Association of Democratic Socialists (Thuringia)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Federation of Democratic Socialists (BdS) was a political organization that was active in the Thuringia area in 1945 immediately after the occupation by US troops . The BdS was de facto an amalgamation of former members and functionaries of the SPD and can therefore be seen as the first step in a regional reorganization of this party (→ SPD Thuringia ). However, it was distinguished by a number of additional programmatic and conceptual features.

Development and programming

Benedikt Kautsky, immediately after his liberation in 1945, photo taken by the US Army

The BdS was founded on July 8, 1945 in Weimar at a state conference attended by around 250 participants. This date, however, marks little more than the formal legalization of an already existing organization that had previously appeared under this name. On June 1st, a local branch of the BdS was set up in Erfurt , which specifically recruited members from former Social Democrats.

The factual establishment of the BdS took place in mid-April 1945 in Buchenwald concentration camp liberated a few days earlier . The core of the organization was a group of German and Austrian Social Democrats around Hermann Brill (1895–1959) and Benedikt Kautsky (1894–1960) who took part in a programmatic platform presented by Brill on April 13 (the manifesto of the democratic socialists of the former Buchenwald concentration camp ) connected. The small group - at the time the camp was liberated there were only 31 German Social Democrats (compared to 796 German Communists) on site - quickly enjoyed the confidence of the Americans, who in addition to Brill entrusted several people from this group with central administrative tasks, starting with Fritz Behr ( 1881–1974), who was appointed Lord Mayor of Weimar on May 1st.

Hermann Brill acted as head and spokesman of the BdS, who initially represented his organization as the legitimate successor - but not simply a re-establishment - of the SPD and a provisional stage on the way to becoming a unified party of the political left. On July 3rd, at an event in Weimar, the BdS described itself as the "actual and legal successor of the former Social Democratic Party of Germany" - although a new central committee of the SPD had been constituted three weeks earlier in Berlin . In addition to the openly announced ambition for all of Germany, the agitation line pursued by the BdS between April and July is particularly noteworthy. Brill, the last SPD parliamentary group leader in the Thuringian state parliament in 1933 and afterwards for some time in the area of Neu Beginnen on the road, was given an “ultra-revolutionary” rhetoric during these months - without this having harmed the continuing “esteem for his person among important US officers” conspicuous, which lacked any immediate practical perspective and which was clearly aimed at slowing down the reorganization of the KPD through interference from the “left” . In his manifesto of the democratic socialists , Brill had already called for the immediate establishment of a “people's republic” and the socialist restructuring of the economy.

In the following weeks he repeatedly stated publicly that the "era of social democracy was over" and an era of "permanent social revolution" had begun. The “rule of finance capital, the imperialist tendency of this rule” - such things have already been “completely destroyed”. Therefore, "the realization of socialism is not a question of the future state, but the immediate task of the present" of the German left. Brill demonstrated at least a certain feeling for the mood of many of the activists of the labor movement emerging from illegality - in particular the KPD supporters who gather in antifa committees or committees (see Antifa committee ), not a few of whom are outspoken irritated reacted to the "right" line of the party leadership, which became clear at the latest with the call of the Central Committee of the KPD on June 11th. Nonetheless, the majority of the KPD cadres in Buchenwald, from whose midst a provisional district leadership for Thuringia emerged after the liberation, was not willing as early as April to endorse Brill's views; In a resolution of April 22nd, the "party activity of the KP Buchenwald" expressed that "the situation in Germany is not yet ready for the immediate implementation of socialism", the central task is instead the "mass mobilization of all anti-fascists on the basis of the National Committee" Free Germany '. ”Brill approached Thuringian KPD representatives in April and again in July with the suggestion of building a socialist unity party, but - as was to be expected in view of the mutually exclusive assessments of the immediate political perspectives -“ formal rejected ”. On July 9, the KPD's district leadership only agreed to a unitary action agreement within the meaning of the Berlin agreement of the leaderships of KPD and SPD of June 19.

After the occupation change was initially confirmed in office by the new Soviet military administration, Brill's position became untenable within a few days in mid-July. On July 16, he was replaced as President of the Government ; on July 24, Major General Kolesnitschenko asked him to drop the manifesto of the democratic socialists as a programmatic platform and to subordinate the BdS to the Berlin Central Committee of the SPD. Since Brill did not obey immediately, he was "arrested" - according to his own statements - on August 4th; He had been threatened to have him tried by “a court martial” if he continued to “propagate the realization of socialism as a contemporary demand.” On August 6th, Brill told the state executive that the SMATh would be called the Union of Democratic Socialists "so that we have to call ourselves the SPD." The manifesto of the democratic socialists is obsolete, from now on one has to act as a regional association of the SPD. Immediately afterwards, Brill called in sick and retired to Masserberg for four weeks .

