[1][2][3] Theodor Leipart was born into a Protestant family,[3] the seventh of his parents' twelve recorded children,[2] in Neubrandenburg, then in the eastern part of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, a grand duchy in the North German Confederation.
[3] Between 1922 and 1933, as leader of Germany's trades union movement, Leipart earned plaudits for the skill and patience with which he was able to integrate hitherto opposed groupings and works councils.
He was never a man for confrontation, preferring to apply compromise and flexibility in response to changing political currents and shifting power balances.
However, as later commentators, able to view history through the revealing prism of subsequent events, were quick to point out, the instinct for compromise did nothing to arrest the tide of post-democratic populism that came to the fore after 1929.
There were those who later blamed the success of Nazism on the so-called "Leipart way" ("Leipart-Kurs"), which historians have subsequently competed to explain, justify or condemn.
On 22 June 1932 the ADGB executive issued a declaration to the effect that the struggle against the common enemy made it an imperative duty, incumbent on the entire German labour movement, to operate a united front.
He asserted that at a time of intensifying political crisis, the ADGB were no longer inclined to "be bound by party ties" ("Parteifesseln zu tragen").
[6] The carefully nuanced formulation was intended to send a message to the increasingly influential Nazi leaders that the unions could no longer be seen simply as an extension of the Social Democratic Party, despite the long-standing ties that bound the two.
Attempts by Leipart to strengthen the labour movement by fostering ever greater unity between free trades unions continued, but his apparently persisting hope that the ADGB might be able to stand aside from the looming political confrontations turned out to be hugely over-optimistic.
[3] The failure of the mainstream parties to gain a parliamentary majority among themselves, combined with their refusal to enter into coalition with Nazis or Communists, meant that during 1932 Chancellor Brüning resorted to the desperate measure of administering the country through a series of emergency decrees.
He ascribed the ADGB's failure to confront the changes of January 1933 to various factors, including the crisis levels of unemployment in the country which would have weakened the union's ability to enforce a strike, the fact that the Nazis had already effectively "taken over" key utilities such as the electricity and water companies, the high level of support that Hitler enjoyed with his "middle-class powerbase and entrepreneurs" ("bürgerliche Kräfte und Unternehmer") and, finally, the fact that Hitler had come to power legally, which was (and remains) a judgment widely backed by constitutional experts, and which meant that a general strike against a legitimately installed government would have been an act of insurrection against the constitution itself.
His reasoning was that he had wanted to protect union members from exposure to Nazi reprisals that would have followed if they had failed to celebrate in public the fascist version of Labour Day.
[2] Theodor Leipart was a few months short of his sixty sixth birthday when the Nazis took power, and during the next twelve years he lived, for the most part, quietly in Berlin, and was seen to be politically inactive.
The Nazis subsequently denied Leipart any of his pension on the grounds that he had "abused his office as chairman of the ADGB to promote Marxist aspirations".
[2] Leipart's term of "protective custody" turned out to be relatively brief, which according to at least one source was because of his poor health and his wife's intervention, as a result of which he was released in order to spend time in hospital, from where he was able to return to his home.
During the twelve Nazi years Leipart was able to remain discreetly in touch with comrades from the old days, notably Wilhelm Leuschner, Jakob Kaiser und Hermann Schlimme.
When in 1946 he became a member of the newly formed Socialist Unity Party ("Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands"/ SED), it was almost certainly out of conviction and not because he had somehow been pressured into taking the step.
Although the political merger seems to have been intended by its backers to apply across the whole of occupied Germany, it really only took effect in those parts of the country administered as the Soviet occupation zone.
Because he lived in the US sector Leipart was spared from the full impact of the "Soviet grip" ("Zugriff der Sowjets« ") which he might have expected from canvassers if he had lived in Berlin's Soviet sector, "although the comrades attempted to collect the completed ballot paper from me in my apartment" ("obwohl die Genossen versuchten, bei mir in der Wohnung den ausgefüllten Stimmzettel abzuholen").
[2] By March 1947 there were still plenty of former comrades who remembered 1933 and the failure of the ADGB to take a lead in opposing the slide into what had turned out to be catastrophic dictatorship.
However, if he is to be evaluated in terms of his socialist objectives, striving for equality and freedom for individuals, and the "people's solidarity" ("Volksganze"), then since he was basing his aspirations on a supposedly neutral state, he failed because of the underlying political realities of the time.