People of the Revolution and the USSR

Marxism and communism 1818–1883 ○ Natural causes

Author of Capital and leader of the First International

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!" — Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875)

Born into a lawyer's family in Trier, he began as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung. He renounced his Prussian citizenship in 1845 and remained stateless for the rest of his life, living in London exile from 1849. Over forty years with Engels he wrote the Communist Manifesto and Capital and led the First International. The late Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875) takes apart, line by line, the Lassallean thinking lodged in the German workers' party's unity programme, his last answer to the idea of the state as the instrument of socialism.

Marxism and communism 1820–1895 ○ Natural causes

Marx's co-author and patron; author of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

"The State is not 'abolished'. It dies out." — Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880)

Born to a Barmen mill-owning family, he managed the family firm in Manchester and wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845). After the 1848 revolution and the Baden rising he returned to the office for twenty years to keep the Marx household in London. From Anti-Dühring (1878) he drew three chapters into the pamphlet Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880), which was translated into ten languages and became the introduction to Marxism. After Marx's death he edited Capital vols. II and III, and in 1891 he published the Critique of the Gotha Programme (buried for fifteen years) over the objections of the party leadership.

Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) Marxism and communism 1846–1919 ○ Illness

The elder theoretician of German Marxism: historian, literary critic, and Spartacus League co-founder

Lenin characterized Mehring as 'a man not only wanting but also knowing how to be a Marxist.'

Franz Mehring was the foremost Marxist historian, literary critic, and philosopher of the German workers' movement. Joining the SPD in 1891, he became a lead writer for Die Neue Zeit and, alongside Kautsky and Luxemburg, formed the theoretical backbone of the party's Marxist left. He co-founded the Spartacus League in 1916, led the founding of the German Communist Party (KPD) in 1919, and authored the classical Marx biography Karl Marx: The Story of His Life (1918) and the landmark History of German Social Democracy (1898). His The Lessing Legend (1893), a materialist demolition of Prussian mythology, drew high praise from Engels, and he extended historical materialism into cultural criticism against the encroachments of neo-Kantianism and Nietzsche.

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.

East Germany state institutions Communism 1876–1960 ○ Natural causes

From the Spartacus League to GDR head of state, the sole founding member who lived the full arc of German communism

On the night of 15 January 1919, Pieck was arrested alongside Luxemburg and Liebknecht and taken to the Eden Hotel. He became the sole survivor — the last to witness his comrades alive.

A coachman's son turned carpenter, he joined the SPD in 1895 and was radicalized under Rosa Luxemburg's influence. Court-martialed for anti-war agitation, he co-founded the Spartacus League and the KPD. Arrested with Luxemburg and Liebknecht in January 1919, he alone survived. He served on the ECCI (1921) and its Presidium (1931), then led the KPD in Moscow exile as Comintern secretary. Returning after the war, he drove the SPD-KPD merger that created the SED and became the first President of the GDR in 1949, holding that office until his death.

Marxism and communism 1880–1943 ○ Natural causes

Lathe operator who led Berlin’s Revolutionary Stewards, chaired the council Executive in 1918 and later wrote the revolution’s history

During the November Revolution of 1918, he chaired the Executive Council of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils. He led the Revolutionary Stewards in organising political strikes against the war from 1916.

A lathe operator from rural Thuringia, he became a leader of the turners’ branch of the Berlin metalworkers’ union. In the war he led the Revolutionary Stewards, a clandestine network of factory delegates, organising the 1916 strike against Liebknecht’s arrest and the mass strikes of April 1917 and January 1918. On the night of 9 November 1918 he occupied the Reichstag and called council elections, and as chairman of the Executive Council of the Greater Berlin workers’ and soldiers’ councils was formal head of the council regime. He later joined and left the KPD, and published a three-volume history of the revolution in 1924–1925.

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 1883–1930 ○ 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.

