Postwar History
In East Germany, the Soviet occupation authorities forced the eastern branch of the SPD to merge with the KPD (led by Pieck and Ulbricht) to form the Socialist Unity Party (SED), which became the ruling party in East Germany until 1990. A small sister party of the SED, the Socialist Unity Party of West Berlin, operated in 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 imposition of a socialist state in East Germany soon caused a collapse in the party's support. At the 1953 election the KPD only won 2.2 percent of the total votes and lost all of its seats. The party was banned in August 1956 by the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany. The ban was due to the aggressive and combative methods that the party used as a "Marxist-Leninist party struggle" to achieve their goals. After the party was declared illegal, many of its members continued to function clandestinely despite increased government surveillance. Part of its membership refounded the party in 1968 as the German Communist Party (DKP), which still exists. Following German reunification, however, many DKP members joined the new PDS.
In 1968, a self-named "true successor" to the (banned) West German KPD was formed, the KPD/ML (Marxist-Leninist), which followed maoist ideas. It went through multiple splits and united with a Trotskyist group in 1986 to form the Unified Socialist Party (VSP), which failed to gain any influence and dissolved in the early 1990s. However, multiple tiny splinter groups originating in the KPD/ML still exist, several of which claim the name of KPD. Another party with this name was formed in 1990 in East Berlin by members of the GDR leadership who were expelled from the PDS, including Erich Honecker. The "KPD (Bolshevik)" split off from the East German KPD in 2005, bringing the total number of (more or less) active KPDs to at least 5. The Left claims to be the historical successor of the KPD.
Read more about this topic: Communist Party Of Germany
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