workers' union, it was weaker than the Christian unions by the turn of the century, and was subsequently also challenged by a significant Polish workers' association. Only in Protestant parts of the coalfields, like Dortmund, was the SPD able to achieve significant power in the period before World War I. The mining workers' leaders, and Fritz Husemann were among the leading social democrats in the Ruhr. In the Ruhr, the SPD was even more directly affected by the crises of the Weimar Republic than the Centre Party. Disenchantment with the party's approach to the Ruhr uprising in 1920, the hyperinflation between 1921 and 1923, and the Great Depression in the 1930s led many workers to move to the far left, initially to syndicalism and later to communism. The Communist Party of Germany (KPD) was already a mass party before the Great Depression, while the SPD fell into the background. Liberals and conservatives In growing cities like Dortmund and Bielefeld, which had a considerable bourgeoisie and a comparatively strong middle class, the SPD was unable to dominate the political landscape. This was due to the Prussian three-class franchise, which gave the rich disproportionate voting power in Prussian elections, and these classes' support for the liberal and conservative movements. These movements also attracted members of the working class. In Siegerland, the Protestant working class long remained conservatives or adherents of Adolf Stoecker's Christian Social Party, which combined a strong Christian-right programme with progressive ideas on labour and tried to provide an alternative for disillusioned Social Democrat voters. Stoecker was elected to the Reichstag in the Siegen-Wittgenstein-Biedenkopf electorate in the 1881 German federal election. The socialist parties did not manage to gain a foothold in Siegerland until the time of the Weimar Republic. Minden-Ravensberg remained a stronghold of the German Conservative Party until the 1912 German federal election, when the Minden-Lübbecke electorate went over to the liberal left Progressive People's Party The south of the old County of Mark, especially the Hagen-Schwelm electorate, was a stronghold of liberalism, particularly the liberal left-wing German Free-minded Party of Eugen Richter, who held Hagen-Schwelm until 1906. Most liberal and conservative voters went over to the Nazi Party during the Great Depression. First World War and Weimar Republic World War and Revolution At the beginning of the First World War, the same nationalist enthusiasm prevailed in Westphalia as in the rest of Germany. In contrast to the