The Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in Munich 1919-1933

The KPD was founded at a conference of the Spartacus League (Spartakusbund) and other left-wing socialist groups on December 30, 1918 in Berlin. With the first appearance of the ‘Münchner Rote Fahne’ (Munich Red Flag) on January 15, 1919, it also went public with its own party newspaper.

As a new revolutionary party for the labor movement, the KPD wanted to continue the revolution begun in November 1918 and transform Germany into a Soviet Republic. In doing so, it completely separated itself from the politics of social democracy (Majority Social Democratic Party of Germany), who was accused, by cooperating with the old political, economic and military elites, of having prevented the revolutionary transformation of Germany and therefore “true democracy” (KPD program 1919). For this reason, the KPD also rejected the parliamentarianism of the Weimar ‘pseudorepublic’.

The Munich KPD had been correspondingly skeptical about the ‘revolutionary’ governments in Bavaria since 1918/19, as no consistent measures for socialization and suppression of the counter-revolutionary forces could be expected from them - including the Majority Social Democratic Party of Germany (MSPD). Although hardly developed organizationally, the KPD found increasing support in the Munich workers’ and soldiers’ councils. While the Munich Soviet Republic proclaimed as a revolutionary counter-government on April 7, 1919 was still rejected as a ‘soviet republic in appearance only’, the party changed its stance when the government under MSPD State Premier Johannes Hoffmann, which had moved to Bamberg, now also fought the revolutionary Soviet Republic with military might. Leading communists like Eugen Leviné, Max Levien or the commander of the ‘Red Army’ Rudolf Egelhofer now shaped the revolutionary Soviet government from mid-April. This first phase of communist movement in Bavaria and Munich ended with the brutal suppression of this ‘communist Soviet Republic’ at the beginning of May by government troops and Freikorps.

Difficult external conditions subsequently shaped the structure of the party: Persecution and condemnation of many communists after the suppression of the revolution decimated the number of leaders considerably; party, assembly and publication bans by the Bavarian authorities made continuous work almost impossible. Involvement in the Soviet Republic and maintaining the revolutionary direction in the post-war period led to the almost complete marginalization of the communists from civil society and the public. Nevertheless, the KPD achieved 8.3% (= 25,000 votes) at the Reichstag elections in Munich in June 1920. Through the defection of Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) members since the end of 1920, the KPD was not only able to increase the number of members and the number of representatives in the state parliament from two to seven, but expand their position in the major Munich companies. In the spring of 1926, over 6000 members were acquired across Bavaria, 1,138 of them in the present-day urban area of Munich. Following the local government elections of December 1924, the KPD had five city councilors in Munich and two each in Pasing and Aubing.

The focus of political work in the years that followed remained the fight against unemployment and reducing the social misery of the workforce, the promotion of the social achievements of the Soviet Union, warning against the growing threat of war and increasing ‘fascist development’ in Germany.

As an anti-capitalist party, the KPD basically only saw the solution as being revolutionary overthrow and establishing socialism. The denunciation of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) as a party that kept the workforce from this realization through illusionary reform politics (‘traitors to the working class’) played a comparatively minor role in the KPD propaganda in Munich, but made the joint approach desired by the KPD against the Nazi movement much more difficult. It was especially in the final phase of the Weimar Republic that Storm Battalion (SA) and the Nazi Party provoked the workforce and local Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and KPD groups with parades and events in ‘working-class districts’ such as Giesing, Westend, Pasing, Neuhausen and Haidhausen. Locally, there was a common approach to defending against the Nazis, especially among members of the two youth organizations Socialist Working Youth (SAJ) and Communist Youth League (KJVD) and workers’ sport associations.

Although the Munich KPD had remained far behind the SPD organizationally and in terms of their influence on business and trade unions since the end of the 1920s (1932 around 3,500 members versus around 14,000 in the SPD), even in the years of the economic crisis, it gained members and especially votes as a radical denouncer of crisis politics: At the Reichstag elections in November 1932 it achieved 19.7% in Munich (=75,559 votes), almost catching up to the SPD (79,109 votes). It attempted to strengthen organizational ties with KPD supporters with numerous subsidiary organizations such as ‘Red Assistance’ (‘Rote Hilfe’), the Association of Proletarian Freethinkers (Verband proletarischer Freidenker), the Combat Community for Red Sports Unit (Kampfgemeinschaft für Rote Sporteinheit) and Marxist Workers’ School (Marxistische Arbeiterschule). The defense organizations ‘Alliance of Red Front-Fighters (Roter Frontkämpferbund) and Fighting League against Fascism (Kampfbund gegen den Faschismus) were intended to be publicly effective signs against the Nazi marches; the decisive declaration of war on the Nazis made the KPD particularly attractive among the young workers.

At the beginning of the 1930s, the Munich KPD also saw the Nazi Party’s impending seizure of power as merely a further change in the already ‘semi-fascist’ governments, with intensified repression against the labor movement, which the party expected was to soon be used to finally shake off all forms of civil rule and establish socialism.

Despite the years of intensive combat against the Nazi movement, the Munich KPD as a whole was helpless in the face of the Nazi Party’s seizure of power: As a party, despite many votes, it ultimately had too little influence on businesses and the workforce; the hoped-for collaboration with workers involved in social democratic associations and trade unions didn’t come about. Finally, the bourgeois circles ultimately saw in the National Socialists the lesser evil compared with a ‘Bolshevik‘ or ‘socialist danger’ and mostly accepted the terror of the new government against the labor movement in the first few months after the seizure of power.