Communist Party of Germany
The Communist Party of Germany was the major far-left political party in the Weimar Republic during the interwar period, an underground resistance movement in Nazi Germany, and a minor party in Allied-occupied Germany and West Germany during the post-war period until it merged with the SPD in the Soviet occupation zone in 1946 and was banned by the West German Federal Constitutional Court in 1956.
The construction of the KPD began in the aftermath of the First World War by Rosa Luxemburg's and Karl Liebknecht's faction of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany who had opposed the war and the Majority Social Democratic Party of Germany 's support of it.
The KPD joined the Spartacist uprising of January 1919, which sought to establish a council republic in Germany. After the defeat of the uprising, and the murder of KPD leaders Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and Leo Jogiches, the party temporarily steered a more moderate, loyal-oppositionist course under the leadership of Paul Levi. He was defeated by the Marxist Leninist wing of the party and three months later he was expelled from both the KPD and Comintern because of his public criticism of the role of the party leadership in the March Aktion of 1921. During the Weimar Republic period, the KPD usually polled between 10 and 15 percent of the vote and was represented in the national Reichstag and in state parliaments. Under the leadership of Ernst Thälmann from 1925 the party became thoroughly Marxist-Leninist and more loyal to the politics of the Soviet Union, and from 1928 it was largely influenced and funded by the Comintern. Under Thälmann's leadership the party directed most of its attacks against the Social Democratic Party of Germany, which it regarded as its main adversary and referred to as "social fascists"; the KPD adopted what's known as the 'social fascism' thesis under Stalin's direction. This position held that social democracy, particularly the SPD, was objectively a variant of fascism – 'social fascism' – because it supposedly upheld capitalism while providing a façade of workers' representation, considering all other parties in the Weimar Republic to be "fascists".
The KPD was banned in the Weimar Republic one day after the Nazi Party emerged triumphant in the German elections in 1933. It maintained an underground organization in Nazi Germany, and the KPD and groups associated with it led the internal resistance to the Nazi regime, with a focus on distributing anti-Nazi literature. The KPD suffered heavy losses between 1933 and 1939, with 30,000 Communists executed and 150,000 sent to Nazi concentration camps. Many German Communists went to the Soviet Union. However, 60% of German exiles in the Soviet Union were liquidated during the Stalinist terror and a higher proportion of the KPD Politburo membership died in the Soviet Union than in Nazi Germany. Hundreds of German citizens, the majority of whom were Communists, had been handed over to the Gestapo from Stalin's administration.
The party was revived in divided postwar West and East Germany and won seats in the first Bundestag elections in 1949. The KPD was banned as extremist in West Germany in 1956 by the Federal Constitutional Court. In 1969, some of its former members founded an even smaller fringe party, the German Communist Party, which remains legal, and multiple tiny splinter groups claiming to be the successor to the KPD have also subsequently been formed. In East Germany, the party was merged, by Soviet decree, with remnants of the Social Democratic Party to form the Socialist Unity Party which ruled East Germany from 1949 until 1989–1990; the merger was opposed by many Social Democrats, many of whom fled to the western zones. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, reformists took over the SED and renamed it the Party of Democratic Socialism ; in 2007 the PDS subsequently merged with the SPD splinter faction WASG to form The Left.
Early history
Before World War I the Social Democratic Party was the largest party in Germany and the world's most successful socialist party. Although still officially claiming to be a Marxist party, by 1914 it had become in practice a reformist party. In 1914 the SPD members of the Reichstag voted in favour of the war. Left-wing members of the party, led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, strongly opposed the war, and the SPD soon suffered a split. From the split emerged the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany and the more radical Spartacist League; the latter formed the core of what would become the KPD. In November 1918, revolution broke out across Germany. The KPD held its founding congress in Berlin from 30 December 1918 to 1 January 1919, in the reception hall of the City Council. Rosa Luxemburg was initially against the setting up of a new party but joined the KPD after her initial hesitation. Apart from the Spartacists, another dissident group of socialists called the International Communists of Germany, also dissenting members of the Social Democratic party but mainly located in Hamburg, Bremen and Northern Germany, joined the KPD. The Revolutionary Shop Stewards, a network of dissenting socialist trade unionists centered in Berlin, were also invited to the congress, but ultimately did not join the KPD because they deemed the founding congress too syndicalist-leaning.The Party's first Central Committee consisted of Hermann Duncker, Käte Duncker, Hugo Eberlein, Paul Frölich, Leo Jogiches, Paul Lange, Paul Levi, Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Ernst Meyer, Wilhelm Pieck, and August Thalheimer.
