Karl Liebknecht

Liebknecht was a lawyer who defended political cases, the son of one of the founders of German social democracy, and was imprisoned before the war for a pamphlet arguing that armies are used against workers at home as readily as against enemies abroad. In August 1914 his party voted unanimously for the credits that paid for the war; he obeyed party discipline and voted with them, then wrote that he had been wrong. In December he voted against, alone in the Reichstag, and was denounced across the political spectrum as a traitor.

He was conscripted into a labour battalion, and in May 1916 he was arrested for shouting down with the war at a rally in Potsdamer Platz; the strike that followed his sentencing brought out fifty thousand workers. Released in the amnesty of 1918, he proclaimed a socialist republic from a palace balcony hours after another republic had been declared elsewhere in Berlin, and founded the Communist Party with Rosa Luxemburg. On 15 January 1919 both were seized by Freikorps officers. He was driven to the Tiergarten, shot, and delivered to a mortuary as an unidentified body. He lies at Friedrichsfelde beside her.