Activities and affiliations

Political and party leadership Communist Party of Germany (KPD) 1857–1933 ○ Natural causes

Creator of International Women's Day, she set women's liberation at the heart of class struggle

Six months before Hitler took power, she opened the Reichstag as its oldest member with a call for a united front against Nazism (1932)

Founder of Marxist feminism, she saw women's liberation as inseparable from class struggle and proposed International Women's Day in 1910. From anti-war resistance to co-founding the KPD, she opened the Reichstag at seventy-five with a call for a united front against Nazism.

Political and party leadership Communist Party of Germany (KPD) 1866–1922

German socialist and a leading figure in the workers’ council movement.

A social-democratic journalist, Däumig joined the Independent Social Democratic Party during the First World War and became influential among Berlin radicals and the revolutionary shop stewards. As a leading member of the Berlin workers’ council executive in November 1918, he sought to make the council system the basis of the constitution, but lost to supporters of a national assembly. In 1920 he led the USPD left into the Communist International and became co-chair of the United Communist Party of Germany. He resigned as co-chair with Paul Levi in February 1921, left the party after the March Action and Levi’s expulsion, and helped found the Communist Working Group; in 1922 he rejoined the USPD.

Political and party leadership Communist Party of Germany (KPD) 1871–1919 ✕ Murdered

The lone vote against the war; the revolution's first martyr

“The main enemy is at home.” — anti-war pamphlet, 1915

German socialist revolutionary. The only Reichstag deputy to vote against war credits during the First World War. Co-founded the Spartacus League and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) with Rosa Luxemburg. Murdered by Freikorps after the January 1919 uprising.

Political and party leadership Communist Party of Germany (KPD) 1881–1967 ○ Natural causes

KPD chairman who called off a revolution; co-founder of the International Right Opposition

At the Chemnitz conference on 21 October 1923, Brandler saw the left-wing Social Democrats walk out and abruptly called off the planned insurrection. Word never reached Hamburg in time — workers there rose in isolation and were crushed within 24 hours.

Chairman of the German Communist Party (KPD) who led the party through the 1921 March Action and the 1923 'German October' uprising plan, which he ultimately called off, judging that revolutionary conditions were not ripe. Held responsible by the Comintern, he was summoned to Moscow and sidelined. After opposing Ernst Thälmann's leadership, he was expelled from the KPD in 1929 and co-founded the Communist Party Opposition (KPO) with August Thalheimer, becoming a central figure of the International Right Opposition. Following the Nazi seizure of power he lived in exile in France and Cuba, returning to West Germany in 1949 where he led the Gruppe Arbeiterpolitik, maintaining an independent communist line to the end of his life.

Political and party leadership Communist Party of Germany (KPD) 1883–1919 ✕ Shot

Communist who led the Bavarian Soviet Republic in 1919 and was shot after its fall

On 13 April 1919, Leviné became chair of Munich’s Executive Board, calling for a Red Army and the overcoming of capitalism. After the Soviet Republic was suppressed, he was executed in June.

Born to a Jewish merchant family in St Petersburg, he moved to Germany with his mother after his father’s death and studied at Heidelberg. He returned to Russia to take part in the revolution of 1905 and was imprisoned. In Germany he worked in the USPD and the Spartacus League, and in 1919 the KPD sent him to Munich. When the KPD replaced Toller’s council government on 13 April he became its leader, raising a Red Army and putting factories under workers’ control. Captured after Munich fell in May, he was sentenced to death by a court martial and shot in Stadelheim prison on 5 June.

Political and party leadership Communist Party of Germany (KPD) 1883–1930 ○ Fatal fall during pneumonia

From Rosa Luxemburg's lawyer to KPD leader, his 'anti-putschism' took on Comintern adventurism

Right after the March Action of 1921 he wrote: 'When I conceived this pamphlet, the Communist Party had 500,000 members in Germany. Eight days later when I wrote it, the party was shaken to its foundations and its very existence called into question. The fallen, sacrificed to this Bakuninist madness, cry out: Never again!'

A socialist who rose from Rosa Luxemburg's lawyer to chairman of the German Communist Party (KPD). Expelled for his pamphlet Unser Weg, which condemned the 1921 March Action as 'Bakuninist putschism,' he returned via the USPD to lead the SPD left. Trotsky called him 'the only man in Germany who had a head to lose.'

Political and party leadership Communist Party of Germany (KPD) 1886–1944 ✕ Executed

Hitler's personal prisoner, unbroken by eleven years in solitary

“A vote for Hindenburg is a vote for Hitler; a vote for Hitler is a vote for war.” — presidential campaign, 1932

KPD chairman. A Hamburg dock worker, he built the party into a Weimar mass force. Arrested after the Nazi takeover, he spent eleven years in solitary and was shot at Buchenwald in 1944.

Political and party leadership Communist Party of Germany (KPD) 1891–1941 ✕ Suspicious death (likely NKVD)

The pianist-turned-revolutionary who drove the KPD's ultra-left turn, and became the anti-Stalinist left's perpetual dissident

“Comrade Maslow, who is playing at Leftism and wishes to exercise himself 'hunting Centrists,' has more zeal than sense.” — Lenin, singling him out by name in his 'Letter to the German Communists' (14 August 1921).

Born into a Ukrainian Jewish merchant family, he abandoned a concert-pianist career to study physics under Einstein and Planck, then the First World War radicalized him into the KPD's founding. As Ruth Fischer's lifelong partner he took the party chairmanship in 1924 and drove 'Bolshevisation', a break with the united front and a one-sided crusade against Social Democracy, until Stalin and Thälmann displaced and expelled him in 1926, leaving him a lifelong anti-Stalinist dissident.

Political and party leadership Communist Party of Germany (KPD) 1895–1961 ○ Natural causes

First woman to lead a major European communist party, and its sharpest anti-Stalinist apostate

“We are condemned to death, since terror reigns in Leningrad.” — her letter to Maslow, intercepted by Soviet censorship and read aloud at a Comintern special session, sealed her break with Stalin (February 1926).

Co-chair of the KPD (1924–1925), the first woman to lead a major European communist party. Born to a Vienna philosophy professor, she co-founded the Austrian Communist Party in 1918 and then, with Arkadi Maslow, led the KPD's ultra-left in Berlin, providing the theoretical groundwork for the 1923 uprising. A fierce factional warrior who publicly denounced Trotsky at the Fifth Comintern Congress, she was expelled in 1926 after refusing to submit to Stalin and spent the rest of her life as an anti-Stalinist left intellectual. Her dramatic trajectory took her from Comintern leadership to US intelligence cooperation in exile, and finally back toward communism in her final years.