David Wijnkoop

At the Barlaeus Gymnasium Wijnkoop was refused membership of a school society because he was a Jew, and he studied arts at the Amsterdam Municipal University but never finished, drawn into social activity under the influence of Domela Nieuwenhuis. Having joined the SDAP in 1898, in 1907 he founded De Tribune with Jan Ceton and Willem van Ravesteyn to attack the revisionism of Troelstra's leadership. When the leadership removed them from the party in 1909, he and Ceton founded the Social Democratic Party (SDP), which Herman Gorter and Anton Pannekoek also joined.

During the First World War he supported the Zimmerwald Left. Elected to the House of Representatives in September 1918, on 13 November, as news of the German revolution arrived, he called at a meeting in Amsterdam's Diamond Exchange for workers' and soldiers' councils to take power. A procession of several thousand marched to the barracks hoping the soldiers would join them, but the army drove them back, four people were killed, and the revolutionary attempt was over. The party took the name Communist Party of Holland in 1919.

When the Comintern's Amsterdam Bureau became a centre of left communism in 1920, he was involved in it. In a party dispute in 1925 he sided with van Ravesteyn, and when the minority won with Comintern backing he left the party; his appeal to the Comintern in 1928 failed. Readmitted in 1930, he thereafter followed the Stalinist line. He sat in parliament again from 1929, was removed from the Amsterdam city council by the German occupiers for his Jewish ancestry, and died of a heart attack in hiding in 1941.