There were seven main reports given at the founding congress:
- "Economical Struggles" – by Paul Lange
- Greeting speech – by Karl Radek
- "International Conferences" – by Hermann Duncker
- "Our Organization" – by Hugo Eberlein
- "Our Program" – by Rosa Luxemburg
- "The Crisis of the USPD" – by Karl Liebknecht
- "The National Assembly" – by Paul Levi
Under the leadership of Liebknecht and Luxemburg, the KPD was committed to a revolution in Germany, and attempts to bring down the interim government and create a revolutionary situation continued during 1919 and 1920. Germany's SPD leadership, which had come to power after the fall of the monarchy, was vehemently opposed to a socialist revolution. With the new regime terrified of a Bolshevik Revolution in Germany, Defense Minister Gustav Noske recruited former right-wing military officers and demobilized veterans and formed various Freikorps and anti-Communist paramilitaries to violently suppress all revolutionary activity. During the failed Spartacist uprising in Berlin of January 1919, Liebknecht and Luxemburg, who had not initiated the uprising but joined once it had begun, were captured by the Freikorps and murdered. At its peak, the party had 350–400,000 members in 1920. The party split a few months later into two factions, the KPD and the much smaller Communist Workers' Party of Germany.
Following the assassination of Leo Jogiches, Paul Levi became the KPD's leader. Other prominent members included Clara Zetkin, Paul Frölich, Hugo Eberlein, Franz Mehring, Julian Marchlewski, August Thalheimer, Wilhelm Pieck, and Ernst Meyer. Levi led the party away from the policy of immediate revolution, in an effort to win over SPD and USPD voters and trade union officials. These efforts were rewarded when a substantial section of the USPD joined the KPD, making it a mass party for the first time.
Weimar Republic years
Through the 1920s, the KPD was racked by internal conflict between radical and moderate factions, partly reflecting the power struggles between Joseph Stalin and Grigory Zinoviev in Moscow. Germany was seen as being of central importance to the struggle for socialism, and the failure of the German revolution was a major setback. Eventually Levi was expelled in 1921 by the Comintern for "indiscipline". Further leadership changes took place in the 1920s. Supporters of the Left or Right Opposition to the Stalinist-controlled Comintern leadership were expelled; of these, Heinrich Brandler, August Thalheimer and Paul Frölich set up a splinter Communist Party Opposition in 1928.The leadership of the German Communist party had requested that Moscow send Leon Trotsky to Germany to direct the 1923 insurrection. However, this proposal was rejected by the Politburo which was controlled by Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev who decided to send a commission of lower-ranking Russian Communist party members.
During the years of the Weimar Republic, the KPD was the largest communist party in Europe and seen as the "leading party" of the communist movement outside of the Soviet Union. The party abandoned the goal of immediate revolution, and from 1924 onwards contested Reichstag elections, with some success.
Fischer and Thälmann leaderships and the united front
A new KPD leadership was elected in 1923. The party's left around Ruth Fischer, Arkadi Maslow and Werner Scholem took leadership of the KPD in 1924; Ernst Thälmann was allied to this faction and became a member of the politburo and was appointedKPD vice-chairman in January 1924. Stalin engineered the Fischer leadership's removal in August 1925, and installed Thälmann as party chairman.
File:Reichsexekution-Sachsen-1923-Reichswehrkompanie-auf-dem-Weg-zum-Landtagsgebaeu.jpg|alt=A crowd of civilians are standing in the foreground watching armed soldiers in the middle-ground marching alongside the street. Buildings of downtown Dresden can be seen in the background.|thumb|right|300px|Reichswehr soldiers marching toward the federal parliament in Dresden, Saxony, to depose the state government led by a KPD-SPD coalition
From 1923 to 1928, the KPD broadly followed the united front policy developed in the early 1920s of working with other working class and socialist parties to contest elections, pursue social struggles and fight the rising right-wing militias. For example, in October 1923 the KPD formed a coalition government with the SPD in the states of Saxony and Thuringia. However, the Reichswehr legally overthrew these governments by force, through a constitutional process called Reichsexekution. In 1926 the KPD worked with the SPD on a referendum to expropriate the German nobility, together mobilising 14.4 million voters.
The party's first paramilitary wing was the Roter Frontkämpferbund, which was founded in 1924 but banned by the governing Social Democrats in 1929.
By 1927, the party had 130,000 members, of whom 40,000 had been members in 1920. From 1928 onwards, the party followed the Comintern line and received funding from the Comintern. Under Thälmann's leadership, the party was closely aligned with the Soviet leadership headed by Joseph Stalin; Thälmann has been described as "the driving force behind Stalinization in the mid to late 1920s" and "Stalin's right hand in Germany". After winning control from his former leftist allies, he expelled the party's Right Opposition around Heinrich Brandler.