- Hugo Haase
Hugo Haase (
September 29 ,1863 –November 7 ,1919 ) was a German politician,jurist andpacifist .Biography
Haase was born in
Allenstein (Olsztyn ),Province of Prussia , the son of Jewish shoemaker and small businessman,Nathan Haase , and Pauline Anker. He studied law inKönigsberg (now Kaliningrad) and established himself as a lawyer. He was the firstSocial Democrat in theStadtrat in Königsberg and became a deputy in the Reichstag in 1897. In multiple legal cases, he defended the Social Democrats against various political attacks.Haase belonged to the so-called revisionist wing of the party, which in contrast to the Marxists, supported gradual reforms and no longer saw the best path to social and political change in revolution. In 1911 he became along with
August Bebel an SPD chairman, in 1912 next toPhilipp Scheidemann an SPD chairman in the Reichstag. After Bebel's death, Haase andFriedrich Ebert were chosen as the party chairmen.In July 1914, he organized the anti-war rally of the SPD and on
July 31 andAugust 1 fought against a decision for an increase in the war credit in the SPD faction. However, he failed to accomplish this because the opposition of Friedrich Ebert and the faction majority. Due to party discipline, Haase had to defend the SPD action in the Reichstag session. In response to his comment "We won't abandon the Fatherland in the hour of danger", the imperial government created its so-calledBurgfrieden policy.After the collapse of German war plans at the end of 1914, Haase became more and more vocal against the policies of the SPD faction. He was forced to resign as faction leader in 1915 and as a party chairman in 1916. In March 1916, he took over the leadership of the
Sozialdemokratische Arbeitsgemeinschaft , which the war critics in the SPD had founded together. In 1917 he became chairman of the newly foundedIndependent Social Democratic Party of Germany , which split the so-called "Majority Social Democrats" group and advocated immediate peace negotiations.In the course of the
German Revolution (November), he created along with the majority Social Democrats' leaderFriedrich Ebert the provisional government, theRat der Volksbeauftragten , of whose acting chairman he took over. After the violent response to the revolutionary "Volksmarinedivision " during Christmas 1918, Haase and the two other USPD representativesWilheim Dittman andEmil Barth abandoned the government onDecember 29 .The Haase-led USPD only achieved 7% of the vote for the Weimar Nationalversammlung on
January 19 ,1919 .On
October 8 ,1919 , Haase was shot by Johann Voss, an apparently mentally ill leather worker. He was severely injured and died onNovember 7 .He was married to Thea Lichtenstein and had three children: one son
Ernst Haase , a psychiatrist, who immigrated to Chicago via England--and two daughters: Hilde Meisels (Jerusalem) and Gertrud Dressel (Tel Aviv).
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