People of the Revolution and the USSR

Communist Party of Germany (KPD) Communism 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.

Communist Party of Germany (KPD) Communism 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.

Communist Party of Germany (KPD) Communism 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.

Communist Party of Germany (KPD) Communism 1871–1919 ✕ Murdered

“Freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently”

On 14 January 1919, the day after the Spartacist uprising fell, Luxemburg's final article appeared in Die Rote Fahne. To the victors' cry of 'Order prevails in Berlin!' she answered: 'I was, I am, I shall be!' Arrested that night, murdered the next day.

Polish-born German revolutionary, and the Bolsheviks' sharpest comradely critic. From prison she defended the Russian Revolution while warning against the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly and the suppression of the press. Murdered by Freikorps troops during the January 1919 Berlin rising.

Communist Party of Germany (KPD) Communism 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.

Communist Party of Germany (KPD) Communism 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.

Communist Party of Germany (KPD) Communism 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.'

Communist Party of Germany Opposition (KPO) Communism 1884–1948 ○ Natural causes

Main theorist of the KPD and Bonapartist analyst of fascism

In July 1937, when six KPO members were arrested by Stalinists in Barcelona, Thalheimer and Brandler issued a joint statement: 'We take upon ourselves any political and personal guarantee for our arrested comrades. They are anti-Fascists and revolutionaries, incapable of any action that could be construed as high treason to the Spanish Revolution.'

One of the leading theorists of the founding generation of the German Communist Party (KPD), and the originator of the 'Bonapartist' theory of fascism, which saw fascism not as a mere instrument of finance capital but as an autonomous executive power rising above class antagonism. Expelled from the KPD in 1929, he co-founded the Communist Party Opposition (KPO) with Heinrich Brandler, holding a line opposed to both Stalinism and Social Democracy while continuing his anti-fascist writings in exile.

Communist Party of Germany (KPD) Communism 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.

Communist Party of Germany (KPD) Communism 1887–1941 ✕ Shot

German Communist who abstained on the Comintern’s founding at its first congress and was later shot in the Great Purge

At the 1919 Comintern founding congress, Eberlein conveyed Luxemburg and Jogiches’s mandate against immediate foundation. Lenin persuaded him personally, but he followed the mandate and abstained rather than vote against.

A draughtsman from Saalfeld, he joined the SPD and during the war co-founded the Spartacus League with Luxemburg. As the KPD’s delegate to the Comintern’s founding congress in March 1919 he abstained on the founding vote, as Luxemburg and Jogiches had advised, believing a premature International would be dominated by the Bolsheviks. Afterwards he did organisational and financial work for the Comintern and the German party and sat in the Prussian Landtag. He fled to the Soviet Union in 1933, was arrested in 1937 and was shot in Moscow in October 1941.

Comintern Communism 1889–1940 ✕ Mysterious death

The 'Red Millionaire' who exposed Nazi terror through publishing, the Comintern's greatest propagandist, who broke with Stalin

"Stalin, you are a traitor!" — Münzenberg's response to the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact

The Comintern's most brilliant mass-propagandist. He founded Workers International Relief, co-founded the League Against Imperialism, and his Brown Book (1933) exposed the Reichstag fire as a Nazi frame-up. He broke with Stalin and died under mysterious circumstances.

Communist Party of Germany (KPD) Communism 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.

Comintern Communism 1900–1974 ○ Natural causes

“Li De”, the only Westerner on the Long March and the Comintern military adviser blamed at Zunyi

Sent to China as a Comintern agent under the name Li De, he was nearly the only foreigner on the Long March, and the Zunyi Conference of 1935 removed him and Bo Gu from command. East Germany revealed only in 1964 that Li De was Otto Braun.

A German Communist from Munich who escaped prison in 1928 and studied at the Frunze Military Academy in the Soviet Union. Sent to Shanghai as Comintern military adviser in 1932, he entered the Jiangxi Soviet in 1933 and with Bo Gu directed a positional defence that lost the fifth encirclement campaign. On the Long March the Zunyi Conference of 1935 condemned his and Bo Gu’s military leadership and elevated Mao. He returned to Moscow in 1939 and after the war lived in East Germany as a translator and lecturer, publishing his memoir A Comintern Agent in China in 1973.

East Germany Communism 1912–1994 ○ Died

The long-serving East German leader of the walled republic

His removal in October 1989 showed that the GDR's collapse could no longer be contained even within its leadership.

A German communist trained at Moscow's International Lenin School, he rose through East Germany's youth organization and party leadership. He led the Socialist Unity Party from 1971 to 1989 as the GDR's long-serving ruler.

Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) Communism 1921–2014 ○ Natural death

Youngest member of the Ulbricht Group who fled to Yugoslavia in 1949 and became a leading Western scholar of Soviet communism

Born Vladimir Leonhard in Vienna, he went into Soviet exile with his Communist mother in 1935; she was arrested in 1936 and spent twelve years in the Vorkuta camps. After the Comintern school he became an announcer for Radio Free Germany, and on 30 April 1945 he returned to Berlin as a member of the Ulbricht Group. He worked in the agitation and propaganda department of the KPD and then SED Central Committee and from 1947 lectured at the party college. Convinced that Germany would replicate the Soviet system, he fled via Czechoslovakia to Yugoslavia in March 1949 and moved to West Germany in 1950. His 1955 memoir Die Revolution entlässt ihre Kinder became an international bestseller, and from 1966 to 1987 he taught Soviet history at Yale.