Talk:Communist Party of Germany

Untitled

Please, clean this article as someone has put nonsense words in "Post 2nd World War", for example and has deleted the links. Also, now the article is a bit unfinished. (posted by 130.206.158.10 17:42, 26 January 2006)

Expansion

I think the sections on the KPD during the 1920s through the 1930s should be expanded. While not much can be written about what transpired during the Nazi era, perhaps some connections could be made with the Red Orchestra. --metzerly 06:28, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

Collaboration of NSDAP

This article should include details of the political collaboration between the NSDAP and the KPD in their mutual goal of bringing down the Weimar Republic. This has been described in a great many sources and this should be a fairly easy task.

I second this opinion. In particular this section is POV favouring the communist defense against criticism. Johan Arve — Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.82.107.246 (talk) 09:59, 3 August 2015 (UTC)

Please sign your comment. Adam 05:28, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

Well, I wouldn't say that they collaborated and coordinated (except maybe for the Young plan) but rather both parties rejected the Weimar Republic government. They hated each other.

Apparently the beginning of this article claims that Karl Haushoffer and Gregor Strasser had some connection to them (this of course led to Strasser's murder during the Knight of Long Knives and Haushoffer being sent to Dacchau). As a side note, they both desired to steer the NSDAP towards an alliance with the Soviet Union, seeing Stalin's regime as both ideologically and culturally compatible with their own goals (this is particularly ironic, since Haushoffer's cultural and geopolitical theories concerning "The Eurasia World-Island" were the basis for Germany's eastern expansion). 68.80.119.225 17:47, 4 July 2007 (UTC) (IdeArchon)

POV

I know nothing about the Bülow-Platz Murders or their relevance to this article, but since Kingstowngalway didn't see fit to include any real citations I decided to delete his paragraphs on the subject while I cleaned up his more obviously spurious edits. I'd be happy to see anyone with real information on these "notorious activities" replace that bit with something less lurid and more substantial Echeneida 19:21, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Jews in KPD

I clearly remember watching a program on the History Channel a few years ago that was about the rise of the Nazi party. This program spent a lot of time covering the conflicts between the Nazi party and its rivals. The main rival they showed was the KPD. They showed a picture of the top 13 members of the KPD and said they were all Jewish. They also explained how afraid many Germans were of communism. I don't see anything in this wiki about Jews in the KPD. Was this documentary I saw wrong or is this information simply missing from this wiki? Thanks for any input. - Bluetd —Preceding comment was added at 18:49, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

It's certainly true that a substantial proportion of the KPD's early leadership was Jewish, starting with Rosa Luxemburg and Paul Levi. But the proportion would have dropped sharply after the party was stalinised around 1930. Anything you write about this must be properly sourced. Intelligent Mr Toad (talk) 02:31, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

Still some vandalism

I see people have reverted most of the changes, but there remains some vandalism in the end of first paragraph of the "Early History" section. I don't know the best way to revert this, so I'm hoping someone else sees this and can do it. It should probably just be taken to where it was before the 18th, when all of this started. 69.226.244.237 (talk) 05:02, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

I think I have removed it all now. Intelligent Mr Toad (talk) 08:02, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Doctored photograph

The photograph of KL Haus that accompanies this article appears to have been doctored to add an AFA banner. 144.32.241.129 (talk) 07:31, 1 June 2016 (UTC)

Leaders / General Secretary

Does anybody know a source which provides a comprehensive list of leaders for the party? It is not mentioned here, or on the German Wikipedia and I can't find it in any books on communism that I have. Did they have a collective leadership or a General Secretary? Ernst Thälmann's article says he was the leader for some time (which is what I thought too). Claíomh Solais (talk) 20:33, 8 July 2017 (UTC)

Removed doctored photo

So apparently someone had some fun in Photoshop, and doctored the picture of the KPD headquarters to include an Antifa logo.

Aside from how obvious of a forgery it is, any observant readers may also wonder how its possible that the KPD used the modern post 1980 Antifa logo in 1932, instead of the original 30ies logo.

I went ahead and removed the picture. There are other un-doctored photos available of the KL Haus online, if somebody wants to replace it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 192.38.137.160 (talk) 22:42, 21 November 2018 (UTC)

Lack of postwar results in the "results" section

The post-war results for the KPD in the two federal elections it participated in before it was banned are not included at the bottom of the page alongside the Weimar Republic-era vote scores. Should this article be expanded to include them? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.32.225.6 (talk) 01:51, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

Banning of the party in 1956 expansion

Just a to-do expansion: Here would be a good English-language source detailing the legal proceedings when the party was banned. And there is a full German Wikipedia article on it: de:KPD-Verbot. --Pudeo (talk) 13:32, 10 July 2019 (UTC)

Marxist-Leninist?

