Rudolf Breitscheid (2 November 1874 – 28 August 1944) was a German politician and leading member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) during the Weimar Republic. Once leader of the liberal Democratic Union, he joined the SPD in 1912. He defected to the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) in 1917 due to his opposition to the First World War, and rejoined the SPD in 1922. He served as a senior member of and foreign policy spokesman for the SPD Reichstag group during the Weimar Republic, and was a member of the German delegation to the League of Nations. After the Nazi rise to power, he was among the members of the Reichstag who voted against the Enabling Act of 1933, and soon after fled to France to avoid persecution. He was arrested and handed to the Gestapo in 1941, and died in Buchenwald concentration camp in 1944.
Early life
Breitscheid was born on 2 November 1874 in Cologne to working-class Protestant parents. His father Wilhelm worked in a bookshop, and died when Rudolf was nine years old. His mother Wilhelmine was the daughter of a tailor. He began studying law at Cologne's Friedrich-Wilhelm Gymnasium in 1894, but moved within the year to Marburg to study politics. In 1898 he completed his PhD with a dissertation on "land policy in the Australian colonies".
Political career
Early career
After graduating, he worked as a journalist for various liberal newspapers in the north of Germany. At this time, his views were classical liberal in nature, and he supported free trade and German colonialism in Africa. He joined the left-liberal National-Social Association and campaigned for the Free-minded Union in the 1903 federal election, subsequently joining the Progressive People's Party (FVP). He moved to Berlin and in 1904 was elected to the city council and the assembly of the Province of Brandenburg. Advancing quickly in the political arena, he became chairman of the FVP's Berlin association and served a lobbyist for free trade issues. He opposed the entrenched power of the nobility, and campaigned for the abolition of the Prussian three-class franchise.
Breitscheid sought election to the Reichstag in the 1907 election, but was defeated by a Junker candidate. After the FVP chose to support the government of conservative Bernhard von Bülow, Breitscheid and a number of other leading liberals left the party and founded the Democratic Union (DV). Breitscheid became its first chairman. The party failed to attract broad support, however, and won less than 30,000 votes in the 1912 election. This defeat greatly disillusioned Breitscheid and, convinced that liberal parties were doomed either to irrelevance or collaboration with conservatives, he left the DV and joined the SPD. His own convictions aligned closely with the SPD's Erfurt program, which advocated for parliamentary democracy, legal equality, separation of church and state, and various other social reforms. Though still sceptical of Marxist theory, he believed that the economic reality of capitalism suppressed the individual rights of workers, and agreed with many socialist perspectives.
Breitscheid quickly gained prominence among the SPD press, but his record as a bourgeois liberal made him unpopular with many of the party's leaders. After he made inaccurate claims to a British newspaper about the party's stance on the First World War, he was attacked scathingly at a party meeting in October 1914 by Friedrich Ebert, who described him as "the last person who should play the role of party schoolmaster abroad". Breitscheid's anti-war activism and support for pacifist Hugo Haase also hampered his journalistic career. In January 1916, he was drafted and sent to the western front, but remained engaged with politics. Disillusioned by the SPD's support for the war, he joined the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) at the end of 1917. The new party nominated him to contest a by-election in Berlin in January 1918, for which he was mostly unable to campaign, and he lost to his SPD opponent.