People of the Revolution and the USSR

Non-Bolshevik socialists 1825–1864 ✕ Shot in a duel

Founder of the ADAV, Germany's first workers' party

"Das eiserne und grausame Gesetz" — the iron and cruel law Lassalle said held wages down to bare subsistence (1863)

A lawyer and agitator from a Jewish merchant family in Breslau. In May 1863 he founded the General German Workers' Association (ADAV) at Leipzig and was elected its president for five years, arguing that universal suffrage would turn the state toward funding producers' co-operatives and so toward socialism. That same year he met Bismarck in secret to sound out an alliance between the workers and the Prussian monarchy, which drew Marx's deep suspicion. In 1864 he was shot in a duel over a marriage and died three days later outside Geneva. Eleven years afterwards his programme supplied the frame of the Gotha unity programme.

Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1826–1900 ○ Natural causes

Co-founder of the Eisenach party and drafter of the Gotha Programme

"Nobody has combatted State Socialism more than we German Socialists, nobody has shown more distinctively than I, that State Socialism is really State capitalism!" — 'Our Recent Congress' (1896)

Born in Giessen, he joined the risings of 1848 and fled by way of Switzerland to London, where he spent twelve years as a close associate of Marx and Engels. In 1869 he founded the Social Democratic Workers' Party with August Bebel at Eisenach; arrested for opposing war credits, he was convicted at the Leipzig treason trial of 1872. He was the man who brought off the Gotha unity congress of 1875 and drafted its programme, the document Marx took apart line by line. From 1890 until his death he edited the party paper Vorwärts. He was the father of Karl Liebknecht.

Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1840–1913 ○ Natural causes

Co-founder of the SPD who led the German workers' movement for over 40 years, the 'shadow emperor' of the working class

"The struggle in Paris is only a small outpost skirmish; the main affair in Europe is still ahead of us. Before a few decades have passed, 'War on the palaces, peace to the cottages' will become the battle cry of the entire European proletariat." — Reichstag, 25 May 1871

A woodturner's apprentice who co-founded the Social Democratic Workers' Party with Wilhelm Liebknecht in 1869 and, through the Gotha unity congress of 1875, built the SPD into the world's largest socialist party. Under the Anti-Socialist Laws (1878–1890) he ran the illegal party paper from Zurich exile and held the underground organisation together; he steered the adoption of the Erfurt Programme (1891), which became the Marxist benchmark for European social democracy, and led the orthodox defence against Eduard Bernstein's revisionism. His Woman and Socialism (1879) ran through over fifty editions as the founding text of socialist feminism, and his funeral in 1913 drew the leaders of the Second International.

Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1850–1932 ○ Natural causes

Founder of Marxist revisionism and evolutionary socialism, author of The Preconditions of Socialism

"I have extraordinarily little interest in what is called the 'final goal of Socialism.' This aim, whatever it be, is nothing to me, the movement everything." — Response to critics (1899)

German SPD theorist and politician. Engels's literary executor and editor of Der Sozialdemokrat, Bernstein began as an orthodox Marxist before his 1899 The Preconditions of Socialism challenged Marx's predictions of capitalist collapse, class polarization, and revolutionary necessity. His dictum "the goal is nothing, the movement everything" laid the foundation for social democracy's reformist, parliamentary turn, creating the schism between revolutionary socialism and evolutionary social democracy. He broke with the SPD's pro-war majority to co-found the anti-war USPD during World War I, and spent his final years defending Weimar parliamentary democracy, dying six weeks before Hitler took power.

Independent activity Non-Bolshevik socialists 1861–1920 ○ Natural death

German trade-union leader who signed the 1918 agreement with Stinnes and met the Kapp Putsch of 1920 with a general strike

Born in Marienburg, he grew up in an orphanage and became a wood turner. He joined the Social Democrats in 1885, chaired the General Commission of the German Trade Unions from 1890, and sat in the Reichstag in 1893–1898 and 1903–1920. In 1913 he became the first President of the International Federation of Trade Unions. He led the SPD’s right wing, and in the First World War supported the civil truce and the renunciation of strikes. On 15 November 1918 he signed an agreement with Hugo Stinnes under which employers for the first time accepted the unions as workers’ representatives, with the eight-hour day and works councils, while the unions rejected the radical socialists’ demands. In 1919 he became chairman of the new General German Trade Union Federation (ADGB), and in March 1920 he organised the general strike against the Kapp Putsch. He died in Berlin later that year.

Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1863–1919 ✕ Assassinated

Lawyer who founded the USPD against the war and co-chaired the Council of People’s Deputies with Ebert in 1918

After Ebert’s government bloodily suppressed the revolutionary Volksmarinedivision in December 1918, Haase and fellow USPD delegates resigned from the Council of the People’s Deputies in protest.

Born to a Jewish family in East Prussia, he made his name as a lawyer defending socialists and in 1911 became SPD co-chairman alongside Bebel. In August 1914 he opposed war credits but had to read the party’s statement in their favour in the Reichstag. In 1917 he founded the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) with the war’s opponents. In November 1918 he co-chaired the Council of People’s Deputies with Ebert, leaving the government after the Christmas crisis. Shot outside the Reichstag in October 1919, he died in November.

Germany state institutions Non-Bolshevik socialists 1865–1939 → Died in exile

SPD politician who proclaimed the republic from a Reichstag window on 9 November 1918 and became Weimar’s first head of government

On 9 November 1918, he proclaimed Germany a republic from a Reichstag window. In June 1919, he resigned as head of government rather than sign the Treaty of Versailles.

A printer from Kassel who became an SPD journalist and Reichstag deputy, he joined Prince Max of Baden’s cabinet in October 1918. On 9 November, hearing that Liebknecht was about to proclaim a socialist republic, he proclaimed a republic first from a Reichstag window, to Ebert’s fury. A People’s Deputy, he became head of government in February 1919 but resigned in June rather than accept the Treaty of Versailles. He was mayor of Kassel in the 1920s, survived a far-right cyanide attack in 1922, went into exile in 1933 and died in Copenhagen.

Germany state institutions Non-Bolshevik socialists 1867–1919 ✕ Assassinated

Journalist who overthrew the Bavarian monarchy in Munich in November 1918, proclaimed the People’s State and was assassinated the next year

He organized the November 1918 Bavarian Revolution, overthrew the monarchy and proclaimed the People’s State; he was assassinated in February 1919 while on his way to resign.

Born to a Jewish merchant family in Berlin, he was a theatre critic and editor of the SPD’s Vorwärts before moving to Munich. He joined the USPD against the war and was jailed for leading the munitions strike of January 1918. On 7 November he led demonstrators from a rally on the Theresienwiese round the barracks, and the next day proclaimed the People’s State of Bavaria and became premier. His publication of documents on German war guilt earned him the right’s hatred. Heavily defeated in the January 1919 election, he was assassinated by Count Arco-Valley on 21 February on his way to resign.