Background
Otto Weis was born in Berlin on 15 September 1873.
Otto Weis was born in Berlin on 15 September 1873.
An upholsterer by profession and a long-time member of the SPD, Weis was elected to the Reichstag in 1912 and served until 1920 in the socialist parliamentary group. Between 1920 and 1933 he was again one of its representatives in the Reichstag and from 1931 a member of the Party Central Committee.
As Party leader, it was Weis who on 23 March 1933 rose to oppose Hitler’s request for special powers under the Enabling Act, the last genuine public debate to take place in Germany for twelve years. It was a courageous personal intervention in defence of democracy, though the content of Weis's speech revealed not only his limited intellectual scope but also how far removed the Social Democrats had become from the language of political liberty and international proletarian solidarity. Weis claimed that the Social Democratic Party was no less patriotic than the Nazis. He rejected the notion of German war guilt, reparations, and the exaggerations of the foreign press about the internal situation in Germany, and did not oppose Hitler’s programme of rearmament and economic autarchy.
Shortly after he was to emigrate to Prague and then, in 1938, he went to Paris, where he continued to lead the exiled SPD, until his death on 16 September 1939.