On 30 June 1940 he wrote, “The final German victory over England is now only a question of time.”
Alfred Jodl was a career officer who served throughout the Second World War as chief of the Operations Staff of Germany's Armed Forces High Command, translating Nazi political decisions into military directives. In 1940 he judged final victory over Britain to be only a matter of time, while the OKW examined pressure and invasion options and coordinated the associated operational preparations and orders. He signed or circulated the Commissar and Commando Orders and bore responsibility for forced evacuation and the destruction of homes in occupied territory. Convicted on all four counts at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, he was hanged in 1946.
Career timeline
1910Entered military service in the 4th Bavarian Field Artillery Regiment
1914–1918Artillery officer on the Western Front in World War I
1932–1935Served in the Army Operations Department
1935–1939Chief of the National Defense Section in the OKW
1939–1945Chief of the OKW Operations Staff
1944Promoted to Generaloberst
1945Defendant at Nuremberg and signatory of Germany's surrender instrument
Hungarian general who directed the Novi Sad massacre, fled to Germany after his conviction and joined the SS
Born Franz Zeidner into a Transylvanian Saxon family, he served as an artillery and staff officer in the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War, and between the wars changed his surname to the more Magyar-sounding Feketehalmy-Czeydner. In August 1941 he became commander of the Fifth Corps at Szeged. In January 1942 Chief of Staff Szombathelyi sent him against the partisans in Bačka; villagers there were massacred on his orders, and he organised the Novi Sad massacre. Sentenced to fifteen years by a court martial in January 1944, he fled to Vienna with other convicted officers and volunteered for the SS. As deputy defence minister under the Arrow Cross he signed the death warrant of his critic Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky. After the war he was handed via Hungary to Yugoslavia and executed in November 1946.
Career timeline
1910Commissioned lieutenant of artillery
1914–1918Austro-Hungarian artillery and staff officer
1941–1942Commander, Fifth Corps; directed the Bačka massacres
1944Convicted by court martial; fled to Vienna and joined the SS
1944–1945Deputy defence minister under the Arrow Cross
A field commander undone by the collision of orders and reality
After being told that no German field marshal had ever been captured alive, Paulus refused suicide and surrendered.
Friedrich Paulus was a German staff officer and general whose work included planning the invasion of the Soviet Union. As commander of the Sixth Army, he led the advance on Stalingrad, then became trapped between Hitler's order to hold the city and the army's collapse after the Soviet encirclement. He surrendered on 31 January 1943 and, in captivity, became a critic of the Nazi regime who joined anti-Nazi German officers' organizations sponsored by the Soviet Union. In postwar East Germany he researched military history, leaving a legacy shaped both by responsibility for an aggressive war and by his late break with Nazism.
Career timeline
1910Officer candidate, 111th Infantry Regiment of the Imperial German Army
1914–1918Served in the First World War and as a staff officer
1935–1939Chief of staff, Panzer Troop Command, then Tenth Army
1939–1940Chief of staff of the Tenth Army, later redesignated Sixth Army
1940–1941Deputy chief of the German Army General Staff
1942–1943Commander of the Wehrmacht's Sixth Army
1943Generaloberst, promoted to field marshal on 30 January
1954–1957Military-history research and teaching in East Germany
Hitler's "fireman" who rushed from crisis to crisis on the Eastern Front, the Wehrmacht's most tenacious defensive commander
Driving through a blizzard to confront Hitler in East Prussia, Model glared through his monocle and demanded: "Mein Führer, who commands Ninth Army, you or I?"
Walter Model distinguished himself as a staff officer in the First World War and rose to become the Wehrmacht's finest defensive commander in the Second. As commander of the 9th Army in the Rzhev salient, he repelled repeated major Soviet offensives, earning the nickname "the Lion of Defence" and Hitler's trust as the "fireman" who could be rushed to any crisis. On 27 April 1943, Model was the first senior commander to warn Hitler against Operation Citadel, presenting aerial reconnaissance photographs of the Red Army's deeply prepared defences in the Kursk salient, yet the offensive went ahead and his 9th Army failed to advance even 12 kilometres on the northern face. In the war's final weeks, trapped in the Ruhr Pocket, he dissolved his army group rather than order a mass surrender and shot himself in a forest.
