters swung towards the October Revolution after the war, he led the vote to join the Comintern at the Tours congress of 1920 and became a founder of the French Communist Party. He was jailed in 1923 for denouncing the French occupation of the Ruhr. A deputy and senator, he remained the party’s elder statesman until his death in 1958.
Career timeline
1892Joined the Gironde section of the French Workers’ Party, founded by Jules Guesde and Paul Lafargue.
1905Took part in the founding congress of the unified Socialist Party (SFIO) and became its propaganda delegate.
1918Elected director of L’Humanité, which he led until his death in 1958.
1920At the Tours Congress, supported SFIO affiliation with the Comintern and helped found the French Section of the Communist International (SFIC), predecessor of the French Communist Party.
1923Arrested for opposing France’s Ruhr occupation and brought before the Senate sitting as a High Court; it ruled there was no case to answer.
1936Elected senator for the Seine, becoming the first senator from the French Communist Party.
German anarchist thinker who served in Bavaria’s revolutionary government and was killed by counterrevolutionary troops in 1919.
The state is a social relationship. Create new communities, and it can be replaced by a different social relationship.
Landauer argued that the state was not merely an apparatus to overthrow but a social relationship that could be replaced by creating voluntary communities. In 1908 he founded the Socialist Bund to pursue socialism through cooperatives and communal association. He opposed the First World War and came to Munich at Kurt Eisner’s request in 1918 to support the revolution. In April 1919 he joined the Bavarian Soviet Republic as Commissioner for Enlightenment and Public Instruction. After government forces crushed the republic, he was arrested and killed at Stadelheim Prison on 2 May.
Career timeline
1908Founded the Socialist Bund
1918Came to Munich at Kurt Eisner’s request to support the revolutionary government
1919Commissioner for Enlightenment and Public Instruction in the Bavarian Soviet Republic
French socialist and teachers’ union activist who led the Committee for the Third International
He organised internationalist socialists against the war and served as secretary of the Committee for the Third International during the founding of the French Communist Party.
A teacher, Loriot joined the Socialist Party in 1901 and became active in the teachers’ union. During the First World War he opposed support for the war and backed the Zimmerwald position, serving as secretary of the Committee for the Resumption of International Relations and later the Committee for the Third International. At the Tours Congress in 1920 he joined the leadership of the newly formed French Communist Party.
Career timeline
1901Joined the Socialist Party
1917Became secretary of the Committee for the Resumption of International Relations
1919Secretary of the Committee for the Third International
1920Elected to the Executive Committee of the newly formed Communist Party and as international secretary at the Tours Congress
1925Active in opposition to the party’s Bolshevisation
1926Left the party and joined the revolutionary syndicalist movement
PSOE right-wing leader, Speaker of the Cortes; joined Casado's coup, refused exile, and died in Franco's prison
"The great majority, the masses, they cannot leave, and I, who have always lived with the workers, will continue with them and with them I will stay. Whatever is their fate will be mine," to the socialist daily La Voz, March 1939
A Marxist revisionist who started as a philosophy professor in Madrid and succeeded Pablo Iglesias as leader of the PSOE and UGT in 1925. As Speaker of the Constituent Cortes (1931) he held to a moderate parliamentarism, and his opposition to the armed rising of October 1934 cost him his party base. During the Civil War he stayed in Madrid seeking a negotiated peace, and in March 1939 joined Colonel Casado's coup against Negrín, serving on the National Defence Council; but Franco demanded unconditional surrender. When every other council member fled, Besteiro refused, telling the socialist daily La Voz that he had always lived with the workers and would share their fate; a Francoist court martial sentenced him to life imprisonment and he died in Carmona prison.
Career timeline
1912Joined PSOE and UGT; appointed chair of Logic at Complutense University
1917Revolutionary general strike committee; sentenced to life imprisonment, amnestied 1918
1925–1931President of PSOE and UGT; collaborationist stance during Primo de Rivera dictatorship
1931–1933Speaker of the Constituent Cortes of the Second Spanish Republic
1934Resigned as UGT president after opposing the October armed rising
1937.05Republic's representative to George VI's coronation; met Anthony Eden seeking peace mediation
1939.03Joined Casado's coup; Foreign Affairs councillor on the National Defence Council
1939.03–1940.09Arrested by Franco's forces, court-martialed and sentenced to 30 years; died in Carmona prison
Social Democratic chancellor whose government accepted the Treaty of Versailles under an Allied ultimatum
Born in Darkehmen in the Province of Prussia, he worked as a lawyer’s clerk, co-founded the office employees’ union and was second chairman of the General Commission of Trade Unions from 1908 to 1918. Elected to the Reichstag for the SPD in 1912, he became labour secretary in Max von Baden’s cabinet in October 1918. When Scheidemann resigned in protest at the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919, Bauer, until then a vocal critic of the treaty, succeeded him and got it through the National Assembly. His government carried out tax reform and extended social insurance, but was forced out in March 1920 over the negotiations conducted with the Kapp putschists. He was later vice-chancellor and treasury minister, and the Barmat corruption scandal cost him his seat in 1925. He died in Berlin in 1944.
Career timeline
1908–1918Second chairman of the General Commission of Trade Unions
Soldier-statesman who was twice prime minister of the Union of South Africa and went to Budapest as the Entente’s envoy in April 1919
Born to Afrikaner parents in the British Cape Colony, he studied law at Cambridge. He fought as an officer in a commando unit in the Second Boer War and played a key role in negotiating the Treaty of Vereeniging in 1902. He led the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, was responsible as defence minister for the Union Defence Force in the First World War and joined the Imperial War Cabinet in London in 1917. At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 he championed the League of Nations, and on 4 April he went to Budapest, offering Béla Kun’s government a neutral zone more favourable than the Vix note and the lifting of the blockade; when Kun rejected the terms he ended the talks. He was prime minister of the Union of South Africa in 1919–1924 and 1939–1948 and became a field marshal in 1941. He died of a heart attack in 1950.
