Arthur Lieutenant

Arthur Lieutenant (9 September 1884 – 10 October 1968) was a German Liberal politician.

His political career peaked and crashed in the late 1940s when he found himself on the losing side as the newly established German Democratic Republic reverted to one-party government.

Biography

Early years Arthur Lieutenant was born in Jauer, an old market town in Silesia, some west of Breslau. Upon leaving school he studied economics before embarking on a career as a tax lawyer. effectively a re-founding with a new name of the old DDP, suppressed in 1933. The LDPD's first leader was Waldemar Koch, but he was forced to resign by the Soviets after a few months. Towards the end of 1945 the LDPD leadership passed to Wilhelm Külz whom the Soviets found more accommodating on the issue of land reform: in 1946 Arthur Lieutenant became Külz's deputy. Külz had not even turned up for the meeting and it was left to his dapper lawyerly deputy, As he left the meeting, Lieutenant concluded with a more telling comment, referencing a quotation attributed to Luther at his trial in 1521, "Know this. We can do nothing else"

By the end of December 1948 the consciously "western" Free Democratic Party had been founded in the Western occupation zones. Before that, on 10 April 1948, Arthur Lieutenant visited his boss, Wilhelm Külz, on the morning of 10 April 1948, only to be greeted by the housekeeper with the unusual information, even though it was already 8 in the morning, Külz had not yet emerged from his bedroom. Lieutenant accompanied the housekeeper into Külz's bedroom only to discover that the elderly East German Liberal Democratic Party leader had unexpectedly died in the night, apparently as the result of a heart attack.

After the death of the party leader Arthur Lieutenant, as his deputy, took over his duties. Sources are nevertheless ambiguous on whether he can strictly be counted as party leader. Some commentators thought that if there had been an election of members, 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 also sharp tensions within the LDPD. In October 1948 he resigned his party offices,

Between 1950 and 1953, based in West Berlin, he served as the party leader of the "Exil-LDPD", effectively the Liberal Democratic Party of Germany in exile. Sources are silent as to what this involved, however. After 1953, the year in which he reached his 69th birthday, Arthur Lieutenant ceased to be politically active. He died in Frankfurt am Main (i.e. in West Germany) in 1968.