Career timeline
1909Officer cadet, 52nd Infantry Regiment
1917Ordnance officer, Supreme Army Command (OHL)
1935Head of Section 8 (Technical), Army General Staff
1940Commander, 3rd Panzer Division
1942Commander, 9th Army: Rzhev
1943Northern pincer, Operation Citadel
1944Army Group Centre → Army Group B
1945Ruhr Pocket encircled, dissolved army group, suicide
“I order the immediate cessation of resistance. Every hour you keep on fighting prolongs the suffering of the civilians in Berlin and of our wounded.”
Helmuth Weidling was a German general who rose from imperial service to become an artillery officer and corps commander in the Wehrmacht. His command on the Eastern Front implicated him in Nazi Germany’s war of aggression and occupation, and his corps was later examined in connection with the Ozarichi camp crimes. Appointed commander of the Berlin Defence Area on 23 April 1945, he directed the city’s defence under Hitler’s ban on surrender, then negotiated with Vasily Chuikov and ordered the garrison to cease resistance on 2 May. Taken prisoner by the Soviet Union, he received a 25-year sentence for war crimes and died in custody in 1955; Russian prosecutors declared him ineligible for rehabilitation in 1996.
Career timeline
1911–1918Officer in Prussian artillery and Zeppelin units
1919–1938Reichswehr artillery officer and regimental commander
1939–1941Artillery commands in Poland, France and on the Eastern Front
1942–1943Commander of the 86th Infantry Division
1943–1945Commander of the XLI Panzer Corps
1945.04Commander of the LVI Panzer Corps at the Oder front and Berlin
1945.04.23–1945.05.02Commander of the Berlin Defence Area, ordering the garrison’s surrender
1952–1955Imprisoned in the Soviet Union after a war-crimes conviction
Mathematician who mastered the Arctic through science and built Glavsevmorput
Every evening on the ice floe he lectured on philosophy, mathematics, and geography. Coughing blood from tuberculosis, he refused to leave until every one of his 104 castaways was safe. In two months, not one person broke discipline.
Mathematician, Arctic explorer, and state administrator. Born in Mogilev to a German-Latvian family, he founded the Moscow algebraic school through his work in group theory. In 1932 his icebreaker Sibiryakov achieved the first single-season transit of the Northern Sea Route; in 1934, after the Chelyuskin sank, he led 104 survivors through two months on a drifting ice floe. As head of Glavsevmorput he directed Soviet Arctic development, and in his later years proposed the influential cosmogonic hypothesis that the Solar System's planets formed through cold accretion of a dust cloud.
Career timeline
1913Graduated Kiev University, began group theory research under D.A. Grave
1916Published Abstract Theory of Groups; privat-docent at Kiev University
1918–1920Official at Narkomprod; joined RSDLP (Internationalists), merged into RKP(b)
1921–1924Head of State Publishing House, led education and publishing reforms
1924–1942Founding chief editor, Great Soviet Encyclopedia
1929–1949Founded and chaired Dept. of Higher Algebra, Moscow University; led Soviet algebraic school
1930–1932Director, All-Union Arctic Institute
1932Led Sibiryakov: first single-season transit of the Northern Sea Route
1932–1938Head of Glavsevmorput (Main Administration of the Northern Sea Route)
1934Chelyuskin sank; led 104 survivors for two months on drifting ice, all rescued
1937Organized drifting station North Pole-1; Hero of the Soviet Union
1939–1942Vice-President, USSR Academy of Sciences
1942–1956Director, Institute of Theoretical Geophysics; developed cold-accretion cosmogonic hypothesis
German naval commander of the U-boat fleet who briefly became head of state after Hitler's death.
Dönitz commanded Germany's U-boat force during the Second World War and became commander-in-chief of the Navy in January 1943. He continued to send submarines into battle through 1945 despite mounting losses. After Hitler's suicide, Hitler's will named him head of state; on 7 May 1945, Dönitz ordered Alfred Jodl to sign Germany's surrender instrument. Convicted at Nuremberg of crimes against peace and war crimes, he was sentenced to ten years in prison.
Career timeline
1943Became commander-in-chief of the German Navy
1945Became head of state after Hitler's death and ordered Germany's surrender
Frankfurt School's spectral companion, Marxist critic who dissected capitalist culture through the lens of mechanical reproduction
In the "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Benjamin wrote: "There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism."
