30Hermann Louis Brill – State Parliamen

Today's ballroom at the University of Music was once the plenary chamber of the Thuringian state
parliament. Hermann Brill, a long-standing member of parliament for the SPD, interrogated Adolf Hitler here as chairman of a parliamentary committee of inquiry in March 1932. The reason was a farce: in the summer of 1930, Hitler had been secretly appointed gendarmerie commissioner of Hildburghausen by Thuringian Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick, only on paper, in order to help him gain German citizenship. Brill wanted to prove that Frick's attempt was unlawful, as the NSDAP was an "anti-state partyfrom the point of view of the current constitution". Brill, a trained teacher and lawyer, represented the SPD in the state parliament for twelve years and also in the Reichstag in 1932. In 1933/34, he was involved in the Thuringian branch of the "New Beginnings" resistance group in Gera. In Berlin, he was a co-founder of the German People's Front. The resistance group was discovered and Brill was subsequently sent to Brandenburg prison and, in December 1943, to Buchenwald concentration camp. In the liberated camp in April 1945, he wrote the manifesto "For Peace, Freedom, Socialism", an important manifesto of German social democracy.
Hermann Brill was commissioned by the Americans to form the Thuringian state government, but left Thuringia after it became part of the Soviet occupation zone. Brill was a member of the constitutional convention in Herrenchiemsee, a member of the first German Bundestag and an honorary professor at the universities in Frankfurt am Main and Speyer. He died in Wiesbaden in 1959.