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Knock on the Door. Hitler was well on his way to power when Schumacher arrived in Berlin in 1930 as a newly elected Reichstag Deputy from Württemberg. Almost immediately Schumacher made his mark. "He was most daring, most reckless, most lacking in respect," recalls the man who was then Reichstag president, "the same as today." His speeches were few but brash, sarcastic and courageous. One day in May 1932, after Goebbels had attacked the German Socialists on the Reichstag floor, Deputy Schumacher rose in fury to reply. "The whole National Socialist movement," he cried, "is only a lasting appeal to the inner swine-dog in man . . . For the first time in German political history, someone has succeeded in absolutely mobilizing German stupidity."
Down went Kurt Schumacher's name in the Nazis' black book. The day of reckoning came in March 1933. By that time, the Socialists were meeting clandestinely.; those in danger of arrest were told to find sanctuary in Prague. Schumacher would not go. Four months later, in a hideaway in Berlin, he heard the expected knock on the door. The Gestapo took him to the Heuberg concentration camp near Stuttgart. Schumacher coolly calculated thaO he would be in jail eleven years (he reckoned that by that time the Third Reich would have fought and lost a war). His calculation was close. He spent ten years in concentration camps, most of them at Dachau of gas-chamber notoriety. There he ran a web of anti-Nazi conspiracy. He served one nine-month stretch in solitary, and ended another with a 28-day hunger strike that brought ruin to his digestive system.
At line-up in Dachau one morning, the Nazi guard ordered the sick and disabled to form on the left, the able-bodied on the right. An instinct of danger swept over one-armed Kurt Schumacher. He stepped to the right and marched off with the ablebodied. The men on the left were never seen alive again. By 1943, so ill and ravaged that the Nazis set him free to go home to his sister's in Hannover to die, he was a pitiful walking cadaver, with ulcers, yellowing stumps for teeth, flickering eyesight. Schumacher still carried in him 17 pieces of shrapnel from World War I.
The Incorruptible. His old friends, seeing him again at war's end, hardly recognized him. The change was more than physical. His disposition had become icy and acerbic, his patience with arguers was gone, his confidence in his own judgment absolute. "He was a skeleton," says Carlo Schmid, now the No. 3 man in the party, "but there could be no doubt that he was the strongest power, that he had the greatest political brain, the most evident power of judgment. He had never given in to atmosphere or psychological pressures . . . [Now] he was as incorruptible as a geometrical theorem."