Karl Liebknecht

German Social Democrat, who, with Rosa Luxemburg and other radicals, founded the Spartakusbund (Spartacus League), a Berlin underground group that became the Communist Party of Germany, dedicated to a socialist revolution.

After serving with the Imperial Pioneer Guards in Potsdam during 1893–94 and subsequently as a junior barrister in Westphalia, Liebknecht returned to Berlin in 1898. In 1904, at a trial at Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia), he defended propertyless peasants accused of infiltrating socialist propaganda from East Prussia into tsarist Russia. His defense of the accused was primarily an apology for social democracy and provided him with a platform for his attacks against militarism. In 1907 he played a principal role in the establishment of the International Union of Socialist Youth Organizations in Stuttgart. His publication of Militarismus und Antimilitarismus in the same year earned him a jail sentence of 18 months in Glatz, Silesia. While still in prison, he won a seat in the Prussian Landtag, and in 1912 he entered the Reichstag as the chief spokesman against the government and against the growing movement within theSocial Democratic Party to revise its Marxist doctrine.

During World War I Liebknecht became a leading figure in the development of opposition movements to the wartime government. He was the first in the Reichstag to vote against war credits and spoke out publicly, as early as January 1915, for the transformation of the national war into a civil or class war. The government conscripted him as a noncombatant but furloughed him to fulfill his duties as a deputy in the Reichstag and the Prussian Assembly. He served on the Düna sector of the Russian front, felling trees, peeling potatoes, and burying the rotting corpses of the dead, until he suffered physical collapse in October 1915. In 1916 he was expelled from the Social Democratic Party for opposing its leadership.