The Independent Social Democrats had broken with the more mainstream SPD primarily on account of the existing party's continuing support for the war.

Like many of the Independent Social Democrat's founder, Handke went on to join the Spartacus League at the end of 1918 and, in 1919, remained with it when it became the Communist Party of Germany.

Beyond his party activism he was also a member of the Soldiers' Council[3] that emerged in Hanau as part of the wider revolutionary turmoil that spread across Germany directly after the war.

Opposition parties were not actually outlawed till two months later at the end of March, but by that time measures had already been enacted which rendered illegal a final meeting of the German Communist Party Central Committee that took place in Berlins's "Goat's Neck Sports Tavern" ("Sporthaus Ziegenhals") on 7 February 1933, and at which Handke was one of the 37 participants.

[1] Less than a month after the Ziegelhaus meeting the Party leader, Ernst Thälmann, was arrested: he would later be shot after 11 years in solitary confinement.

Handke remained in Germany, however, and was arrested in Berlin on 21 September 1934,[1] for taking part the previous evening in an illegal meeting in the Breitenbach Square (with Nikolaus Thielen and two other members of the outlawed Communist Party).

[6] On 2 July 1935 he appeared before the Berlin Special "People's" Court, faced with the usual (under these circumstances) charge of "Conspiring to commit High Treason" ("Vorbereitung zum Hochverrat").

At the end of June the Americans withdrew their fighting forces from West Saxony into Bavaria, and on 1 July 1945 Zwickau was occupied by the Red army.

In 1947 Handke married Emmy Thoma, like him a former party activist who had been arrested in 1934 and spent the Nazi years in a succession of jails.

Emmi's first husband, a fellow Communist called Karl Thoma, had been arrested back in 1933 shortly after the Reichstag fire, but he had been released later in the decade and gone to Spain to fight in the Spanish Civil War.

His ashes were placed with those of other senior East German politicians in the "Socialists' Memorial" area ("Gedenkstätte der Sozialisten") at Berlin's Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery.