Communist Party of Germany
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The Communist Party of Germany (German: Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, KPD) was a German political party founded in 1918. Committed to overturning the capitalist system, the party became more committed to Leninism and Stalinism as time went on, eventually becoming wholly controlled by the Soviet Union and the Comintern. Throughout its history the KPD carried out various terrorist actions, usually against the Social Democratic Party, their main nemeses. The KPD were eventually dissolved by the Nazi Party in 1933, and were later banned during the postwar period.
History edit
The KPD was formed by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in 1918 after they split from the SDP due to the party's support for World War I. Attempts to seize control of the government in a general election were unsuccessful due to the unpopularity of communism and the KPD being a relatively small party. Liebknecht and Luxemburg were later executed by the Freikorps for their involvement in the Spartacist uprising, leaving Paul Levi to take over.
Levi lead the party away from the policy of immediate revolution in an attempt to win over voters. This strategy payed off when large swathes of opposing parties joined the KPD, making it a major party for the first time. However, at around this time a power struggle broke out between the main party and the Soviet-backed aspect. The Soviets won out, and Levi was expelled from the party and replaced by the more radical Ernst Thälmann.
During the Weimar Republic, the KPD was the largest communist party in Germany and maintained 13.2% of the vote. By this point they were largely under the control of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and funded by the Soviet-controlled Comintern. Under Thälmann's control, the KPD shifted back towards the idea of revolution, taking the stance that all other parties were fascist. Their main enemy was the SDP, directing many violent attacks against SDP members. They also briefly allied themselves with the Nazi Party in order to assist them in violence against SDP members, viewing the Nazis as a lesser of two evils compared to the SDP, although they also regularly clashed with the Sturmabteilung, the Nazi paramilitaries. During this period, police captains Paul Anlauf and Franz Lenck were shot and killed by members of the KPD. Detailed planning for the murders had taken place within the KPD leadership, and was carried out at the orders of regional party leader Walter Ulbricht. They also founded Antifaschistische Aktion, forerunner of the modern-day Antifa movement.
On 27 February 1933, just after Adolf Hitler was appointed German chancellor, the Reichstag building was set on fire, allegedly by KPD member Marinus van der Lubbe. The following day, Reichschancellor Hitler issued the Reichstag Fire decree, giving the power to repress the KPD. Within hours dozens of KPD members had been arrested for "treason". The KPD was formally outlawed on 6 March, and Ernst Thälmann and other leaders were arrested and summarily shot. Ulbricht and Wilhelm Pieck, now the two most senior leaders of the party, fled to the Soviet Union to escape arrest, along with many other communist leaders. However, many of them were soon killed by the NKVD during the Great Purge.
Following the collapse of the Nazi regime during World War II, Pieck and Ulbricht, now the default leaders of the KPD, re-established the KPD in Soviet-controlled East Germany. The KPD was soon merged with the remnants of the SDP to form the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, which ruled over East Germany. Meanwhile, the West German authorities banned the KPD due to various instances of violent extremism in its history, a decision which was upheld by the European Commission of Human Rights in 1957. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the re-unification of East and West Germany, this ban became common law in all of Germany. The KPD remains banned to this day.