Communist Party of Germany (Opposition)
The group initially sought to modify, later to replace, the mainstream Communist Party of Germany (KPD) headed by Ernst Thälmann.
They were expelled from the KPD after organising a meeting to combat what they saw as corruption in their party after its central leader Ernst Thälmann defended a protégé, John Wittorf, from charges of theft despite his guilt.
The corruption of Thälmann's Hamburg organization and its protection by the Stalin faction in Moscow was used as a pretext for Brandler and Thalheimer to issue a call for a meeting of their followers on 11 November 1928.
[3] Brandler and Thalheimer gathered their supporters into a new organization called the Communist Party of Germany (Opposition) (KPO), a group which was founded at the 30 December 1928 meeting which had originally prompted the wave of expulsions.
The major exception was Paul Frölich, who had been allied with a third, so-called Conciliator faction which stood between the future KPO and the KPD leadership.
[5] These expulsions paralleled similar efforts to purge the Soviet Communist Party of followers of Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov and Mikhail Tomsky.
The organization held a second conference in November 1929 at which in the words of M. N. Roy it "declared unequivocally that between Social Democracy and Communism there is no half-way house".
In the period when the KPD was denouncing the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) as social fascists and retreating from joint anti-fascist work with non-Communists, Brandler and the KPO were strongly in favor of the establishment of a united front against the menace of Nazism and were particularly critical of the Communist Party's conception that "once the Nazis get into power, then will the united front of the proletariat rise and brush them aside".
[9] Campaigning for a united front as a small group did not give the KPO more influence with the general public, but the threat of the Nazis did lead to a leftward movement within the SPD.
[10] The ban, along with similar measures taken against other organs of the left-wing press, helped make coordinated action against German ultranationalism more difficult.
Following the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and his ultranationalist Nazi Party on 30 January 1933 and the wave of anti-radical repression which ensued, Brandler and most of the KPO leadership fled to France.
Politically, it continued the previous line of the KPO and was supportive of the Comintern and of the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union, its criticisms being reserved for the KPD.
This group signed a declaration of independent socialist parties, many associated with the International Workers' Front which had left the ICO and KPO.
Brandler returned to West Germany in 1949 and played a leading role in the Gruppe Arbeiterpolitik [de] which stood in the tradition of the KPO, but he was never able to recover its former influence.
