ABSTRACT
German social democracy had a long tradition of hostility towards the German Empire. At the time of the elections to the National Assembly in 1919, the German Socialist Party or Sozialistische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) had the support of more than eleven million voters and a million fee-paying members. The SPD’s voting figures were stagnant following its peak of electoral support in 1919. This makes it all the more impressive that, on the whole, the organized working class put up considerable resistance to the charms of National Socialism prior to 1933. The inability of the SPD to break through the one-third voting barrier was partly due to some worker support going to the Centre Party. Historians of the Weimar Republic have only rarely resisted the temptation to write harshly of the German Communist Party, founded between 28 December 1918 and 1 January 1919.
