Fritz Heine

Leading figure in German social democracy

Friedrich Heine, political activist: born Hanover, Germany 6 December 1904; married; died 5 May 2002.

Fritz Heine was one of the founding fathers of the post-war Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and a representative, in exile, of the millions of Social Democratic followers who never succumbed to the rhetoric of the Nazis. He was also a fan of Britain and its Labour Party. Between 1947 and 1949 he was one of two men (the other was Erich Ollenhauer), that the SPD leader Kurt Schumacher consulted most. From then until Schumacher's untimely death in 1952, Heine met him almost daily.

Friedrich Heine was the son of an organ-maker, born in Hanover in 1904. He grew up in an SPD environment. By that time the party was already the biggest single party in Germany in terms of its membership, and in the parliamentary elections of 1903 had achieved the largest number of votes, 31.7 per cent. It was not just a party, it was an ersatz religion. Although Heine trained as a bank clerk, much of his free time was devoted to the SPD. Like many other members, his faith was put to the test by the horrors of the First World War and the revolutions that followed.

Claiming to be socialist, Lenin's Bolshevism ruled supreme in Russia and in Germany his followers in the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) fought the SPD for the hearts and minds of the German workers. The other danger to Germany's new democracy came from Hitler's Nazis and, to the dismay of Heine and his comrades, they took power in 1933.

Heine, who had worked full-time for the SPD since 1925, played an important role between 1933 and 1938, keeping the exile wing of the SPD, sent to Prague by the party's leadership, in touch with colleagues still in Germany. Via mountain paths, he crossed the Czech-German frontier on hazardous missions, as the exile SPD attempted to carry on underground propaganda work in Germany. When relations between Germany and Czechoslovakia deteriorated, in 1938 Heine and his comrades left Prague and set up their headquarters, with the help of the French socialists, in Paris.

The SPD had predicted that Hitler would lead Germany into another war and they were not surprised when it happened in 1939. Like most others, however, they were surprised by the rapid fall of France in 1940. This brought more dangers for Heine. After being interned, he volunteered for the pioneer corps of the French army, and then managed to make his way to Marseilles in unoccupied Vichy France. There, Heine was taken on by Frank Bohn, representative of the US trade unions AFL, whose mission was to help European socialist refugees reach safety.

Heine, who had learned some French and a little English, managed to secure the passage of hundreds of Social Democrats. Under the terms of their armistice with Germany, the Vichy French were obliged to hand over German and other refugees sought by the Gestapo. Arrests were made regularly and Heine was forced to leave France for neutral Portugal from where, in May 1941, he reached London.

The Labour Party, part of the Churchill coalition, had worked hard to convince the security authorities, fearful of Nazi spies, to admit the Social Democrats led by Ollenhauer. At 3 Fernside Avenue, Mill Hill, in north London, they lived and worked partly funded by the Labour Party. In 1942, Richard Crossman invited Heine to work for the BBC, transmitting propaganda broadcasts to Germany. In the following year he was sent to North Africa to interview German prisoners of war in an attempt to assess the morale of the Wehrmacht and understand the generation of Germans educated in Hitler's schools.

But Heine and his colleagues did not want to become mere tools of the Allies. They disagreed with the idea that the German people as a whole were guilty of Nazi crimes. They disagreed with the idea of dismembering Germany and they disagreed with the mass bombing of civilians. Many of their London hosts could not understand their reservations about Stalin and the exile KPD. All this made them unpopular in certain circles. When the war ended, some were reluctant to let them loose in the British Zone of Germany. However, they managed to convince Attlee's new Labour government to let them return and, on 4 October 1945, Heine, Ollenhauer and Ewin Schoettle, all members of the exile executive committee, were flown to Germany in a British military plane.

They met the former Reichstag member Kurt Schumacher, who had spent most of the Third Reich in concentration camps, and decided to back him as new leader of the SPD, and in his fight to keep the party from merging with the KPD. Ollenhauer became, in effect, Schumacher's deputy, and Heine was put in charge of propaganda. At the SPD congress in Düsseldorf, in September 1948, this position was formalised. They were able to defeat the KPD in the Western zones but in the Soviet Zone the SPD was forcibly merged with the KPD and although they went confidently into the first West German elections a year later, they were defeated by Adenauer's Christian Democrats.

The honourable but ordinary Ollenhauer took over as leader on the death of the charismatic Schumacher. The scale of the defeats increased in 1953 and 1957. In his own way, Konrad Adenauer was charismatic and he knew how to integrate the right-wing parties into his coalition. The SPD faced the opposition of the Catholic church and, as the economic miracle got under way, Germans felt grateful to Adenauer and many voters felt they were not clear where the SPD stood on defence against the Soviet threat.

The scale of the 1957 defeat led to a reappraisal of the SPD's leadership, structure and programme. In 1958 Heine was not re-elected to the executive committee. Still only 53, he was appointed manager of the SPD's newspaper empire, a post he held until the 1970s.

Although Fritz Heine saw his youthful hopes dashed, he played a considerable role in political education in post-war Germany and the rise of his party to office under Brandt, Schmidt and Schroeder. He saw the defeat of the twin enemies Nazism and Bolshevism, the phoenix-like rise of post-war Germany and its eventual reunification. No doubt he was grateful for having seen this through.

David Childs