The newspaper was suppressed with the implementation of Bismarck's Anti-Socialist Laws, which led to the financial collapse, around 1879, both of the printing-publishing co-operative and of Stolle's horticulture business, after which he is recorded as the owner of a guest house, the "Schönburger Hof", in nearby Gesau, close to Glauchau.
Support for the political truce was encouraged within the party by the spectre of life under an autocratic Russian Czar if Germany failed to win, but even in 1914 there were prominent SPD members resolutely opposed to the war, grouped around Hugo Haase: Karl Wilhelm Stolle was one of these.
[7] Stolle was one of 18 SPD Reichstag members who formed themselves into the so-called Social Democratic Working Group ("Sozialdemokratische Arbeitsgemeinschaft") within the party, which on 21 December 1915 voted against the renewal of war credits.
As economic destitution at home and industrial-scale slaughter on the frontline mounted, in 1917 the SPD itself broke apart and Stolle was one of those who went with the breakaway faction, forming the short-lived Independent Social Democratic Party ("Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands" / USPD).
[1] Three years later the USPD itself split, with a larger element of its membership joining the new Communist Party, but by that time Karl Wilhelm Stolle had died, aged 75, in March 1918.