Wolfgang Walter Arnulf Abendroth (; 2 May 1906 – 15 September 1985) was a German socialist, jurist, and political scientist. He was born in Elberfeld, now a part of Wuppertal in North Rhine-Westphalia. Abendroth was a radical social democrat and an important contributor to the constitutional foundation of post-World War II West Germany. In 1943, he was forcibly drafted into one of the 999th Division's "probation units" and while stationed in Greece, he deserted to the Greek People's Liberation Army (ELAS).
After the war, he briefly held a Law professorship in East Germany. However, in 1948 he left for West Germany with his family, refusing to disassociate himself from the Social Democratic Party and join the, overwhelmingly stalinist, Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) which in 1949 became the ruling party of East Germany. In 1950, he was appointed professor of Political Science at Marburg and also served as a senior judge in the state court of Hesse. In 1961, he was expelled from the Social Democratic Party for refusing to disassociate himself from the Socialist German Student Union (SDS). Due to his socialist principles and politics, Abendroth was for many years after the end of the war under surveillance by West Germany's Intelligence services.
Birth to the end of World War II According to the biography provided by the German Resistance Memorial Center:
Abendroth was born in Elberfeld in 1906 and grew up in a family of Social Democrats. His father was a teacher. He joined the Young Communist League of Germany (KJVD) at the age of 14. As a result of his agitation for a united front of Social Democrats and Communists, he was expelled from the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in 1928. In 1933, he lost his job as a junior lawyer for political reasons, and went on to provide legal advice for many opponents of the regime. Following his first arrest, Abendroth emigrated to Switzerland, where he gained his PhD. After acting as a courier for some time, he decided to return to Berlin in 1935. There, he was an active member of the resistance until he was imprisoned for several years in 1937. Forcibly drafted into one of the 999th Division's "probation units" in February 1943, he soon deserted to the Greek People's Liberation Army (ELAS). He was taken prisoner by the British, and carried out political education for opponents of the regime in prisoner of war camps in Egypt.
In particular, after the National Socialists seized power, Abendroth was forbidden to do any further legal work. From 1933 he was politically active in various illegal resistance organizations (KP opposition, Red Aid, New Beginnings, etc.). In 1935 he received his doctorate summa cum laude with a dissertation on international law at the law faculty of the University of Bern, Switzerland and in October 1936 he got a trainee position in a bank in Berlin. His doctoral dissertation was published by Verlag Marcus in Breslau at the end of 1936 but was confiscated by the Gestapo shortly afterwards.
Arrest by Gestapo and imprisonment for high treason
In February 1937, he was arrested by the Gestapo, and on November 30, 1937, the higher regional court in Kassel sentenced him to four years in prison for high treason, which he served in Luckau.Zu Abendroth in der NS-Zeit und seiner späteren Auseinandersetzung mit dem Faschismus vgl. Gregor Kritidis: Wolfgang Abendroth und seine Auseinandersetzung mit dem NS-Regime, in: Arbeit – Bewegung – Geschichte, Heft III/2016, S. 47–64.
After his release in June 1941, Abendroth moved to his parents in Potsdam-Babelsberg and worked first as an auditing assistant for the accountant and tax consultant Erhard Oewerdieck and then as a business lawyer for a foreign trade company in Berlin. Immediately after his release, he met the student Lisa HörmeyerLisa Abendroth (27 February 1917 – 4 February 2012), promovierte Historikerin DNB. through one of her fellow students, whom he in turn knew from the Socialist Student Union (SSB) and the Free Socialist Youth.
A marriage with Lisa Hörmeyer could not take place, however, because he was drafted into the 999th Division as a "probationary soldier" ('Bewährungssoldat') at the beginning of 1943.
Anti-nazi resistance in occupied Greece
In one of his books,Abendroth, W., Dietrich, B., & Perels, J. (1976). Ein Leben in der Arbeiterbewegung: Gespräche. Suhrkamp Abendroth recalled his experience in German-occupied Greece. He was originally stationed in the Greek island of Lemnos where he helped set up an anti-fascist cell among the soldiers of the German occupation forces on the island.
According to Abendroth, this anti-fascist cell prevented the destruction of Lemnos's electricity generation unit that was planned by the German occupation forces as part of their retreat in 1944. During the evacuation of the island by the Germans, Abendroth and five other German soldiers defected to the Greek People's Liberation Army (ELAS), which was active on the island. Subsequently, the group was sent to the Greek island of Lesvos, where they were used in propaganda aimed at the German occupation forces on that island.
Imprisonment by the British
Eventually, Abendroth was imprisoned by the British in 1944 and, together with other German anti-fascists, was held in various British internment camps in Egypt. In one of the prison camps in the Egyptian desert, he began political training work with the labor lawyer Herbert Komm with the intention of training cadres and preparing them for administrative work that would follow after the defeat of the Nazi regime. Later, with the help of his friends Georg Schwarzenberger and Richard Löwenthal, Abendroth was taken to the Wilton Park Training Center re-education campEvening Standard: denazification at Wilton Park, 18 Mar 1946 https://mrc-catalogue.warwick.ac.uk/records/TUC/A/12/943/37/1 in the UK, where "prisoners of war who appeared suitable were prepared for their return to Germany to help build democracy". Against the background of the Labour Party's election victory in July 1945, Abendroth discussed the prospects for the workers' movement in Germany with Löwenthal.
