Kurt Schumacher

Curt Ernst Carl Schumacher, better known as Kurt Schumacher (13 October 1895 – 20 August 1952), was a German politician and resistance fighter against the Nazis.

The young man was a brilliant student, but when the First World War broke out in 1914, he immediately abandoned his studies and joined the German Army.

In December, at Bielawy west of Łowicz in Poland, he was so badly wounded that his right arm had to be amputated.

After contracting dysentery, he was finally discharged from the army and was decorated with the Iron Cross Second class.

Inspired by Eduard Bernstein, Schumacher became a dedicated socialist and in 1918 joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD).

He led ex-servicemen in forming Workers and Soldiers Councils in Berlin during the revolutionary days following the fall of the German Empire but opposed attempts by revolutionary left-wing groups to seize power.

Schumacher returned to his law and political science in Halle, Leipzig and Berlin from which he graduated in 1919.

In 1920, the SPD sent him to Stuttgart to edit the party's newspaper there, the Schwäbische Tagwacht.

Schumacher was elected to the state legislature, the Free People's State of Württemberg Landtag in 1924.

He transferred to the local republican organisation "Schwabenland" in the new founded democratic combat organisation Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold.

Schumacher became chairman of the Stuttgart Branch of Reichsbanner.

In 1928, he became the SPD leader in the state of Württemberg.

To oppose the emerging Nazi Party, Schumacher helped organise socialist militias to oppose them.

In 1930, he was elected to the national legislature, the Reichstag.

In August 1932, he was elected to the SPD party leadership group (Parteivorstand).

At 38, he was youngest SPD member of the Reichstag.

Schumacher was staunchly anti-Nazi.

In a Reichstag speech on 23 February 1932, he excoriated Nazism as "a continuous appeal to the inner swine in human beings" and stated the movement had been uniquely successful in "ceaselessly mobilizing human stupidity".

Schumacher was arrested in July 1933, two weeks before the SPD was banned, and was severely beaten in prison.

Schumacher was given the opportunity to sign a declaration in which he renounced any political activity if released, but unlike Fritz Bauer and seven other political prisoners, he refused to sign it.

He spent the next ten years in Nazi concentration camps at Heuberg, Kuhberg, Flossenbürg, and Dachau.

The camps were initially intended for exploitation of those deemed by the Nazis to be undesirable people, such as Jews, socialists, communists, and criminals.

Beginning in 1940, the prison camps were overcrowded with transports from the eastern front, leading to disease outbreaks and starvation.

Under Action 14f13, beginning in 1941, the Nazis summarily murdered prisoners they deemed unfit for work, but Schumacher and some other disabled veterans were spared after they proved with their war medals that they had been disabled in service of Germany during World War I. The conditions in the camps continued to worsen and by 1943, nearly half of the prisoners died, in particular in Neuengamme of 106,000 inmates almost half died.

In 1943, when Schumacher was near death, his brother-in-law succeeded in persuading a Nazi official to have him released into his custody.

Schumacher was re-arrested in late 1944 and was in Neuengamme when the British arrived in April 1945.

Schumacher wanted to lead the SPD and bring Germany to socialism.

By May 1945, he was already reorganising the SPD in Hanover without the permission of the occupation authorities.

He soon found himself in a battle with Otto Grotewohl, the leader of the SPD in the Soviet Zone of Occupation, who argued the SPD should merge with the KPD to form a united socialist party.

Grotewohl had initially opposed the idea, but was persuaded that the rise of the Nazis would have never happened had the left presented a unified front.

Schumacher was as ardently anti-Communist as he was anti-Nazi, and rejected the proposal.

As it turned out, when the eastern SPD merged with the KPD to form the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, that party became, for all intents and purposes, the KPD under a new name.

The few recalcitrants from the SPD half of the merger were branded "agents of Schumacher" and shunted aside.

He was chairman of the Social Democratic Party of Germany from 1946 and the first Leader of the Opposition in the West German Bundestag in 1949; he served in both positions until his death.

Upon Adolf Hitler's seizure of power, he was imprisoned for ten years in various Nazi concentration camps.

After World War II, Schumacher was one of the founding fathers of postwar German democracy.

Throughout his life, he opposed reactionary and revolutionary forces, including the Nazi Party and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD).

He described the KPD as "red-painted Nazis".

Schumacher was born in Kulm in West Prussia (now Chełmno in Poland), the son of a small businessman who was a member of the liberal German Free-minded Party and deputy in the municipal assembly.

In August 1946, Schumacher called an SPD convention in Hanover, which elected him as the Western leader of the party.