Wilhelm Dittmann

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Wilhelm Dittmann
Wilhelm Dittmann (left) together with Arthur Crispien on July 18, 1930

Wilhelm Dittmann (born November 13, 1874 in Eutin , † August 7, 1954 in Bonn ) was a German social democratic politician. From 1917 to 1922, Dittmann was the political secretary of the Central Committee of the USPD and led the work of the party. From November 10 until his resignation on December 29, 1918, he was a member of the Council of People's Representatives . From 1912 to 1918 and from 1920 to 1933 he was a member of the Reichstag for the SPD and the USPD .

Life

Dittmann attended elementary school in his hometown, completed an apprenticeship as a carpenter in 1894 and worked in this profession for five years. In 1894 he joined the SPD and the woodworkers' association . From 1899 Dittmann worked as an editor for party newspapers in Bremerhaven and Solingen ( Bergische Arbeiterstimme ). In 1904 he took up a position as party secretary in Frankfurt am Main , where he also became a city councilor in 1907. In 1909 he returned to Solingen and in 1912 won the Reichstag constituency Remscheid - Lennep - Mettmann .

Leading members of the USPD on the sidelines of the Leipzig party congress, December 1919. Dittmann in the center of the picture behind Lore Agnes and Arthur Crispien

On December 21, 1915, he voted for the first time against the war credits to finance the First World War , was expelled from the SPD parliamentary group in March 1916 and founded the Social Democratic Working Group in 1916 together with Hugo Haase and Georg Ledebour . In April 1917 he was a founding member of the USPD . In February 1918 he was for his participation at the Berlin munitions workers' strike by a court martial of attempted treason convicted and five years imprisonment convicted. In the course of the change in domestic policy under Chancellor Max von Baden , he was released from prison on October 15, 1918.

During the first weeks of the November Revolution ( November 10 to December 29, 1918) he was a member of the Council of People's Representatives for the USPD . In 1920 he was elected to the Reichstag for the USPD . In 1920 he took part for the USPD at the Second World Congress of the Communist International (KI) in Petrograd , but, contrary to the party congress vote in Halle , refused to join the USPD to the KI and to unite with the KPD .

Dittmann remained a leading member of the rest of the USPD (the majority of the members joined the KPD in 1920) and in 1922 promoted reunification with the SPD. In autumn 1922 Dittmann joined the executive committee of the united party as secretary and also took on the role of executive chairman of the Social Democratic parliamentary group. He held both offices until 1933. From 1920 to 1925 he was also one of the vice-presidents of the Reichstag, and from 1921 to 1925 also city councilor in Berlin. In the SPD, however, he no longer played a similarly important role as in the USPD.

On January 22 and 23, 1926, Dittmann gave a six-hour speech to the parliamentary committee of inquiry of the Reichstag, which he chaired, on the stab in the back . With this falsification of history, right-wing parties and nationalist groups had claimed that the German army had not been militarily defeated in the field, but had been "stabbed" from behind - by the supporters of the November Revolution of 1918. He had the official secret files of ship trials, Reichsmarineamt and Reichsgericht evaluated.

Shortly before the Reichstag fire , he fled to Austria in February 1933 on the recommendation of the party executive when it was rumored that the Nazis wanted to accuse him of a “ November criminal” in a show trial . A little later he moved to Switzerland . A manuscript he wrote there under the title How everything came about on the history of the years 1914 to 1933 remained unpublished. Instead, the social democratic leadership in exile published Friedrich Stampfer's book The Fourteen Years of the First German Republic in 1936 , which Dittmann judged extremely critically. In 1951 he returned to West Germany and worked in the SPD archive in Bonn until his death.

Dittmann's memoirs, written in Switzerland between 1939 and 1947 and edited by Jürgen Rojahn in 1995, are a first-rate autobiographical source on the history of the German labor movement, particularly during the First World War, the November Revolution and the first years of the Weimar Republic.

Dittmann's brother Paul Dittmann was one of the organizers of the North German shipyard workers' strike in the summer of 1913 and founding chairman of the Hamburg USPD in 1917. He committed suicide in May 1919, terminally ill with tuberculosis.

Publications (selection)

  • State of siege, censorship and protective custody before the Reichstag: three Reichstag speeches, go. 1916 ; After d. official shorthand. Verlag der Leipziger Buchdruckerei, Leipzig 1917.
  • Revolutionary tactics . Dittmann's speech at the party conference of the USPD in Halle on October 14, 1920, Verlag Freiheit, Berlin, 1920.
  • The Truth About Councilor Russia . Reichsverlag Berlin 1920. A brochure in the series Direction for the working people in the Reichsverlag Berlin.
  • The 1917 Navy Justice Murders and the 1918 Admirals Rebellion . Represented according to the official secret files on behalf of the Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry into the World War (4th sub-committee) by Werner Dittmann. Berlin, JHW ​​Dietz Nachf., 1926. Documentation of the judicial murders of Max Reichpietsch and Albin Köbis , the USPD's policy against World War I and the sailors' uprising in November 1918.
  • Why the fleet broke up: Kriegstagbuch e. christl. Worker . By Richard Stumpf. With e. Foreword by Wilhelm Dittmann, JHW ​​Dietz Nachf., Berlin 1927.
  • Political Germany before Hitler: After d. official material of the Statist. Reich Office in Berlin . Europa Verlag, Zurich 1945.
  • Memories . Edited and introduced by Jürgen Rojahn Campus-Verl. Frankfurt a. M. 1995, ISBN 3-593-35285-0 .
  • Ernst Drahn (Ed.): German Revolutionary Almanac for 1919 on the events of 1918 Hamburg / Berlin, Hoffmann & Campe 1919. Contributions by Hugo Haase , Philipp Scheidemann , Wilhelm Dittmann, Karl Kautsky , Eduard Bernstein , Johannes R. Mug u. a. (Not available in the German National Library, but in several other German libraries, see KVK , and as a digital copy at archive.org )
  • Jörg Wollenberg : Wilhelm Dittmann - An Unloved Demoncratic Socialist , Magazine Z , No. 115, Sept., 2018

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Imperial Statistical Office (Ed.): The Reichstag elections of 1912 . Issue 2. Berlin: Verlag von Puttkammer & Mühlbrecht, 1913, p. 94 (Statistics of the German Reich, Vol. 250)
  2. ^ Wilhelm Dittmann: Memories, Volume 3, Frankfurt / New York 1995, pp. 903-935

literature

Web links

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personal data
SURNAME Dittmann, Wilhelm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (SPD), MdR
DATE OF BIRTH November 13, 1874
PLACE OF BIRTH Eutin
DATE OF DEATH 7th August 1954
Place of death Bonn