Wilhelm Dittmann

Wilhelm Friedrick Karl Dittmann (1 November 1874 – 7 August 1954), was a German Social Democratic politician who was a founding member of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) and on its Central Committee from 1917 to 1922, after which he returned to the Social Democrats. He was a member of the imperial Reichstag (1912–1918), of the Council of the People's Deputies, the Weimar National Assembly (1919–1920) and the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic (1920–1933). After the Nazi Party came to power he went into exile and returned to Germany in 1951.

Life Dittmann was born in Eutin in the Duchy of Oldenburg where he attended primary school. He completed an apprenticeship as a carpenter in 1894 and worked in the profession for five years. In 1894, he joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the Woodworkers' Association. Beginning in 1899, Dittmann worked as an editor for party newspapers in Bremerhaven and Solingen. In 1904, he took up a position as party secretary in Frankfurt am Main, where he also became a city councillor in 1907. He returned to Solingen in 1912 where he won a seat in the Reichstag of the German Empire in 1912.

After having initially supported loans to finance World War I, he voted against them on 21 December 1915 because he believed that Germany was to blame for starting the war. As a result, he was expelled from the SPD Reichstag contingent in March 1916.

During the first weeks of the German Revolution of 1918–1919, Dittman was a member for the USPD on the Council of the People's Deputies, the six-man body that functioned as Germany's revolutionary government beginning on 10 November 1918. His responsibilities on the Council were for transportation and the demobilisation of soldiers returning from the front. He and the other USPD members of the Council resigned on 29 December 1918 due to a disagreement with the SPD following the 1918 Christmas crisis.

In 1919, he was elected to the Weimar National Assembly, the interim parliament that also drafted the Weimar Constitution, then in 1920 to the first Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. Also in 1920, Dittmann took part in the Second World Congress of the Communist International in Petrograd (Saint Petersburg), Russia on behalf of the USPD. He opposed an affiliation of the USPD with the Communist International and a unification with the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), contrary to the vote at the USPD party congress in Halle.

Shortly after the Nazi Party came to power, in February 1933, Dittmann fled to Austria on the recommendation of the party executive when it was rumoured that the Nazis intended to accuse him of being a "November criminal" – i.e. one of those who had stabbed the army in the back. He later moved to Switzerland where he wrote Wie alles kam ("How it All Came About"), a history of the years 1914 to 1933 which remained unpublished. He returned to West Germany in 1951 and worked in the SPD archive in Bonn until his death.

Dittmann's memoirs, written in Switzerland between 1939 and 1947 and published in 1995, are a first-rate autobiographical source on the history of the German labour movement, particularly during the First World War, the November Revolution and the first years of the Weimar Republic.