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The human wreck that hobbled into the British occupation political office in Hannover and asked how to go about starting a political party made little impression—"An interesting but completely nondescript fellow," says a Briton who was there. Like all who spoke for a bona fide anti-Nazi group, Schumacher was told he could go ahead. He rallied Socialists around him, whipped up interest across Germany, paved the way for a national convention, the first for the Socialists since the Weimar days. There was no question who was boss, but there was a basic decision to be made.
The Communists clustered around Kurt Schumacher like hummingbirds around a morning glory; some were friends from Dachau days. They wanted a SocialistCommunist coalition which would make Berlin plumo for their plucking. Inside the party, a wing led by Otto Grotewohl, who had sat with Schumacher in the Reichstag, argued for the coalition. After all, they said, Communists and Socialists are ideological brothers. "Yes," Schumacher would reply, "like Cain & Abel." He detested the Communists as much as he had the Nazis, and blamed their war against Socialists in the Weimar days for Hitler's rise to power. Even Western occupation officials, still dazzled by the wartime alliance with Russia, pressed him to cooperate with the Communists. One day, after Schumacher had made a particularly violent anti-Communist speech, he was summoned to a high Western official's office.
"You must remember that the Russians are our allies," said the general. Retorted Schumacher: "You must remember that the Communists are our enemies."
Grotewohl went over to the Reds, and got his reward: today he is the captive Premier of Communist East Germany. But he took only a tiny splinter of Socialists with him. Schumacher and Ernst Reuter, now the strong-minded Socialist mayor of West Berlin, stood their ground. As much as the allied airlift of 1948-49, that Socialist resistance saved West Berlin for democracy. "No matter what we think of Schumacher now," a U.S. official confessed last week, "we will gladly pay him tribute for having been right about the Russians at a time when we were dead wrong."
Doctor's Verdict. But Kurt Schumacher was bound to resist the West, too. Speaking with the defiant snarl that often makes his mildest statements sound like ravings, reacting violently where a milder response might ease his way, he has made it hard for Westerners to trust him. In speech after speech, he attacked the West —first for having no policy, then for adopting a policy he did not like.
Some time before West Germany's election in 1949, his left leg became seriously diseased and, at the recommendation of General Clay's own chief medical officer, Schumacher gave in at last to the doctor's verdict—amputation. He had lived so long on painkilling drugs that the anesthesia barely worked, but soon after the operation he was puffing a cigarette and joking with the surgeons.