I'm curious why the article lists "Marxist-Leninist" as one of the KPD's ideology when there's nothing in the article to suggest it. What's more, at least one of the founders—Rosa Luxemburg—was a fairly strong critic of Lenin. Thrilway (talk) 18:48, 17 September 2022 (UTC)

It was due to ideological changes in the 1920s; it was not initially Marxist-Leninist, but after the killing of Luxemburg and Liebknecht and especially after the leadership of Thälmann it moved to full on Stalinism. 4kbw9Df3Tw (talk) 04:22, 5 September 2023 (UTC)

Purged By Stalin Section

I'm a little unsure if "by Stalin" is the best phrase in the heading here, perhaps "in the Stalin period" or similar would be preferable in the interests of attributing cause to Stalin directly. While he was no doubt an influential player in these affairs it would be unfortunate to overlook the culpability of others.

Additionally, the last line about Willi Münzenberg should be removed from this section. To place this event under this heading is to imply a definitive position on the contested issue of his murder and who was responsible without a source. To place it here is to imply that Stalin was responsible as I'm sure most will agree JWMoynette (talk) 23:53, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

Both changes seem sensible. I'd suggest "purged under Stalin". BobFromBrockley (talk) 16:25, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

Updates to reflect the latest scholarship

EDIT: I think at this point, because my proposed edits are substantial, it makes more sense to make a new wiki page dedicated to the topic of Communist Resistance in the Third Reich. I'll do so and link it into this page.

-- Hi. I'm a historian of Communist resistance to Nazi Germany. Great work on this article so far! I have a number of major revisions to to suggest to make it even more rigorous and really reflect the latest scholarship on the party, particularly for the "Third Period" and Nazi-period sections. These are some major revisions that will take time to implement. If I haven't heard back from anyone for a week on this, I'll go ahead and try them out, then we can all see how we feel and reassess?

First, I'll say that the article relies a bit too much in general on the older interpretations of the KPD from historians like Hermann Weber, for whom the KPD was always ultimately beholden to whatever Moscow ordered it to do. While this has some merit in terms of national and international positions, at the national and local levels the KPD and its dozens of mass organizations had a good deal of autonomy. Sometimes, this could even cause a lot of problems, such as when the party tried to get its local branches to give full membership responsibilities of women and these branches deliberately left them out anyways (see Sara Ann Sewell, “Bolshevizing Communist Women: The Red Women and Girls' League in Weimar Germany,” Central European History 45, no. 2 (2012)...Michael Mallmann's book on Communist culture in the 1920s also shows this autonomy at the local level, as do the numerous, numerous memoirs written by party members in the postwar period...like by Erich Hanke, Werner Eggerath, Lina Haag, Lucie Suhling, Kurt Hager, Karl Schirdewan...the list of these memoirs is huge). The party was a huge organization of about 300,000 members by 1933, and to imply that they were all lockstep behind every latest word of Stalin is a bit silly. The reality is that the Party leadership gave orders through resolutions, which were then carried out by autonomous party comrades on the ground all over Germany. They had a lot of independence in how they carried out there work, so long as they stuck to the general principles of the party and general organizing philosophies (whatever the latest ones might have been). So, after 1929, for example, the party shifted its work to focus on building up a revolutionary union opposition (RGO) in the factories to oppose the SPD and bourgeois trade unions, whom they thought were allied with "arms of capital." If you were a Communist party in, say, Heidelberg, you would try your best therefore to carry out the organization of RGO cells in the local factories in workshops. You would then report to your Instrukteure, your Bezirksleitung, etc. to say what had been going on, and receive advice as to how to proceed. It was a rigorous, militant, Bolshevized party, yes, but these people were also seriously committed to their cause and were there because they wanted to be there. In other words, the Weber interpretation is wrong because it is oversimplified, too top-down, and it doesn't actually really help us understand why people in the KPD acted the way that they did.