Born to a prosperous assimilated Jewish family in Berlin, Walter Benjamin was a singular Marxist cultural critic who intersected deeply with the Frankfurt School yet remained irreducible to any single tradition. His thought, fusing Jewish mysticism with historical materialism, analyzed how capitalist production destroys art's "aura" in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935), while his posthumous "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940) challenged the Marxist faith in progress through the indelible allegory of the "angel of history," drawn from a Paul Klee painting. In exile he pursued the unfinished Arcades Project, an archaeological excavation of 19th-century Parisian commodity culture, and through his tense intellectual friendships with Brecht, Adorno, and Scholem, he expanded the horizons of Western Marxism.
Career timeline
1919PhD summa cum laude, University of Bern, on 'The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism'
1925Withdrew habilitation thesis 'The Origin of German Tragic Drama' from University of Frankfurt
1928Published 'One-Way Street' and 'The Origin of German Tragic Drama'
1933Fled Nazi Germany permanently, exiled to Paris
1935–1936Wrote 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,' published in French
1940Completed 'Theses on the Philosophy of History'; took his own life at Portbou on the Spanish border
First East German justice minister, dismissed and imprisoned in 1953 after opposing the prosecution of striking workers
A toolmaker from Berlin, he joined the SPD in 1910 and sat in the Prussian Landtag from 1928 to 1933. Under the Nazis he took part in a resistance group and was twice imprisoned. After the war he supported the forced merger of the SPD and KPD, sat on the SED’s Central Committee, and in October 1949 became the GDR’s first Minister of Justice. In the trial of the Gladow gang he had adult criminal law applied unlawfully so that a death sentence was possible. In an interview with Neues Deutschland on 30 June 1953 he said that members of the 17 June strike leadership would not be punished on mere suspicion; denounced as an “enemy of the state and the party”, he was dismissed, expelled and arrested, and sentenced to eight years. Released and pardoned in 1956, readmitted to the party in 1958, he died in 1973.
German Jewish Expressionist playwright who took part in the Bavarian revolution
After volunteering for the German army in World War I and being wounded at Verdun, Toller was discharged in 1917; his wartime experience turned him toward pacifism, and he joined the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany. In April 1919 he served six days as president of the Bavarian Soviet Republic and took part in its armed resistance; sentenced to five years for high treason, he wrote several major plays in prison. Exiled after the Nazis came to power, he continued warning against Nazism and died by suicide in New York in 1939.
Career timeline
1914Volunteered for the German army and served in World War I.
1917Discharged from military service after wartime injury and ill health.
1919As a member of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany, joined the leadership of the Bavarian Soviet Republic and served as its president, April 6–12.
1919Sentenced to five years in prison for high treason over his role in the republic's armed resistance.
1925Released, expelled from Bavaria, and went to Berlin.
1933After the Nazi seizure of power, left Germany and went into exile, moving through Switzerland, France, and England before the United States.
Baltic German Nazi ideologue from Reval who served as Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories in 1941–1945
Born in 1893 in Reval (Tallinn), in the Governorate of Estonia of the Russian Empire, he studied architecture at the Riga Polytechnical Institute. In 1918 he left for Germany with the retreating German army and in January 1919 joined the German Workers’ Party, eight months before Hitler; in 1923 he became editor of the party newspaper Völkischer Beobachter. In 1930 he published his racial treatise The Myth of the Twentieth Century, and he fed Hitler’s belief in Jewish conspiracies by introducing him to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Appointed Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories on 17 July 1941, he had Hinrich Lohse installed as Reichskommissar for Ostland, though his own authority was severely limited. He saw the Baltic lands as German “Lebensraum”. Found guilty on all four counts at Nuremberg, he was hanged on 16 October 1946.
Career timeline
1919Joined the German Workers’ Party
1923Editor of the Völkischer Beobachter
1930Published The Myth of the Twentieth Century
1941–1945Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories
A Luftwaffe chief who organized Nazi war and plunder
In August 1940, redirecting the air offensive toward London and civilian cities gave the RAF time to recover.
