Definition of Kommunistische partei deutschlands

This article deals with the original KPD. For information on later groups using the same name, see Communist Party of Germany (disambiguation).

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. Founded in the aftermath of the First World War by socialists opposed to the war, led by Rosa Luxemburg, the party was after her death gradually committed to Leninism, and in the 1930s was completely loyal to the Soviet Union and its leader Joseph Stalin. During the Weimar Republic period, the KPD usually polled between 10 and 15% of the vote and was represented in the Reichstag and in state parliaments. Banned by the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler, the KPD maintained an underground organisation but suffered heavy losses. The party was revived in postwar Germany and won seats in the first Bundestag elections in 1949, but its support collapsed after the establishment of a Communist state in Soviet occupation zone of Germany. In East Germany, the party merged with the Social Democratic Party to from the Socialist Unity Party which ruled East Germany until the nation's collapse in 1991. It was banned in West Germany in 1956 by the Constitutional Court and was in effect wound up in 1969, when a new, legal German Communist Party (DKP) was formed.