Kurt Schumacher elected SPD chairman

On 9 May 1946 in Hanover, Kurt Schumacher is elected party chairman at the SPD party convention of the three western zones. As a representative in the Reichstag during the Weimar Republic, Schumacher was regarded as a resolute opponent of the Nazis who incarcerated him in concentration camps for ten years after Hitler’s „seizure of power“. This had serious consequences for his state of health. After the end of the war he immediately began in Hanover to build up the SPD again.

© AdsD Alfred Nau, Herbert Kriedemann, Erich Ollenhauer, Kurt Schumacher, Willi Knothe and Fritz Heine (left to right) at the SPD party convention in Hannover, 1946

Without compromise Schumacher rejects any kind of cooperation with the KPD in the western zones and with the newly founded Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) in the Soviet Occupation Zone (SBZ). At the same time he tries to broaden the base for his party to make it attractive to all democratic constituencies. The SPD chairman vehemently criticises the policies of the occupation powers who, as he sees it, regularly favour candidates of the bourgeois parties for key positions in politics, in the economy and administration.