While it is true that the KPD did sometimes collaborate with Nazi's, it is also true that they fought more often than they worked together. The article's language, however, suggests that the former was a more frequent occurrence. A quick read of Beating the Fascists? by Eve Rosenhaft easily dispels that myth. The Nazis and Communists were engaged in constant street battles that were very violent. These involved a lot of death and arrests, and the police system did tend to favor the NSDAP in the trials about these conflicts. Indeed, part of the reason that the roundups in 1933 were able to be carried out against the Communists so effectively is because the Nazis and Communists knew each other from years and years of these street battles. In other words, I worry that someone reading this article with no prior knowledge of the KPD would walk away thinking that they essentially helped collaborate with the NSDAP to destroy the Weimar Republik (and, especially, the SPD). And that's just really not a fair assessment of the history. The SPD and the Zentrum carry equal blame for there failures to stop Nazism. After all, the SPD supported Hindenburg's presidential run in 1932, the man who would ultimately cave and appoint Hitler to the Chancellory. And, when Hitler did come to power, the SPD resisted the KPD's urges to call for mass strikes of opposition, adopting instead a "wait and see" policy to see if Hitler would really carry out his threats to destroy the fledgling democracy or not.

The most glaring omissions are in the section on the Nazi period, however. There is virtually no mention of the KPD's enormous resistance efforts, and how by most historians accounts had the longest, most sustained resistance to the regime out of any organization in Germany. Whether this resistance was successful or not is not the question, but what must be mentioned is how the party continued for years to try and build its factory cells in secret, to spread anti-Nazi flyers and information (in the form of Tarnschriften, for example...Detlev Peukert and other historians have estimated that millions of these disguised pamphlets were successfully smuggled inside Germany by the party), the party's anti-military intelligence efforts, the enormous apparatus that smuggled its members (and money, weapons, and illegal publications) over the French, Danish, Czech, Polish, and Netherlands borders)...I could go on. This section really needs a rewrite to reflect this history. And I'd be happy to do it.

In addition, the Nazi period section fails to accurately characterize the nature of the repression of the KPD. First, it under-emphasizes the scope of this repression. As historians like Nicolas Wachsmann have recently shown, the concentration camp population skyrocketed in the first few years of the Reich, reaching close to 300,000 imprisoned between 1933-1935 (in 1935-1937, the camp population decreased to a few thousand and stabilized, before steadily increasing from Kristallnacht up through the war). At the same time, it argues that the repression was so great that the party was "efficiently" dispatched in the regime. In reality, historians have shown pretty comprehensively (even West Germans without access to the same kinds of archives we now have like Peukert, Duhnke, and sympathetic historians too like Merson...) that the Nazi repression was only partially effective. It kind of depends on how you want to define resistance, too, a subject that historians have a lot to say about...

A few other omissions from this section: -No mention of the Reichstag Fire Trial, which was a huge "win" for the Communists on the international scene--Dimitrov's Defense Speech there at Leipzig also really helped pave the way for a strategy change a few years later -No mention of the Party's support of anti-fascists in the Spanish Civil War, in which thousands of KPD members fought -No mention of the Brussels Conference, at which the Party leaders formally announced a shift of resistance strategy and a change in the interpretation of what a united front meant -No explanation of how the party actually operated in the Nazi period, with the Landesleitung, Bezirke/Unterbezirke, and the Ausleitung divisions of the leadership...nor the preparations the party made in 1932 to anticipate illegality -No conflict! Reading this, it seems like everyone in the party was always in lockstep during this period about what should be done, and that's really not true...there was a lot of conflict, notably from KPD ZK member Hermann Remmele, who argued that the party needed to call for a militant, armed struggle against the NSDAP regime rather than the then strategy up building a revolutionary movement through secret factory cells -Little mention of the KPD's mass organizations and its strategy with the Revolutionäre Gewerkschafts Opposition (RGO), which was a really central piece of their anti-fascist strategy and revolutionary strategy before and after 1933 -I think we could also do well to mention the United Front From Below policy of the KPD, because this would really help explain their complicated relationship with the SPD and "bourgeois" trade unions better. The KPD was for a United Front of all workers even before the Brussels Conference in 1935 made this the "popular front" with any and all willing anti-fascists (including capitalist or bourgeois parties & forces) the more explicit policy, but they wanted to build this united front by convinced workers to leave their bourgeois SPD and trade union leader behind for a new, mass organization led by the KPD. But this strategy was complicated...and it did involve frequent, direct appeals to the SPD leaders themselves, such as in early 1933 when the KPD authored an open letter to the SPD and its leadership begging for more concerted action against the Nazi's...

Ngoodell42 Ngoodell42 (talk) 21:17, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

The amount of content from just this comment would warrant its own article. Adding some details to the main article would still be helpful though. Yue🌙 00:29, 7 February 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback! I agree and will do so...realized that once I started writing the thing and saw how much more I still had to say than is even reflected by this comment...hope to have a draft up in a week or two and will link here for feedback from you all then (: Ngoodell42 (talk) 02:15, 7 February 2024 (UTC)