Career timeline
1899–1902Commando officer in the Second Boer War
1910Creation of the Union of South Africa; interior, mines and defence minister
1917Imperial War Cabinet
1919Delegate at the Paris Peace Conference; envoy to Budapest
1919–1924Prime minister of the Union of South Africa
1939–1948Prime minister of the Union of South Africa
Austrian Social Democratic leader who signed the Treaty of Saint-Germain and founded the Second Republic in 1945
Born to an ethnic German farming family in Moravia, he studied law in Vienna, joined the Social Democrats and entered the Imperial Council in 1907. An Austromarxist theorist of “personal autonomy” on the national question, he was criticised by Lenin and Stalin. In 1918 he became the first chancellor of German-Austria, leading a grand coalition that introduced the eight-hour day among other reforms, and had to accept the ban on union with Germany and the territorial losses of Saint-Germain. He supported the Anschluss in 1938. In April 1945, at Soviet direction, he formed a provisional government, and that year became president. He died in Vienna in 1950.
Career timeline
1896Joined the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Austria
1907–1918Member of the Reichsrat
1918–1920Chancellor and foreign minister of German-Austria (Austria)
1919Head of the delegation at Saint-Germain
1931–1933President of the National Council
1945Head of the provisional government; declared independence
The lone vote against the war; the revolution's first martyr
“The main enemy is at home.” — anti-war pamphlet, 1915
German socialist revolutionary. The only Reichstag deputy to vote against war credits during the First World War. Co-founded the Spartacus League and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) with Rosa Luxemburg. Murdered by Freikorps after the January 1919 uprising.
Career timeline
1907Published Militarism and Anti-Militarism and was sentenced to fortress imprisonment
1912–1916Reichstag deputy; the sole vote against war credits in December 1914
1916Arrested at a May Day anti-war rally; sentenced to prison
1918.11November Revolution — proclaims the 'Free Socialist Republic' from the Berlin palace
1918.12–1919.01Co-founds the Spartacus League and the KPD; the January uprising
1919.01Seized by the Freikorps and killed alongside Luxemburg
“Freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently”
On 14 January 1919, the day after the Spartacist uprising fell, Luxemburg's final article appeared in Die Rote Fahne. To the victors' cry of 'Order prevails in Berlin!' she answered: 'I was, I am, I shall be!' Arrested that night, murdered the next day.
Polish-born German revolutionary, and the Bolsheviks' sharpest comradely critic. From prison she defended the Russian Revolution while warning against the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly and the suppression of the press. Murdered by Freikorps troops during the January 1919 Berlin rising.
Career timeline
1893Co-founds the Polish social democracy
1898–1914Theorist of the SPD left; the revisionism dispute
1899Published Reform or Revolution
1906The Mass Strike
1913Published The Accumulation of Capital
1915–1918Jailed for anti-war work; writes on the Russian Revolution from prison
1918.12Co-founds the German Communist Party
1919.01Murdered by Freikorps troops in the January rising
SPD leader who headed the revolutionary government of 1918, steered the councils into parliamentary democracy and became the first president
During the November Revolution of 1918, Ebert led the Council of People’s Representatives and advocated elections to a National Assembly. Elected the first president of the German Republic in 1919, he served until 1925.
Born to a tailor in Heidelberg, he worked as a saddler, became a party organiser in Bremen and in 1913 succeeded Bebel as SPD co-chairman. In the war he backed war credits and the Burgfrieden. Taking over the chancellorship on 9 November 1918, he led the Council of People’s Deputies and that night won the army’s support in a secret pact with General Groener. Elected president by the National Assembly in February 1919, he put down risings from left and right with the army, the Freikorps and emergency decrees under Article 48. He died in office in 1925 after an appendicitis operation.
Career timeline
1889Joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD).
1905Elected to the SPD party executive.
1912Became a member of the Reichstag of the German Empire.
1913Elected one of the SPD’s two chairmen.
1918Took over state affairs from Chancellor Max von Baden during the November Revolution and led the Council of People’s Representatives.
1919Elected president of the German Republic by the National Assembly.
1925Died on 28 February from complications of appendicitis.
The monarchist anti-communist who established the 4th of August dictatorship
“Then, it is war.”
A Greek military officer turned politician, Metaxas sought an authoritarian national order that joined monarchism to hostility toward parliament. With King George II's support, he suspended parliament in 1936 and established the 4th of August Regime, banning parties and strikes while repressing the left. He also used state intervention and a youth organization to mobilize society, and historians have debated whether his rule is best understood as fascist, authoritarian-conservative, or a regime with a strong fascist component. In 1940 he rejected Italy's ultimatum and led Greece into war, but died in 1941 before the German invasion.
Career timeline
1890Second lieutenant, Hellenic Army Engineers
1899–1903Studied at the Berlin War Academy
1910–1912Adjutant to Eleftherios Venizelos, Minister of Military Affairs and prime minister
1912–1913Operations staff officer in the Balkan Wars and military adviser at the London Conference
1922–1936Founder and parliamentarian of the Freethinkers' Party
1926–1928Minister of Communications in Alexandros Zaimis's cabinet
1932–1933Minister of the Interior under Panagis Tsaldaris
1936–1941Prime Minister of Greece and leader of the 4th of August Regime
1868–1940
Died in Bermuda