Hermann Göring rose from a First World War fighter ace to a central power-holder in Nazi Germany and commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe. He helped build dictatorship and the machinery of aggressive war by directing the Prussian police, the creation of the Gestapo, rearmament, and wartime economic mobilization. During the Battle of Britain in 1940, he overestimated the Luftwaffe and was involved in shifting attacks from the RAF's struggling airfields and fighter defences toward British cities, giving Fighter Command time to recover. After the war, the Nuremberg Tribunal condemned him as a major war criminal, and he committed suicide on the eve of his execution.
Nazi Germany’s foreign minister, he played a key role in negotiating the German-Soviet nonaggression pact.
Joachim von Ribbentrop served as Germany’s foreign minister from 1938 to 1945. He played a key role in negotiating the 1939 German-Soviet nonaggression pact, which made possible Germany’s invasion of Poland that September. He also directed diplomatic efforts to persuade Axis partners to deport Jews to German killing centers and to hand over their Jewish citizens in Germany to deportation. The International Military Tribunal convicted him on all four counts and sentenced him to death; he was hanged on October 16, 1946.
First East German Minister for State Security, purged in 1953 after trying to replace Ulbricht
Born in Gelsenkirchen to a gendarmerie sergeant’s family, he trained as a teacher and was a military leader of the Red Ruhr Army during the Kapp Putsch of 1920. As a GRU agent and Comintern military adviser he co-organised the Guangzhou Uprising in China, and in the Spanish Civil War, as “Gomez”, he led the International Brigades. He returned to Germany in 1947, joined the SED, and in 1950 became the first Minister for State Security and a Politburo member, building up the Stasi. After the uprising of June 1953 he moved to replace Ulbricht with Herrnstadt, but once Ulbricht had Khrushchev’s backing he lost his ministry and all his posts in July and was expelled from the party. He worked as a translator, died in East Berlin in 1958 and was rehabilitated after 1990.
Career timeline
1920Red Ruhr Army leader during the Kapp Putsch
1927–1930Comintern military adviser in China
1936–1938International Brigades commander in Spain (“Gomez”)
1950–1953GDR Minister for State Security; Politburo member
1953Stripped of all posts and expelled from the SED
SED Politburo member and chairman of the Central Party Control Commission who stood by Ulbricht in 1953
Born in Burg, the son of a Social Democratic worker, he worked as a tanner and left the SPD when it voted for war loans. He went through the USPD into the KPD and led its Magdeburg and East Prussia districts. Arrested in 1933, he escaped and went into exile, joining the National Committee for a Free Germany in the Soviet Union. He returned in 1945 with Anton Ackermann’s group and until 1946 was first secretary of the KPD in Saxony. From 1948 until his death he chaired the SED’s Central Party Control Commission, responsible for party discipline, and was a Politburo member and vice-president of the People’s Chamber. After the 1953 uprising, when a Politburo majority wanted to remove Ulbricht, he and Honecker alone stayed loyal. He died in East Berlin in 1971.
Career timeline
1918Joined the USPD; workers’ and soldiers’ council
1931–1933KPD political leader in East Prussia
1945–1946First secretary of the KPD in Saxony
1948–1971Chairman of the SED Central Party Control Commission
German communist leader who built the GDR and erected the Berlin Wall
At a press conference on 15 June 1961 he declared, 'Nobody intends to build a wall'; two months later, on 13 August, his orders launched the Berlin Wall.
Born in Leipzig in 1893 to a tailor's family and trained as a joiner, he joined the SPD in 1912, passed through the USPD (1917) and the Spartacus League (1919) into the KPD (1920), and sat on the KPD Central Committee from 1923 and in the Reichstag from 1928 to 1933. After the Nazi takeover he fled via Paris and Prague to the Soviet Union to work for the Comintern, and returned on 30 April 1945 leading the 'Ulbricht Group'. He was pivotal in the forced 1946 merger of the KPD and SPD into the SED and became its First Secretary in 1950, the effective leader of East Germany. He backed the suppression of the June 1953 uprising, ordered the Berlin Wall in 1961, and launched the New Economic System in 1963. Forced out on 3 May 1971 'for health reasons' in favour of Erich Honecker, he died of a stroke on 1 August 1973.
Career timeline
1912Joins the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD)
1918Co-founds the Spartacus League and the KPD
1923–1933KPD Central Committee member, Reichstag deputy
1933–1945Exile in Paris, Prague and Moscow; works for the Comintern
1943Helps found the National Committee for a Free Germany
1950–1971First Secretary of the SED Central Committee
1960–1973Chairman of the GDR State Council
1971Forced to resign party leadership under Brezhnev pressure
The Social Democrat who led a divided state into being
In April 1946, he was elected co-chairman of the newly founded Socialist Unity Party alongside Wilhelm Pieck.