One result of these discussions was Löwenthal's manifesto 'Beyond Capitalism', which appeared in Nuremberg in 1946 under the pseudonym Paul Sering. At the end of November 1946 Abendroth was released from captivity and during the same period he joined the German Social Democratic Party (SPD).Abendroth, W. (1972), A Short History of the European Working Class, London: NLB
After World War II Academic and judicial positions in East Germany At the end of November 1946, he was released from captivity and initially tried to gain a foothold in Marburg as a lawyer. In the same year, he married Lisa Hörmeyer. The couple had three children: Elisabeth (b. 1947), Barbara (b. 1949) and Ulrich (b. 1952). Since he was still missing the second state exam, he decided on the advice of Georg August Zinn, a companion from student days and newly appointed Hessian Minister of Justice, to take the missing exam in the Soviet Occupation Zone (SBZ). Subsequently, Abendroth returned to Potsdam with an unofficial letter of recommendation written by Zinn for Eugen Schiffer, the head of the judicial administration of the SBZ.
Thus, in January 1947, Abendroth was appointed judge at the Potsdam Regional Court, while on 1 April 1947, he entered the service of the Brandenburg Ministry of Justice as a member of the government council. After an assessor's examination, he was employed by the judicial administration of the SBZ in the summer of 1947 as a senior judicial officer. In September 1947, he was appointed lecturer at the Faculty of Law and Political Science at the Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg. At the end of 1947, he was appointed to the University of Leipzig and, with effect from April 1, 1948, was appointed professor of international law. In October 1948, he received a professorship in public law from the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, which also only lasted a few months.
Since Abendroth was officially registered in West Berlin, he did not automatically become a member of the SED, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (German: Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands) after the forced union of the SPD and KPD. Instead, he remained an illegal member of the Social Democrats and maintained covert contact with the SPD's East Office (Ostbüro), headed by Stephan Thomas. Against the background of the repression against those Social Democrats who refused to join the SED, he moved to the western occupation zones and negotiated through his friend Herbert Komm, who worked as a lawyer in Berlin, with the Lower Saxony Minister of Education, Adolf Grimme, about an appointment to the newly founded University of Applied Sciences in Wilhelmshaven-Rüstersiel.Tagungsbericht 13 October 2007. When a courier from the SPD's Ostbüro was uncovered, Abendroth felt compelled to flee the Soviet occupation zone in December 1948. Together with his wife and daughter, he moved to Bremen to live with his parents-in-law.
In Bremen he justified his resignation in writing to the Thuringian Minister of Education, Marie Torhorst, with a carbon copy to Hilde Benjamin. Abendroth spoke out against the emerging formation of the bloc system, but promised not to allow himself to be instrumentalized against socialism in the East, since he remained a socialist despite giving up his activities.Der vollständige Brief findet sich in seinen Gesammelten Schriften, 1. Band (1926–1948). Brief mit Erläuterungen von Lisa Abendroth: Die Flucht (Sozialismus, 2/1990) als PDF online: http://www.platzdasch.homepage.t-online.de/download/wolfgang_abendroth-flucht.pdf.
Academic and judicial positions in West Germany
On December 21, 1948, Abendroth was appointed full professor of public law and politics at the University of Applied Sciences in Wilhelmshaven. The following year, he was elected a full member of the State Court of Justice of the State of Bremen. On November 15, 1950, again with the help of Zinn (now Hessian Prime Minister), he received a professorship at the Philosophical Faculty of the Philipps University in Marburg, and remained at this university until his retirement in 1972. From 1959 to 1963, he was also a member of the State Court of Justice of the State of Hesse.
The Forsthoff-Abendroth controversy
During Abendroth's period as an academic in Marburg took place the so-called Forsthoff-Abendroth controversy about the importance of the welfare state in West Germany's Basic Law (constitution).
After the Second World War, Ernst Forsthoff was one of the commentators on the German Basic Law of 1949. With respect to the concepts of welfare state and rule of law, Forsthoff was of the opinion that the welfare state was not an instrument of justice but an illegitimate means of distributing wealth.
Forsthoff, who in 1934 in the second edition of his book The Total State had emphatically welcomed the Nazi state and the elimination of "aliens and enemies", was a representative of traditional conservative legal and political theory. In his argument, he tried to argue that "welfare state" is not a legal concept and therefore does not represent a legal principle in the constitutional context of the Basic Law.Ernst Forsthoff: Verfassungsprobleme des Sozialstaats. Vortrag. Aschendorff, Münster/Westfalen, 1954, .