[2][6] Stoecker became a member of the Cologne Young Socialist Movement ("sozialistische Arbeiterjugendbewegung") in 1908, and joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in 1909.

[1] He also spent a year as a student, starting in 1912 or 1913, during which he studied History and Applied Economics ("Volkswirtschaft") at Cologne, Leipzig and, according to at least one source, Zürich.

[1] He was particularly critical of the "right-wing" SPD party leadership in parliament as, following after considerable soul-searching, they declared what amounted to a parliamentary truce for the duration of the war.

There were plenty of party activists across Germany who believed, even in 1914, that none of these arguments justified SPD parliamentary backing for the war: Walter Stoecker was one of them.

[2] As more and more reports came through of the slaughter on the frontline, and shortages of almost everything made life for families left behind on the home front ever more difficult, the initial enthusiasm for the war among the citizens of the belligerent powers drained away.

Walter Stoecker was a founder member of the breakaway Independent Social Democratic Party ("Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands" / USPD).

[5] After the war ended and revolution spread from the naval ports in the north to factories and cities across the country, Stoecker became a leading participant in the Workers' and Soldiers' Soviet in Cologne.

With the city under British military occupation at the time, Cologne did not feature prominently in the more extreme manifestations of the "German revolution".

[2] The job evidently involved spending considerable time away from Cologne, though Stocker would retain close links to the Rhineland region throughout his political career.

Walter Stocker, with other leading party comrades including Ernst Däumig and Wilhelm Koenen, pushed for a merger between the USPD and the Communists.

Some comrades simply returned to the SPD while others remained members of the USPD, which survived as a much diminished fringe movement till 1931.

[4][7] He represented Electoral District 26 (Düsseldorf-West) By the end of 1920 he was sitting not as a USPD parliamentarian but as a Communist Party (KPD) member.

[2] Between October and December 1920 Stoecker served as one of three editors-producers on "Kommunistische Rundschau", a short-lived political journal of which six editions appeared during that three-month period.

The new name, which reflected the expansion resulting from the many members who had moved across from the USPD, was not universally used even at the time, and would be abandoned by the party leadership after barely two years.

Parliament was dissolved in October 1924 in anticipation of the general election scheduled for December, which the authorities saw as an opportunity to issue an arrest warrant against Stoecker in respect of his suspected involvement in the uprising the previous year.

[2] Stoecker was re-elected to the Reichstag in December 1924 which put an end to any residual concern about possible loss of parliamentary immunity from arrest.

[8] In 1925, following the "open letter" affair and the removal of Ruth Fischer along with the leadership team around her,[9] and its rapid replacement with a more uncompromisingly pro-Moscow leadership team under Ernst Thälmann, Walter Stoecker, still identified as a left-leaning comrade quickly recovered his influence within the party apparatus.

Towards the end of August 1932 he undertook a trip to Amsterdam, this time in his capacity as chairman of the International Association of Friends of the Soviet Union.

On 7 February 1933 Walter Stoecker was one of the participants at the "illegal" Sporthaus Ziegenhals meeting, celebrated subsequently (especially during the "East German" years) as the last meeting held by the German Communist Party leadership before the participants were arrested, killed, or in a few cases managed to flee abroad.

From there the authorities transferred him to Sonnenburg concentration camp, sited on marshy land close to the Oder River between Berlin and Posen during April 1933.

With other inmates, the three men set up the kernel of a communist cell inside the Buchenwald ("Beech Wood") concentration camp, as it was becoming known.

[18][19] At some point Helmuth and Helga Stoecker moved out of Ivor and Hell Montagu's home, and were instead fostered by a Captain Lamont in Yorkshire, in the northern part of England.

[2][14] He was then identified by the English government as an Enemy alien and, with thousands of other refugees from Nazism who had sought safety in England, removed to a prison or detention camp.

Instead he was employed in farm and factory work till 1947 when he was able to make his way back to Berlin in what had become Germany's Soviet occupation zone.

He worked for the "General [East] German News Service" between 1950 and 1952, and then for the young country's new Museum for History during 1952/53, before returning to his academic career.

He received his doctorate at Berlin in 1957 in return for a dissertation on "Germany and China in the nineteenth century: Penetration of German capitalism".