The Communist Party of Germany was a major political party in Germany between
1918 and 1933, and a minor party in West Germany in the postwar period until it
was banned in 1956. In the 1920s it was called the "Spartacists", since it was
formed from the Spartacus League. Founded in the aftermath of the First
World War by socialists opposed to the war, led by Rosa Luxemburg, after her
death the party became gradually ever more committed to Leninism and later
Stalinism. During the Weimar Republic period, the KPD usually polled between
10 and 15 per cent of the vote and was represented in the Reichstag and in
state parliaments. The party directed most of its attacks on the Social
Democratic Party of Germany, which it considered its main opponent. Banned in
Nazi Germany one day after Adolf Hitler emerged triumphant in the German
elections in 1933, the KPD maintained an underground organization but suffered
heavy losses. The party was revived in divided postwar West and East Germany
and won seats in the first Bundestag elections in 1949, but its support
collapsed following the establishment of a communist state in the Soviet
occupation zone of Germany. In East Germany, the party was merged,
by Soviet decree, with the Social Democratic Party to form the Socialist
Unity Party which ruled East Germany until 1989–1990. It was banned in West
Germany in 1956 by the Constitutional Court. Some of its former members
founded an even smaller fringe party, the German Communist Party, in 1969,
which remains legal, and multiple tiny splinter groups claiming to be the
successor to the KPD have also subsequently been formed.
Early history Before the First World War the Social
Democratic Party was the largest party in Germany and the world's most
successful socialist party. Although still officially claiming to be a
Marxist party, by 1914 it had become in practice a reformist party. In 1914 the
SPD members of the Reichstag voted in favour of the war. Left-wing members of
the party, led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, strongly opposed the
war, and the SPD soon suffered a split, with the leftists forming the
Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany and the more radical Spartacist
League. In November 1918, revolution broke out across Germany. The leftists,
led by Rosa Luxemburg and the Spartacist League, formed the KPD at a founding
congress held in Berlin in 30 December 1918 – 1 January 1919 in the reception
hall of the City Council There were seven main reports given:
Economical Struggles — by Paul Lange Greeting speech — by Karl Radek
International Conferences — by Hermann Duncker
Our Organization — by Hugo Eberlein Our Program — by Rosa Luxemburg
The crisis of the USPD — by Karl Liebknecht
The National Assembly — by Paul Levi These reports were given by leading
figures of the Spartakus League, however members of the Internationale
Kommunisten Deutschlands also took part in the discussions
Under the leadership of Liebknecht and Luxemburg, the KPD was committed to a
violent revolution in Germany, and during 1919 and 1920 attempts to seize
control of the government continued. Germany's Social Democratic government,
which had come to power after the fall of the Monarchy, was vehemently opposed
to the KPD's idea of socialism. With the new regime terrified of a Bolshevik
Revolution in Germany, Defense Minister Gustav Noske formed a series of
anti-communist paramilitary groups, dubbed "Freikorps", out of demobilized
World War I veterans. During the failed so-called Spartacist uprising in Berlin
of January 1919, Liebknecht and Luxemburg, who had not initiated the
uprising but joined once it had begun, were captured by the Freikorps and
murdered. The Party split a few months later into two factions, the KPD and the
Communist Workers Party of Germany. Following the assassination of Leo
Jogiches, Paul Levi became the KPD leader. Other prominent members included
Clara Zetkin, Paul Frölich, Hugo Eberlein, Franz Mehring, August
Thalheimer, and Ernst Meyer. Levi led the party away from the policy of
immediate revolution, in an effort to win over SPD and USPD voters and trade
union officials. These efforts were rewarded when a substantial section of
the USPD joined the KPD, making it a mass party for the first time.
Through the 1920s the KPD was racked by internal conflict between more and less
radical factions, partly reflecting the power struggles between Zinoviev and
Stalin in Moscow. Germany was seen as being of central importance to the
struggle for socialism, and the failure of the German revolution was a major
setback. Eventually Levi was expelled in 1921 by the Comintern for
"indiscipline." Further leadership changes took place in the 1920s.
Supporters of the Left or Right Opposition to the Stalin-controlled
Comintern leadership were expelled; of these, Heinrich Brandler, August
Thalheimer and Paul Frölich set up a splinter Communist Party Opposition.
The Weimar Republic years In 1923 a new KPD leadership more
favorable to the USSR was elected. This leadership, headed by Ernst Thälmann,
abandoned the goal of immediate revolution, and from 1924 onwards
contested Reichstag elections, with some success.
