[4] Meanwhile, in 1892 he joined the Social Democratic Party (SPD / Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) and the newly formed German Metal Workers' Union.
[4] War broke out in August 1914, rapidly triggering a truce between the mainstream left-wing Social Democratic Party (SPD), and the political establishment.
Otto Franke, too, unhesitatingly opposed the war, and inevitably this brought him into contact with the pacifist Spartacus group developing from what had been the left wing of the SPD.
Otto Franke and Karl Liebknecht together organised a massive antiwar "May demonstration" in Berlin's Potsdamer Platz on 1 May 1916, for which together they had prepared the leaflets.
[4] In January 1918 Franke organised a strike by Berlin munitions workers, while building up a transport and courier network for the anti-war Spartacus League.
After war ended, and during the confused revolutionary period that directly followed German military defeat, Otto Franke worked more closely than anyone else with Karl Liebknecht until the latter's assassination.
[4] A so-called Hindenburg Amnesties enabled him to return to Germany later in 1928, and here, till 1933, he took charge of the Main Library and Archive of the Party Central Committee.
[1] The political backdrop changed in January 1933 when the NSDAP (Nazi Party) took power and lost little time in moving to a system of one-party government in Germany.
The entire Soviet administered area would become the Soviet sponsored German Democratic Republic, formally in October 1949, but already in April 1946 the ground was prepared for a return to one-party government, with the contentious merger of the KPD and more moderately left-wing SPD Franke became a member of the resulting Socialist Unity Party (SED / Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands) and took a job at the "Karl Marx" Party Academy in Liebenwalde.