East Germany state institutions Communism 1892–1973 ○ Natural death

First East German justice minister, dismissed and imprisoned in 1953 after opposing the prosecution of striking workers

A toolmaker from Berlin, he joined the SPD in 1910 and sat in the Prussian Landtag from 1928 to 1933. Under the Nazis he took part in a resistance group and was twice imprisoned. After the war he supported the forced merger of the SPD and KPD, sat on the SED’s Central Committee, and in October 1949 became the GDR’s first Minister of Justice. In the trial of the Gladow gang he had adult criminal law applied unlawfully so that a death sentence was possible. In an interview with Neues Deutschland on 30 June 1953 he said that members of the 17 June strike leadership would not be punished on mere suspicion; denounced as an “enemy of the state and the party”, he was dismissed, expelled and arrested, and sentenced to eight years. Released and pardoned in 1956, readmitted to the party in 1958, he died in 1973.

East Germany state institutions Communism 1893–1958 ○ Natural death

First East German Minister for State Security, purged in 1953 after trying to replace Ulbricht

Born in Gelsenkirchen to a gendarmerie sergeant’s family, he trained as a teacher and was a military leader of the Red Ruhr Army during the Kapp Putsch of 1920. As a GRU agent and Comintern military adviser he co-organised the Guangzhou Uprising in China, and in the Spanish Civil War, as “Gomez”, he led the International Brigades. He returned to Germany in 1947, joined the SED, and in 1950 became the first Minister for State Security and a Politburo member, building up the Stasi. After the uprising of June 1953 he moved to replace Ulbricht with Herrnstadt, but once Ulbricht had Khrushchev’s backing he lost his ministry and all his posts in July and was expelled from the party. He worked as a translator, died in East Berlin in 1958 and was rehabilitated after 1990.

Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) Communism 1893–1971 ○ Natural death

SED Politburo member and chairman of the Central Party Control Commission who stood by Ulbricht in 1953

Born in Burg, the son of a Social Democratic worker, he worked as a tanner and left the SPD when it voted for war loans. He went through the USPD into the KPD and led its Magdeburg and East Prussia districts. Arrested in 1933, he escaped and went into exile, joining the National Committee for a Free Germany in the Soviet Union. He returned in 1945 with Anton Ackermann’s group and until 1946 was first secretary of the KPD in Saxony. From 1948 until his death he chaired the SED’s Central Party Control Commission, responsible for party discipline, and was a Politburo member and vice-president of the People’s Chamber. After the 1953 uprising, when a Politburo majority wanted to remove Ulbricht, he and Honecker alone stayed loyal. He died in East Berlin in 1971.

Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) Communism 1893–1973 ○ Natural causes (stroke)

German communist leader who built the GDR and erected the Berlin Wall

At a press conference on 15 June 1961 he declared, 'Nobody intends to build a wall'; two months later, on 13 August, his orders launched the Berlin Wall.

Born in Leipzig in 1893 to a tailor's family and trained as a joiner, he joined the SPD in 1912, passed through the USPD (1917) and the Spartacus League (1919) into the KPD (1920), and sat on the KPD Central Committee from 1923 and in the Reichstag from 1928 to 1933. After the Nazi takeover he fled via Paris and Prague to the Soviet Union to work for the Comintern, and returned on 30 April 1945 leading the 'Ulbricht Group'. He was pivotal in the forced 1946 merger of the KPD and SPD into the SED and became its First Secretary in 1950, the effective leader of East Germany. He backed the suppression of the June 1953 uprising, ordered the Berlin Wall in 1961, and launched the New Economic System in 1963. Forced out on 3 May 1971 'for health reasons' in favour of Erich Honecker, he died of a stroke on 1 August 1973.

East Germany state institutions Communism 1894–1964 ○ Natural causes

The Social Democrat who led a divided state into being

In April 1946, he was elected co-chairman of the newly founded Socialist Unity Party alongside Wilhelm Pieck.

Otto Grotewohl was a Weimar-era Social Democratic politician who voted against Hitler’s Enabling Act and later led the postwar SPD in the Soviet occupation zone. Initially cautious, he helped drive the merger with the Communist Party under Soviet occupation authorities, becoming the SED’s co-chairman in 1946. The merger created the political foundation of East Germany, but it also followed the suppression of free choice within the SPD. As the GDR’s first head of government from 1949, Grotewohl helped build the new state while operating within the limits imposed by Soviet power.