During the years of the Weimar Republic the KPD was the largest communist party
in Europe, and was seen as the "leading party" of the communist movement outside
the Soviet Union. It maintained a solid electoral performance, usually polling
more than 10% of the vote, and gaining 100 deputies in the November 1932
elections. In the presidential election of the same year, Thälmann took 13.2% of
the vote, compared to Hitler's 30.1%. Critics of the KPD accused it of having
pursued a sectarian policy – e.g. the Social Democratic Party criticized the
KPD's thesis of "social fascism". This scuttled any possibility of a united
front with the SPD against the rising power of the Nazis. These allegations
were repudiated by supporters of the KPD: the right-wing leadership of the
SPD, it was said, rejected the proposals of the KPD to unite for the defeat of
fascism. The SPD leaders were accused of having countered KPD efforts to form a
united front of the working class. For instance, after Papen's government
carried out a coup d'état in Prussia, the KPD called for a general strike and
turned to the SPD leadership for joint struggle. But the SPD leaders again
refused to cooperate with the KPD. The Nazi era
Soon after the appointment of Hitler as Chancellor, the Reichstag was set on
fire and Dutch council communist Marinus van der Lubbe was found near the
building. The Nazis publicly blamed the fire on communist agitators in general,
although in a German court in 1933, it was decided that van der Lubbe had acted
alone, as he claimed to have done. After the fire, the Reichstag Fire Decree was
passed, under the pretext of snuffing out "Communist state-endangering acts of
violence." Its actual effect, however, was to suspend most civil liberties. The
KPD was banned shortly afterward. The Enabling Act, which legally gave Hitler
dictatorial control of Germany, was passed by a Reichstag session held after
all communist deputies had been arrested and jailed.
The KPD was efficiently suppressed by the Nazis. Thousands of Communists were
imprisoned in concentration camps, including Thälmann and the party's
leader in the Reichstag, Ernst Torgler. The most senior KPD leaders to escape
were Wilhelm Pieck and Walter Ulbricht, who went into exile in the Soviet Union.
The KPD maintained an underground organisation in Germany throughout the
Nazi period, but the loss of many core members severely weakened the Party's
infrastructure. The Purge of 1937
A number of senior KPD leaders in exile were caught up in Joseph Stalin's Great
Purge of 1937–38 and executed, among them Eberlein, Heinz Neumann, Hermann
Remmele, Fritz Schulte and Hermann Schubert, or sent to the gulag, like
Margarete Buber-Neumann. Still others, like Gustav von Wangenheim and Erich
Mielke, denounced their fellow exiles to the NKVD. Willi Münzenberg, the KPD's
propaganda chief, was murdered in mysterious circumstances in France in
1940. The NKVD is believed to have been responsible.
Postwar history In East Germany, the Soviet occupation
authorities forced the eastern branch of the SPD to merge with the KPD to form
the Socialist Unity Party in April 1946. Although nominally a union of equals,
the SED quickly fell under Communist domination, and most of the more
recalcitrant members from the SPD side of the merger were pushed out in short
order. By the time of the formal formation of the East German state in
1949, the SED was a full-fledged Communist party, and developed along
lines similar to other Soviet-bloc Communist parties. It was the ruling
party in East Germany from its formation in 1949 until 1989. The SPD managed to
preserve its independence in Berlin, forcing the SED to form a small branch
in West Berlin, the Socialist Unity Party of West Berlin.
The KPD reorganised in the western part of Germany, and received 5.7% of the
vote in the first Bundestag election in 1949. But the onset of the Cold War and
imposition of an undisguised Communist dictatorship in East Germany soon caused
a collapse in the party's support. At the 1953 election the KPD only won 2.2
percent of the total votes and lost all of its seats, never to return. The party
was banned in August 1956 by the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany. The ban
was due to the aggressive and combative methods that the party used as a
"Marxist-Leninist party struggle" to achieve their goals. After the party was
declared illegal, many of its members continued to function clandestinely
despite increased government surveillance. Part of its membership
refounded the party in 1968 as the German Communist Party. Following German
reunification many DKP members joined the new Party of Democratic Socialism,
formed out of the remains of the SED. In 1968, a self-named "true successor"
to the West German KPD was formed, the KPD/ML, which followed Maoist ideas. It
went through multiple splits and united with a Trotskyist group in 1986 to form
the Unified Socialist Party, which failed to gain any influence and
dissolved in the early 1990s. However, multiple tiny splinter groups
originating in the KPD/ML still exist, several of which claim the name of KPD.
Another party with this name was formed in 1990 in East Berlin by several
hardline Communists who had been expelled from the PDS, including Erich
Honecker. The "KPD" split off from the East German KPD in 2005, bringing the
total number of active KPDs to at least 5. The Left, formed out of a merger
between the PDS and Labour and Social Justice – The Electoral Alternative in
2007, claims to be the historical successor of the KPD.
Organization In the early 1920s, the party operated
under the principle of democratic centralism, whereby the leading body of
the party was the Congress, meeting at least once a year. Between Congresses,
leadership of the party resided in the Central Committee, which was elected at
Congress, of one group of people who had to live where the leadership was
resident and formed the Zentrale and others nominated from the districts they
represented who represented the wider party. Elected figures were subject to
recall by the bodies that elected them. The KPD employed around about 200
full-timers during its early years of existence, and as Broue notes "They
received the pay of an average skilled worker, and had no privileges, apart
from being the first to be arrested, prosecuted and sentenced, and when
shooting started, to be the first to fall".
See also Communist Party Opposition
Communist Workers' Party of Germany German resistance
German Revolution of 1918–1919 Hotel Lux, Moscow hotel where many
German party members lived in exile Luxemburgism
Revolutionary Trade Union Opposition Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Paul
Levi, Erich Mielke, Richard Müller Rotfrontkämpferbund
Socialist Workers' Party of Germany Spartacus League
Union of Manual and Intellectual Workers References