11 Facts About Arthur Lieutenant

Arthur Lieutenant was a German Liberal politician.

In 1919 Arthur Lieutenant switched his party allegiance to the DDP which was proving less grudging in its acceptance of the post-imperial constitutional structure being put in place.

Arthur Lieutenant was relieved of his civic duties, arrested and briefly imprisoned.

Arthur Lieutenant turned to national politics in the country's Soviet occupation zone.

Towards the end of 1945 the LDPD leadership passed to Wilhelm Kulz whom the Soviets found more accommodating on the issue of land reform: in 1946 Arthur Lieutenant became Kulz's deputy.

Arthur Lieutenant's career in the LDPD party leadership team was a correspondingly difficult one.

Kulz had not even turned up for the meeting and it was left to his dapper lawyerly deputy, Arthur Lieutenant, to spell out the obvious conclusion that under the circumstances further co-operation across the four occupation zones was from now on, for the eastern Liberals, impossible.

Arthur Lieutenant accompanied the housekeeper into Kulz's bedroom only to discover that the elderly "east German" Liberal Party leader had unexpectedly died in the night, apparently as the result of a heart attack.

Some commentators thought that if there had been an election of members, Arthur Lieutenant would have been voted in as party leader, but, possibly mindful of this possibility, the Soviet Military Administration did not permit such an election.

Arthur Lieutenant was not a supporter of the Soviet style constitutional arrangements being imposed by the government: there were sharp tensions within the LDPD.

Lieutenant evidently remained under pressure and in October 1949, a few days before the founding of the German Democratic Republic was celebrated in East Berlin, Arthur Lieutenant fled to West Berlin.