Communists banned!

The West German Constitutional Court approves a ban on the West German Communist Party

After being banned during the Third Reich, the German Communist Party (KPD) was re-established in 1945 and won 5.7% of the vote to the first West German Bundestag. The other parliamentary parties soon distanced themselves from the communists because of their links to the East German SED and the Soviet Union. In 1951, Konrad Adenauer’s government applied to the Federal Constitutional Court to rule on whether the KPD should be banned under the West German constitution. The behaviour of the KPD itself provided several arguments for a ban. Whilst some of its representatives had been temporarily expelled from the German parliament for “unparliamentary behaviour”, the KPD had attempted to hold a general referendum against the rearmament of the Federal Republic, and referendums were banned by the West German constitution. Following a change in Bundestag rules of procedure, the KPD lost its parliamentary group status. In response, it called for the “revolutionary overthrow of the Adenauer regime”.

Court proceedings began three years after the application had been submitted, by which time the KPD was no longer represented in parliament. In its ruling, handed down on 17 August 1956, the court found that the hostile and militant attitude of the KPD towards democracy in general – and the West German constitution in particular – had been proven. The principles underpinning West Germany were ruled to be incompatible with the KPD’s belief in the necessity of a “dictatorship of the proletariat”. On these grounds, the Federal Constitutional Court announced the second ban of a political party in the short history of West Germany. The first had been imposed on the neo-Nazi Socialist Reich Party in 1952.