The Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (, SAPD, sometimes called simply the , SAP) was a centrist Marxist political party in Germany. It was formed as a left-wing party with around 20,000 members who split off from the SPD in the autumn of 1931. In 1931, the remnants of the USPD merged into the party and in 1932 some Communist Party dissenters also joined the group as well as a part of the Communist Party Opposition. Nevertheless, SAPD membership remained small. From 1933, the group's members worked illegally against Nazism.

History

1931–1933

The Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (SAPD) emerged as a left-wing splinter of the SPD in the autumn of 1931. It was formed when six members of the SPD Reichstag faction (Kurt Rosenfeld, Max Seydewitz, , Heinrich Ströbel, Hans Ziegler and ) were expelled for breaking party discipline. The newly-founded party was joined by other SPD left-wingers (including some well-known politicians such as and Käte Frankenthal), its youth association, the SAJ, a part of the KPO around Paul Frölich, Jacob Walcher, August Enderle, and , some groups and individuals from the conciliator faction of the KPD such as , the remaining USPD around Theodor Liebknecht, the Socialist League of Georg Ledebour, the Working Group for Left Socialist Politics around , an entryist group of the around Bernhard Reichenbach (expelled in 1932) as well as well-known independent Marxist intellectuals such as Fritz Sternberg.

The SAPD was largely unable to achieve a breakthrough at the electoral level. It won state parliament seats in Hesse and city and district council seats in its municipal strongholds of Offenbach, Geesthacht, Breslau, Dresden, Zwickau and, above all, some smaller communities in the Vogtland; in the Vogtland village of Morgenröthe-Rautenkranz, the party received an absolute majority of votes and seats in the municipal elections on 13 November 1932. It did not succeed in attracting independent leftists or critical SPD and KPD members.

The SAPD vehemently advocated a united front of the SPD, KPD, trade unions and other mass organizations of the workers' movement against fascism; this was not successful due to the rejection of this strategy by the leading party bureaucracies. Together with the KPO and the Lenin League, the SAPD held a series of anti-fascist rallies and discussion events at which the idea of a united front was propagated.

At the beginning of 1933, factional disputes within the SAPD came to a head when the majority of the executive committee around Rosenfeld and Seydewitz advocated a dissolution of the party in favour of the SPD and KPD. The left wing opposed this and, already under illegal conditions, held a party conference at which a new executive committee was elected. Barely a tenth of the then 15,600 members supported the right wing's call for dissolution. The background to this dispute was the dissatisfaction of a majority of members with the moderate left-wing social democratic and pacifist course of the party leadership and former Reichstag deputies. The SAPD left (around the former KPO members Fröhlich and Walcher, the intellectuals Sternberg and and the leadership of the SJVD) sought to build a new revolutionary party and a new communist international. In this context, the SAPD belonged to the London Bureau, an alliance of left-wing socialist and independent communist parties such as the POUM, the British ILP and the Dutch RSP and OSP, and in 1934 conducted merger negotiations with Leon Trotsky's International Communist League. The SAPD was also affiliated to the International Revolutionary Marxist Centre, but it broke with the main party of that international (the Independent Labour Party) over the question of the united front and popular front.

The SAPD published the daily newspaper Sozialistische Arbeiter-Zeitung, the weekly newspaper Die Fackel, several regional newspapers such as Kampfsignal (Berlin), and the previous theoretical organ of the SPD left, Der Klassenkampf. Young members and sympathizers of the SAPD joined together to form the Socialist Youth Association (SJVD), which had around 8,000 to 10,000 members (the SAPD had around 25,000 at its peak). The SAPD exerted a certain influence on the pacifist German Peace Society (DFG), especially since its executive chairman Fritz Küster was also a member of the SAPD board, and in various cultural organizations of the labor movement (Freidenker, ). The SAPD's influence in the unions remained rather moderate. The party had its headquarters in Berlin-Mitte on .

Exile and illegality

From 1933 onwards, the SAPD's members worked illegally against the Nazis. Over half of the party's membership took part in the resistance, a much higher proportion than in the SPD and KPD. In Berlin, there was close cooperation between members of the SAPD and the left-wing socialist , which at the time had up to 500 members. This resulted in an official "fighting alliance", which was announced on July 18, 1933 in the SAPD leaflet "Information from Politics and Economy". Together, both groups planned the "renewal of the workers' movement on the basis of revolutionary principles". The alliance became largely ineffective at the end of 1933 and beginning of 1934 due to mass arrests in Berlin resistance circles.