Friedrich Ebert
Friedrich Ebert was a saddler who became Germany's first president and spent six years being blamed for everything. Born in Heidelberg in 1871, the seventh of nine children of a tailor, he trained as a saddler, travelled as a journeyman, and rose through the trade unions and the Social Democratic Party — becoming its secretary in 1905 and its chairman in 1913, the first working man to lead it. He supported the war credits in 1914 and spent the war on the party's patriotic wing, which the left never forgave. Power arrived in the collapse of November 1918. The last imperial chancellor handed him the office unconstitutionally as the fleet mutinied and revolution spread from Kiel, and his colleague Scheidemann proclaimed a republic from a window without consulting him. Ebert's judgment was that Germany faced a choice between parliamentary democracy and a Bolshevik revolution, and he acted on it. He made an agreement with General Groener the same night, in which the army would support the government and the government would not touch the officer corps — and used Freikorps units against the Spartacist rising in January 1919, in which Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered. The left called him a traitor for it and the right never accepted him regardless. He was elected president by the assembly at Weimar in February 1919 and used Article 48 emergency powers repeatedly to hold the republic together through the Kapp putsch, the Ruhr occupation and the hyperinflation. He died in 1925 of a burst appendix, having delayed an operation to attend a libel trial.
- Lived: 1871 CE – 1925 CE
- Nationality: German
- Roles: president, labour_leader
