LEDEBOUR, GEORG

born March 7, 1850, Hannover, Hanover died March 31, 1947, Bern, Switz. German socialist politician who was radicalized by the outbreak of war in 1918 and became a leader of the Berlin communist uprising of January 1919. A Social Democrat member of the Reichstag (national parliament) from 1900, Ledebour initially stood among the left centrists of his party. With the outbreak of World War I, however, he formed, with his fellow socialist Hugo Haase, a solitary opposition to the voting of German war credits (August 1914) and later, again with Haase, led other party dissidents in the formation of the Independent Social Democratic Party (1917). A leading proponent of political and social revolution during the closing weeks of the war, he headed, with Karl Liebknecht, the revolutionary committee that in January 1919 directed the abortive communist uprising in Berlin. Subsequently, as a member of the Weimar Reichstag (192024), he was the head of a small independent faction. In 1931 Ledebour joined the Socialist Workers' Party, but he emigrated from Germany when the National Socialists came to power in 1933.