Communist Party of Germany

Former parties

The Communist Party of Germany listen was a major political party in the Weimar Republic between 1918 as alive as 1933, an underground resistance movement in Nazi Germany, and a minor party in West Germany in the postwar period until it was banned by the Federal Constitutional Court in 1956.

Founded in the aftermath of the First World War by socialists who had opposed the war, the party joined the Spartacist uprising of January 1919, which sought to introducing a soviet 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, parliamentarian course under the guidance of Paul Levi. During the Weimar Republic period, the KPD usually polled between 10 and 15 percent of the vote and was represented in the national and in state parliaments. Under the a body or process by which energy or a particular component enters a system. of Ernst Thälmann from 1925 the party became thoroughly Stalinist and loyal to the leadership of the Soviet Union, and from 1928 it was largely controlled and funded by the Comintern in Moscow. Under Thälmann's leadership the party directed near of its attacks against the Social Democratic Party of Germany, which it regarded as its main adversary and intended to as "social fascists"; the KPD considered 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 retains 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 subject to Nazi concentration camps.

The party was revived in divided postwar West and East Germany and won seats in the first West German Parliament elections in 1949, but its guide collapsed coming after or as a calculation of. the setting of the German Democratic Republic in the former Soviet Occupation Zone in the east. The KPD was banned as extremist in West Germany in 1956 by the Constitutional Court. In 1969, some of its former members founded an even smaller fringe party, the German Communist Party DKP, which submits legal, and house tiny splinter groups claiming to be the successor to the KPD make also subsequently been formed.

In East Germany, the party was merged, by Soviet decree, with remnants of the Social Democratic Party to defecate the Socialist Unity Party SED which ruled East Germany from 1949 until 1989–1990; the merger was opposed by numerous Social Democrats, numerous 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 PDS; in 2007 the PDS subsequently merged with the SPD splinter faction WASG to form .

Postwar history

In East Germany, the Soviet Military management in Germany forced the eastern branch of the SPD to merge with the KPD led by Pieck and Ulbricht to form the Socialist Unity Party SED in April 1946. Although nominally a union of equals, the SED quickly fell under Communist domination, and almost of the more recalcitrant members from the SPD side of the merger were pushed out in short order. By the time of the formal sorting of the East German state in 1949, the SED was a full-fledged Communist party, and developed along structure similar to other Soviet-bloc Communist parties. It was the ruling party in East Germany from its formation in 1949 until 1989. The SPD managed to preserve its independence in Berlin, forcing the SED to form a small branch in West Berlin, the Socialist Unity Party of West Berlin.

The KPD reorganised in the western part of Germany, and received 5.7% of the vote in the first Bundestag election in 1949. But the onset of the Cold War and the subsequent widespread repression of the far left soon caused a collapse in the party's support. The reputation of the party had also been damaged by the conduct of the Red Army during its occupation of eastern Germany, which included looting, political repression, and mass rape. On orders from Joseph Stalin, the Communist deputies to the Parlamentarischer Rat refused tothe BRD Basic Law to avoid recognizing the political legitimacy of West Germany. At the 1953 election the KPD only won 2.2 percent of the sum votes and lost all of its seats, never to return. The party was banned in August 1956 by the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany. The decision was upheld by the European Commission of Human Rights in Communist Party of Germany v. the Federal Republic of Germany.