Ernst Heilmann

Ernst Heilmann (13 April 1881 – 3 April 1940) was a German jurist and politician of the Social Democratic Party during the Weimar Republic. He rose to prominence as a proponent of the German party truce (Burgfriedenspolitik) during the First World War. From 1921 he was leader of the SPD's parliamentary group in Prussia, Germany's largest state, where he played a key role in stabilising the moderate democratic Weimar Coalition that governed the state until July 1932. He was elected to the Reichstag in 1928 and was prominent in the party press during the rise of the Nazis. As a high-profile Jewish Social Democrat, he was subject to frequent rhetorical attacks particularly by the Nazis, including a death threat by Wilhelm Frick in 1929. Not long after the Nazi seizure of power, Heilmann was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in a series of concentration camps in which he was to spend nearly seven years. He was murdered at Buchenwald in April 1940.