Otto Grotewohl was a Weimar-era Social Democratic politician who voted against Hitler’s Enabling Act and later led the postwar SPD in the Soviet occupation zone. Initially cautious, he helped drive the merger with the Communist Party under Soviet occupation authorities, becoming the SED’s co-chairman in 1946. The merger created the political foundation of East Germany, but it also followed the suppression of free choice within the SPD. As the GDR’s first head of government from 1949, Grotewohl helped build the new state while operating within the limits imposed by Soviet power.
Career timeline
1912Joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany
1920–1926Member of the Brunswick state parliament
1922–1924Brunswick Minister of Justice and Public Education
1925–1933Member of the Reichstag
1945–1946Chairman of the SPD Central Committee in the Soviet occupation zone
1946–1950Co-chairman of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany
1949–1964Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the GDR
1960–1964Withdrew from active politics because of severe illness
The German general who surrendered Paris rather than destroy it
On 25 August 1944, he signed the capitulation of the German garrison in Paris.
Dietrich von Choltitz was a German professional officer who served in both world wars and carried out Nazi Germany’s war on the Eastern and Western Fronts. As military governor of Paris in August 1944, he did not execute Hitler’s order to destroy the city and surrendered the garrison to French forces, helping make the liberation of Paris possible. British recordings made after his capture also preserve his admission of responsibility for the liquidation of Jews in Crimea, so his refusal in Paris does not erase his wider responsibility for the war.
Career timeline
1914–1918Officer, Royal Saxon Army 107th Infantry Regiment, Western Front
1919–1939Reichswehr officer, commander of III Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment
1939–1940Commander, 16th Air Landing Infantry Regiment, Poland and the Netherlands campaigns
1941–1942Commander, 16th Infantry Regiment, Crimea and Siege of Sevastopol
1943Commander, 11th Panzer Division and XLVIII Panzer Corps, Eastern Front
1944Commander, LXXVI Panzer Corps and LXXXIV Army Corps, Italy and Normandy
1944Commander of Greater Paris and military governor, surrendered on 25 August
1944–1947Interned at Trent Park and a US prisoner-of-war camp
A social democrat who moved from municipal politics into state power amid Germany's division
On 30 November 1948, he was elected Lord Mayor of the “provisional democratic magistrate” in Berlin's Soviet sector.
Friedrich Ebert Jr. was a German politician who moved from the Social Democratic Party to the leadership of the Socialist Unity Party, carrying both the symbolism of being the first president's son and the consequences of his own choices. The Nazis detained him in concentration camps for illegal political activity; after the war, he became a central figure in the Soviet zone as social democracy was forcibly fused with communism and the SED consolidated power. On 30 November 1948 he led the extraordinary assembly in the Soviet sector that deposed Berlin's elected magistrate and installed a rival East Berlin magistrate, then combined municipal reconstruction with senior work in East German state institutions.
Career timeline
1919–1925Editor of the Social Democratic daily Vorwärts
1927–1933Brandenburg an der Havel city councillor
1928–1933Member of the Reichstag
1946–1949President of the Brandenburg Landtag
1946–1979SED Central Committee and Politburo member
1948–1967First Lord Mayor of East Berlin
1949–1979People's Chamber and Council of State leadership
1971–1979Chairman of the SED People's Chamber faction
Nazi Party leader and Hitler’s deputy, sentenced to life imprisonment at the Nuremberg trials.
Hess joined the Nazi Party in 1920 and became a close associate of Hitler. He was appointed deputy party leader in 1933, and in 1939 Hitler placed him second after Hermann Göring in the line of succession. In May 1941 he flew alone to Scotland in an attempt to negotiate an end to the war with Britain; the British government rejected his proposals and held him as a prisoner of war. After the war, the Nuremberg tribunal convicted him of crimes against peace and sentenced him to life imprisonment, which he served at Spandau Prison.