Up until this point, Brill had emerged as a staunch advocate of the organizational amalgamation of communists and social democrats, but subsequently - when the KPD began to strive for this union from a position of strength on its part - as a bitter opponent of such a perspective. With the foreseeable failure in mind, he resigned the state chairmanship of the SPD on December 28, 1945 and left Thuringia to work in Berlin as an advisor to the American military government .

literature

  • Änne Anweiler, On the history of the unification of KPD and SPD in Thuringia 1945–1946 , Erfurt 1971.
  • Steffen Kachel , A red-red special path? Social Democrats and Communists in Thuringia 1919 to 1949 , Cologne-Weimar-Vienna 2011.
  • Werner Mägdefrau , Volker Wahl, On the politics and ideology of the right-wing social democratic leader Dr. Hermann L. Brill , in: Yearbook for Regional History, Vol. 5, Weimar 1975, pp. 191–215.
  • Manfred Overesch , Hermann Brill in Thuringia 1895–1946. A fighter against Hitler and Ulbricht , Bonn 1992.
  • Manfred Overesch, seizure of power from the left. Thuringia 1945/46 , Hildesheim 1993.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Sieber, H. (et al.), Chronicle on the history of the workers' movement in Thuringia 1945 to 1952, Erfurt 1975, p. 17.
  2. ↑ See, for example, the report of the District President H. Brill to the High Command of the Soviet Occupation Army on the situation in Thuringia from July 4, 1945, in: Post, Bernhard, Wahl, Volker (Ed.), Thüringen-Handbuch. Territory, constitution, parliament, government and administration in Thuringia 1920 to 1995, Weimar 1999, p. 119.
  3. ↑ See Sieber, Chronik, p. 12.
  4. ↑ Completely reprinted in Brill, Hermann, Gegen den Strom, Offenbach 1946, pp. 97-102.
  5. ↑ See Anweiler, Änne, On the history of the unification of KPD and SPD in Thuringia 1945-1946, Erfurt 1971, pp. 20, 23.
  6. ↑ Unfortunately, the currently only more extensive study on Brill is Overesch, Manfred, Hermann Brill in Thuringia 1895-1946. A fighter against Hitler and Ulbricht, Bonn 1992. This work is, however, almost useless due to its questionable constructions that have been consistently persisted and the sometimes almost excessive lack of distance. The same applies to Overesch, Manfred, seizure of power from the left. Thuringia 1945/46, Hildesheim 1993.
  7. ↑ Quoted from Röll, Wolfgang, Social Democrats in the Buchenwald Concentration Camp 1937-1945, Göttingen 2000, p. 259.
  8. ↑ See Overesch, Kämper, p. 237ff.
  9. ↑ Kachel, Steffen, A red-red special path? Social Democrats and Communists in Thuringia 1919 to 1949, Cologne-Weimar-Wien 2011, p. 344.
  10. ↑ See Brill, Strom, pp. 98f.
  11. ↑ See Pritchard, Gareth, The making of the GDR. From antifascism to Stalinism, Manchester 2004, p. 63.
  12. ↑ Quoted from Fuchs, Ludwig, The occupation of Thuringia by the American troops, in: Museums der Stadt Erfurt (Ed.), Contributions to the history of Thuringia, Erfurt 1968, p. 64.
  13. ↑ Quoted from Fuchs, Occupation, p. 64.
  14. ↑ See Pritchard, The making, pp. 64ff.
  15. ↑ Quoted from Anweiler, Geschichte, p. 21. Overesch, who knows this document and also prints it in full in the appendix to his work on the "seizure of power from the left", nevertheless claims with regard to the Brill-Ulbricht dualism he constructed, that the Thuringian KPD broke with Brill only after the "Moscow emigrants" appeared. See Overesch, Power Grabbing, pp. 106ff. In this context, it is noticeable that in Overesch's extremely detailed appreciation of Brill, the ultra-left rhetoric of the protagonist only appears marginally and is not discussed as such. Instead, Overesch repeatedly invokes a "political legacy of Buchenwald", which only the "intellectually superior, theoretically well-founded, programmatically clear [e] (...) man of democratic socialism" (seizure of power, p. 108) Brill embodied and that was only thrown off the rails in July 1945 by the appearance of a kind of deus ex machina ("Ulbricht's Marionette [Georg] Schneider", seizure of power, p. 106). How Schneider did it - according to Overesch, his speeches were "devoid of any theoretical content, mentally often blurred, rhetorically impetuous" (seizure of power, p. 107) and Schneider as a person "inferior in everything, unclear and contradicting" (power grab, p. 107) 109) - remains incomprehensible.
  16. ↑ See Kachel, Sonderweg, p. 80 (footnote 220).
  17. ^ Brill, Strom, p. 96.
  18. ↑ See Sieber, Chronik, p. 17. Overesch does not understand this agreement, which does not go beyond similar declarations in other regions of the Soviet occupation zone, as an expression of a specific "Buchenwald line of the Thuringian communists" sympathizing with Brill. "(Overesch, Power Grab, p. 109) A somewhat more differentiated assessment of the considerations in the circle of the Buchenwald KP in Kachel, Sonderweg, p. 244ff.
  19. ↑ See Overesch, taking power, p. 112.
  20. ↑ Quoted from Overesch, grabbing power, p. 113.
  21. ↑ Quoted from Overesch, grabbing power, p. 113.
  22. ↑ See Overesch, Power Grab, p. 113.
  23. ↑ See tile, Sonderweg, p. 343.