55 Facts About Philipp Scheidemann

Philipp Heinrich Scheidemann was a German politician of the Social Democratic Party of Germany.

Philipp Scheidemann resigned the office the same year due to a lack of unanimity in the cabinet on whether or not to accept the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.

Philipp Scheidemann continued to be a member of the Reichstag until 1933 and served as mayor of his native city of Kassel from 1920 to 1925.

Philipp Scheidemann was born in Kassel on 26 July 1865, the son of the upholsterer Friedrich Scheidemann and his wife Wilhelmine.

Philipp Scheidemann attended elementary and secondary schools between 1871 and 1879.

In 1883 Philipp Scheidemann joined the SPD, which had been banned under the Anti-Socialist Laws of Otto von Bismarck, and became a member of the Free Trade Union of Book Printers.

Philipp Scheidemann was reelected in January 1907 and January 1912.

Unlike Friedrich Ebert, who became party co-chairman with Hugo Haase in 1913, Philipp Scheidemann had rhetorical talent.

Philipp Scheidemann could speak convincingly before mass meetings as well as small audiences.

Philipp Scheidemann championed a cause only when it seemed possible that he would be successful in it.

On several occasions Philipp Scheidemann represented German social democracy at congresses abroad.

In January 1915 Philipp Scheidemann expressed his anger at elements in the SPD who could not bear to hear the word "fatherland".

Philipp Scheidemann's statement was preceded by Karl Liebknecht's breach of party discipline when in December 1914 he voted against a war loan bill.

From October 1917, with the Wurzburg Party Congress, Philipp Scheidemann was MSPD party chairman alongside Friedrich Ebert.

Philipp Scheidemann accommodated the bourgeois parties to the point of saying that he believed he could if necessary envision a parliamentary system with a monarch at its head.

When politicians from the Progressive People's Party brought Prince Maximilian von Baden into the discussion as Reich chancellor, Philipp Scheidemann said that the Social Democrats could not be expected to put a prince at the head of the government.

On 3 October 1918, "at the moment when the circumstances were the worst possible", Philipp Scheidemann opposed Social Democratic participation in the government.

Philipp Scheidemann was chosen for the position instead of Friedrich Ebert due to his greater popularity.

Communist propaganda and historiography later attributed the Reich government's severance of relations with Soviet Russia on that day to Philipp Scheidemann and declared him "the author of the anti-Soviet provocation directed against the Spartacus League".

Unlike the military, Philipp Scheidemann had come to the conclusion that a successful fight against the extreme left was possible only if Emperor Wilhelm II abdicated.

Ebert and Philipp Scheidemann nevertheless postponed the fundamental question of monarchy or republic for the time being.

Philipp Scheidemann handed in his resignation as secretary at 10 am Around noon, Friedrich Ebert arrived at the Reich chancellery and demanded that the authority to govern be handed over to him and the MSPD.

When Ebert and Philipp Scheidemann went to the Reichstag building for lunch, they sat at separate tables.

Ebert refused to go out to them, but Philipp Scheidemann stood up and hurried to a window facing the crowd.

Philipp Scheidemann then made a spontaneous speech that closed with the words:.

When Philipp Scheidemann returned to the Reichstag dining room, a furious Ebert confronted him.

Philipp Scheidemann was on the Council of the People's Deputies for the entire period of its existence, from 10 November 1918 to 13 February 1919.

Philipp Scheidemann was elected a member of the Weimar National Assembly in the January 1919 federal election.

Philipp Scheidemann wanted to persuade Ebert, who was seeking the office of Reich president, to take over the office of Reich chancellor, as he was convinced that Ebert's strengths lay in practical rather than representative activity.

Philipp Scheidemann therefore ran against Ebert in the presidential election in February 1919 but received only one of 379 valid votes cast by members of the National Assembly.

Philipp Scheidemann held office from then until 20 June 1919 as Reich minister president, the designation for the head of government until the adoption of the Weimar Constitution and equivalent to Reich chancellor.

Since coal mining was a key factor in the economy as a whole, Philipp Scheidemann's government responded in part by deploying Freikorps units but by negotiating.

The unrest that Philipp Scheidemann's government faced in Berlin was quite different.

Philipp Scheidemann's government adopted a law in the National Assembly on 6 March 1919 that, in the words of one historian, "greatly modified and liberalized the code of military justice", bringing it into the realm of social policy.

Philipp Scheidemann remained a member of the Reichstag until 1933.

Philipp Scheidemann made frequent appearances outside of parliament, especially after leaving his post as mayor of Kassel in 1925.

Philipp Scheidemann became one of the most outspoken advocates of the resolution adopted in 1919 at the Weimar Party Congress of the MSPD which emphasized the party's unrestricted independence with respect to the government and the government representatives it appointed.

Philipp Scheidemann thought that loyalty to one's own government representatives had its limits where fundamental principles of the party and elementary interests of the people were violated.

In November 1923 Philipp Scheidemann admitted in a newspaper article in the that the course he had followed a year earlier, which had led to the end of Joseph Wirth's second government, had been a grave and irreparable mistake.

Philipp Scheidemann's call had been preceded by many expressions of displeasure from within the party against Ebert because he had not resisted the request of Centre Party Chancellor Constantin Fehrenbach's center-right government to invoke Emergency Article 48 of the Reich Constitution.

Philipp Scheidemann's call had been immediately preceded by the adoption, approved by Ebert, of the flag ordinance introduced by the Fehrenbach government.

Philipp Scheidemann held the Reichswehr minister partly responsible for the coup attempt, saying that the democratization of the military had been neglected.

Philipp Scheidemann demanded a thorough purge of the troops, the disarmament of all mutineers, and the dismissal of all officers who were not loyal to the republic.

In 1926 Philipp Scheidemann revealed in the Reichstag the illegal collaboration between the Reichswehr and the Soviet Army in an attempt to rebuild the German armed forces beyond the limitations of the Versailles Treaty.

Philipp Scheidemann was elected Mayor of Kassel on 19 December 1919, succeeding Erich Koch-Weser.

Philipp Scheidemann wrote a number of books, including his autobiography in two volumes, Memoirs of a Social Democrat.

On Whit Sunday, 4 June 1922, while Philipp Scheidemann was mayor of Kassel, an attempt was made on his life.

Philipp Scheidemann survived the assassination attempt because strong winds prevented the perpetrators from spraying him so that the poison entered his mouth and nose.

Later, after Philipp Scheidemann received repeated death threats and his house was smeared with swastikas, he always carried a pistol on walks to defend himself against attackers.

The men who attacked Philipp Scheidemann were caught the same year and sentenced to long prison terms.

Philipp Scheidemann's grave is located in the old section of Kassel's main cemetery and is preserved as a grave of honor by the city.

Philipp Scheidemann was able to recover them in 1945 and in 1947 gave the SPD executive committee some copies for inspection.

Philipp Scheidemann described Ebert as a calculating lone wolf who hardly ever explained himself, who was a "master in organizational and tactical issues," and who usually avoided direct confrontation and discussion in the official committees but always understood how to get his way through parallel informal consultations with different interest groups.

Philipp Scheidemann stated that he soon "bitterly regretted" his withdrawal from the party leadership in the fall of 1919 and his departure for Kassel.

Philipp Scheidemann had "believed in the Berlin slogan because I considered a complete failure of the leadership, in which, admittedly, I had not had great confidence for years, to be impossible".