This current was identified as the Bremen Radical Leftists (German: Bremer Linksradikale) around the newspaper Bremer Bürger-Zeitung edited by Johann Knief, although their followers would be found outside Bremen as well.
Subsequently, parts of the Bremen group advocated the thesis that one had to finally break away from the SPD and, under the influence of Knief, founded the first declared communist party in Germany on November 23, 1918, the International Communists of Germany.
Only in 1918 the current institutionalized as a party and took its new name - the German Revolution had taken away censorship and repression.
Leading former IKD members such as Otto Rühle and Heinrich Laufenberg then founded the Communist Workers' Party of Germany on April 3, 1920 , a minority around Paul Frölich remained in the KPD.
[3] The same name was later used by German Trotskyists who, fleeing Germany after the Nazis' rise to power in 1933, established an exile organization in Paris.