“The world war… exerted the deepest influence on my entire life. Whatever other factors may have affected me, it was solely because of this war that I became a communist.” — from his 1927 autobiography
A Soviet intelligence officer who worked under cover as a German correspondent in Tokyo. He warned of Operation Barbarossa and confirmed Japan's southward turn, enabling Siberian divisions to be thrown into the Moscow front. Executed in 1944; made a Hero of the Soviet Union in 1964.
Career timeline
1925–1929Comintern, then Red Army intelligence
1930–1933The Shanghai network
1933–1941Tokyo: the correspondent the German embassy trusted
1941.05–06Warns of Barbarossa; ignored
1941.09“Japan will not strike north”, the basis for moving the Siberian divisions
SS special-unit commander implicated in the Wola massacre
Waffen-SS commander of a unit recruited from convicted criminals; from 1940 he led it in anti-partisan operations in occupied Poland and Belarus, massacring civilians on a mass scale.
Nazi German SS officer and war criminal. From 1940 he commanded the special unit bearing his name, which committed war crimes in Poland and Belarus. During the suppression of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, his formation participated in the massacre of civilians in Wola. His command responsibility belongs within the history of Nazi occupation policy and the SS and police command structure.
Career timeline
1913Enlisted in the Württemberg Army as a machine gunner; rose to lieutenant in World War I and received the Iron Cross in both classes.
1919–1921Joined the Freikorps and helped crush the German Revolution, workers' uprisings, strikes and communist revolts by force.
1922–1934Took a doctorate in political science at Frankfurt and joined the Nazi Party, but in 1934 was imprisoned for a sexual offence involving a minor and theft, expelled from the party and stripped of his doctorate and military honours.
1937–1939Served with the Condor Legion in the Spanish Civil War, was wounded three times, and on the strength of that service had his 1934 conviction annulled and his party membership restored in 1940.
1940Took command of the Oranienburg poacher unit recruited from convicted poachers; renamed Sonderkommando Dirlewanger, it was assigned guard and anti-partisan duties in occupied Poland.
1943Expansion of the unit to regimental size was authorized, and in Belarus it conducted anti-partisan operations that massacred civilians on a mass scale.
1944Took part in suppressing the Warsaw Uprising and the Wola massacre, and was then deployed against the Slovak National Uprising.
1945Was seriously wounded fighting Soviet forces near Guben in February and sent to the rear; in April he deserted and went into hiding.
Higher SS and Police Leader who directed the mass shootings at Kamianets-Podilskyi, Babi Yar and Rumbula
The son of a textile factory owner in Hornberg in the Black Forest, he fought as an officer in the First World War. He joined the Nazi Party in 1929 and the SS in 1930, and from 1933 was police president and head of the political police in Brunswick. Chosen by Himmler in June 1941 as Higher SS and Police Leader for southern Russia and Ukraine, he controlled all Einsatzgruppen killings in his area and used his method in the mass shootings at Kamianets-Podilskyi (23,600 killed) and Babi Yar (33,771 killed). Moved to Ostland in November with orders to complete the extermination of Riga’s Jews, he watched over two days as 25,000 people were killed at Rumbula. Taken prisoner fighting the Red Army in April 1945, he was sentenced to death at the Riga trial and hanged in Riga on 3 February 1946.
Career timeline
1914–1918German army officer and pilot
1929–1930Joined the Nazi Party and the SS
1932–1945Reichstag deputy
1933–1938Police president and head of political police, Brunswick
1941Higher SS and Police Leader, southern Russia and Ukraine
SPD leader who survived ten years in Nazi camps and, after the war, refused the merger with the Communists
Born in Kulm in West Prussia, he lost his right arm in the First World War and joined the SPD in 1918. As a member of the Württemberg Landtag and the Reichstag he fought the Nazis. Arrested in July 1933, he refused to sign a renunciation of political activity and spent ten years in concentration camps. In 1945 he rebuilt the party from Hanover, rejected the merger with the Communists urged by Otto Grotewohl in the Soviet zone, and called the KPD “red-painted Nazis”. Elected SPD chairman in 1946 and the Bundestag’s first leader of the opposition in 1949, he called for the nationalisation of heavy industry and a united Germany and opposed Adenauer’s integration with the West. He died in Bonn in 1952.
Career timeline
1918Joined the SPD
1930–1933Reichstag deputy
1933–1943Held in Nazi concentration camps
1946–1952SPD chairman
1949–1952Leader of the opposition in the Bundestag
