THE SOCIALIST LAWYER
Hugo Haase was born on September 29, 1863 in the East Prussian town of Allenstein (now Olsztyn, Poland), the son of Jewish shoemaker and small businessman Nathan Haase and wife Pauline (née Anker). After attending Gymnasium at Rastenburg, Haase studied law in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia). He joined the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in 1887 and established himself as a lawyer the following year.
Haase was the first socialist lawyer in East Prussia… and many of his clients were lower class workers and peasants, journalists and socialist functionaries. In 1894, he became the first Social Democrat in the municipal parliament (Stadtverordnetenversammlung) of Königsberg. Three years later, he was elected to the Reichstag.
In multiple legal cases, Haase defended Social Democrats against various politically-motivated charges. High-profile cases made him well-known throughout Germany. One such case was the so-called Königsberger Geheimbundprozeß (Königsberg Secret Society Trial) in July 1904, in which Haase achieved acquittals for several politicians, including future Minister President of Prussia, Otto Braun. Three years later, Haase was counsel for fellow SPD member Karl Liebknecht, who had been charged with high treason for publishing his sacred Militarismus und Antimilitarismus (Militarism and Antimilitarism).
In contrast to the Marxists, Haase belonged to the so-called “revisionist” wing of the SPD, which supported gradual reforms, thus no longer seeking revolution as the best path to social and political change. In 1911, he became party chairman along with August Bebel. The next year, Haase was reelected to the Reichstag after a five-year absence. He also became chairman of the SPD Reichstag group along with Philipp Scheidemann.
After Bebel’s death in 1913, Haase and Friedrich Ebert were chosen as chairmen of the SPD. However, he remained active as a lawyer (now with an office in Berlin). In contrast to Ebert, Bebel and Scheidemann, Hugo Haase was not a home-grown party functionary… but rather a radical intellectual.
THE RADICAL PACIFIST
During the 1914 July Crisis, Hasse organized anti-war rallies on behalf of the SPD. When Germany formerly declared war on the first of August, he lobbied SPD members in the Reichstag to vote against an increase in war loans. However, Haase failed in his quest due to the opposition of Friedrich Ebert and the faction majority. In the decisive meeting of the SPD delegates on August 3rd, only Haase and thirteen others refused to support the loans. But bowing to party discipline, Haase then voted for the loans in the Reichstag. As party chairman, he had to defend the SPD vote in the session of August 4th. In response to which the Imperial German government created its so-called policy of Burgfrieden, it was Haase who read out the party’s statement that “we won’t abandon the Fatherland in the hour of danger”.
But after the collapse of German war plans at the end of 1914, Haase became more and more vocal against the policies of the SPD faction. The result was a forced resignation as faction leader in 1915. That June, he signed the manifesto Gebot der Stunde (commandment of the hour), which openly opposed the war aims of the Imperial German government.
In March 1916, Haase and eighteen other SPD delegates voted against the government’s emergency budget. For this, he was forced to resign as party chairman of the SPD! He then founded and led the Sozialdemokratische Arbeitsgemeinschaft (Social Democratic Working Community).
THE GERMAN REVOLUTION
In April 1917, Haase became chairman of the newly founded Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), which split from the so-called “majority Social Democrats” group and advocated immediate peace negotiations. When the German Revolution broke out in early November 1918, Haase, along with the majority Social Democrats’ leader Friedrich Ebert, became joint chairman of the provisional government, the Council of the People’s Deputies. He promptly distanced himself from those in the USPD who were seeking to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat via powerful soldiers’ and workers’ councils. But after Ebert ordered the bloody suppression of the revolutionary Volksmarinedivision during the 1918 Christmas holiday, Haase and two other USPD representatives, Wilhelm Dittman and Emil Barth, left the government on December 29th in protest.
Despite his exit from the provisional body, Haase supported continued cooperation with the SPD, and he was also in favor of elections to the Weimar National Assembly. However, both views were not universally popular in his party; many preferred a council-based republic. After the founding of the German Communist Party (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, or KPD), Haase argued in favor of a reunification between USPD and the majority SPD.
Not withstanding this position, many in the majority SPD loathed Haase. This was mainly due to the fact that the very existence of the USPD provided a political alternative to the left of the SPD, which was particularly attractive to many workers. In order to retain the support of the revolutionary masses, the SPD leadership was forced to steer a more leftist course than they desired. It also made their job of feeding the population, keeping up law and order, and decommissioning the huge wartime army (while replacing the old imperial order with a republic) harder by threatening to antagonize the mostly conservative civil services… as well as the military leadership! However, the Haase-led USPD achieved only seven percent of the vote for the National Assembly on January 19, 1919.
DEATH
On October 8, 1919, Hugo Haase was walking into the Reichstag with the intention of exposing an alliance between Ebert and Rüdiger von der Goltz, a Freikorps general active in the Baltic. He was shot by Johann Voss as he entered the building. Voss was declared insane within two days and committed to a mental asylum. Some left wing activists suggested that Voss was a paid assassin!
Nevertheless, Haase was severely injured and died in Berlin on November 7th at the age of fifty-six. He is buried on the Zentralfriedhof Friedrichsfelde.