Communist Party of Germany

The party’s core was the Spartacus League of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, who had opposed the Social Democrats’ support for the war, joined by the International Communists of Germany (IKD) of Hamburg, Bremen and northern Germany. The English-language source places the founding congress in the reception hall of the Berlin City Council, the German-language source in the ceremonial hall of the Prussian Landtag. During the Spartacist uprising of January 1919 Liebknecht and Luxemburg were murdered by the Freikorps, and Leo Jogiches was killed in March. When his successor Paul Levi pushed through participation in parliamentary elections, the council communists left to form the Communist Workers’ Party of Germany (KAPD). The merger with the left wing of the Independent Social Democrats in December 1920, forming the United Communist Party of Germany (VKPD), made it a mass party; the English-language source gives 350,000–400,000 members in 1920, the German-language source 356,000 in early 1921.

After the failed uprising in central Germany in March 1921, Levi was expelled from the party and the Comintern. In October 1923 the party entered coalition governments with the Social Democrats in Saxony and Thuringia, which were overthrown by Reich intervention, and after the failed Hamburg uprising the Brandler–Thalheimer leadership fell. The left around Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow took over in 1924, and in 1925 Stalin’s intervention installed Ernst Thälmann as chairman. In 1928 Thälmann was removed by the Central Committee over an embezzlement scandal involving an ally, but was reinstated by the Comintern and then expelled the right around Brandler. The party branded the Social Democrats ‘social fascists’ and treated them as its main enemy, and in the November 1932 election it won 16% and 100 seats.

The day after the Reichstag fire of 27 February 1933, an emergency decree suspended basic rights and party officials were arrested. According to the German-language source, 7,500 communists, Thälmann among them, had been arrested by March; the party won 12.3% in the election of 5 March, but its seats were annulled on 8 March. It kept an underground organisation, while leaders such as Wilhelm Pieck and Walter Ulbricht went into exile in the Soviet Union. In the Great Purge of 1937–1938 many exiled leaders, among them Hugo Eberlein, were executed in the Soviet Union.

In 1945 the Ulbricht Group and others rebuilt the party in the Soviet zone, and on 21 April 1946 it was forcibly merged with the Social Democrats into the Socialist Unity Party of Germany. In the west the party won 5.7% in the first Bundestag election of 1949 but fell to 2.2% and lost all its seats in 1953, and on 17 August 1956 it was banned by the Federal Constitutional Court. In 1968 some former members founded the German Communist Party (DKP); the lead of the English-language source dates this to 1969.