Friedrich Ebert

Friedrich Ebert, the son of a Heidelberg tailor, trained as a saddler, joined the SPD in 1889 and built his career as a trade union organizer and party official in Bremen. He became party secretary in Berlin in 1905 and co-chairman of the SPD after August Bebel's death in 1913. On 9 November 1918, as the Kaiser abdicated, Prince Max von Baden handed him the chancellorship, and he then co-chaired the revolutionary Council of the People's Deputies. The National Assembly elected him Reich President in February 1919. He died in office in 1925 from a neglected appendicitis.

Admirers regard Ebert as a founder of German democracy who steered the country from empire to republic, secured elections to the National Assembly and held the Weimar Republic together through civil war, inflation and attempted coups. Critics on the left accuse him of allying with the old officer corps and the right-wing Freikorps against fellow socialists. In the Spartacist uprising of January 1919, which his government ordered crushed, around 170 people were killed, including Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, who were murdered by Freikorps officers, and troops were also sent against the 1920 Ruhr uprising. The nationalist right in turn smeared him as a traitor, and in 1924 a court held that his role in the January 1918 strike amounted to treason in a legal sense.