[7][8] Proscribed by the National Socialist Worker's Party government of Adolf Hitler after 1933,[9] publication continued illegally, underground.

[10] Wilhelm Hasselmann of the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (now SPD) and member of the German Reichstag founded a short-lived, weekly newspaper called Die rote Fahne.

[1] Using the newspaper's subtitle as indicator of its political allegiance, Die Rote Fahne was successively the central organ of: The publication was proscribed from October 1923 to March 1924, as part of the ban on the German Communist Party.

Many prominent Germans and others worked on the newspaper: Outlawed after the end of the Weimar Republic and the Reichstag fire in 1933, it was illegally distributed during the Nazi regime by underground groups close to the Communist Party[30] until 1942.

[31] Following the events of 1968, several projects of ideologically divergent groups of the so-called old and the new left arose in the Federal German Republic to build a new communist party.