SPD banned

© AdsD Women's protest against the banning of the SPD (with party emblems wrapped around their bodies)

© AdsD „Worker's fate under the swastika“ - SPD election poster, 1932

The SPD leadership’s call to overthrow the National Socialist regime gives Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick a welcome pretence to ban the Social Democrats on 22 June 1933 as an „organisation hostile to nation and state“. SPD members are officially banned from their professions, and the party’s assets are confiscated. In the aftermath numerous Social Democrats are taken into „protective custody“, incarcerated in concentration camps and some even killed. Soon after the Reichstag elections on 5 March and the vote on the „Enabling Act“, which the Social Democrats were the only faction to reject, the party’s leaders fled into exile in Prague to escape danger to life and limb. By 2 May of that year the Nazis have already dismantled Germany’s trade unions, the Social Democrats’ most important allies.