Communist Party of Germany

The Communist Party of Germany (German: Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, KPD) was a major political party in Germany between 1918 and 1933, and a minor party in West Germany in the postwar period until it was banned in 1956. In the 1920s it was called the "Spartacists", since it was formed from the Spartacus League.

Founded in the aftermath of the First World War by socialists opposed to the war, led by Rosa Luxemburg, after her death the party became gradually ever more committed to Leninism and later Stalinism. During the Weimar Republic period, the KPD usually polled between 10 and 15 per cent of the vote and was represented in the Reichstag and in state parliaments. The party directed most of its attacks on the Social Democratic Party of Germany, which it considered its main opponent. Banned by the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler, the KPD maintained an underground organization but suffered heavy losses. The party was revived in divided postwar West and East Germany and won seats in the first Bundestag (West German Parliament) elections in 1949, but its support collapsed following the establishment of a communist state in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany.

In East Germany, the party was merged, by Soviet decree, with the Social Democratic Party to form the Socialist Unity Party which ruled East Germany until 1989-1990. It was banned in West Germany in 1956 by the Constitutional Court. Some of its former members founded an even smaller fringe party, the German Communist Party (DKP), in 1969, which remains legal, and multiple tiny splinter groups claiming to be the successor to the KPD have also subsequently been formed.