One of the fundamental tenets of the FRG's postwar political order was Basic Law (Grundgesetz), which assured the fundamental rights of German citizens and secure the future of democracy within Germany. One component of Basic Law was the the Federal Constitutional Court's ability to ban political parties or groups that sought to obstruct or abolish democracy. The position of Basic Law was that the the new Germany would not countenance any political party that acted in an antidemocratic manner. The first test case for the Court's power to restrict political choices was the banning of the Socialist Reich Party (Sozialistische Reichspartei) in 1951/2. The SRP was a far-right political organization with many former NSDAP members and maintained that the Third Reich still legally existed. The relative success of the SRP in Lower Saxony's 1950 elections prompted the federal government into action and the Constitutional Court ruled that the SRP's ideology was inimical to Basic Law's guarantees of democracy and the SRP would be dissolved as a political party.

While the banning of the SRP was a relatively open and shut case, the banning of the KPD was another matter. One unique aspect of Basic Law was that it applied to all Germans, not just the citizens of the FRG. The position of the Adenauer government was that the FRG was the sole legitimate German state and the GDR was only a temporary entity. This led to the curious use of Germany's pre-1938 borders when depicting the country in early FRG electoral materials. Basic Law emerged as a component of Adenauer's legitimation strategy and the naturally, the GDR's ruling party, the SED rejected Basic Law as an attempt to effect a permanent division of Germany. The elements of the KPD operating in the FRG hewed to the SED's line and operated as an oppositional party within FRG. The KPD sought to actively hinder efforts of the FRG to reestablish a German military and often acted as a mouthpiece for the SED by claiming that Adenauer's policies of soft denazification had allowed former NSDAP members to slither back into positions of power.

The KPD's increasingly strident opposition to the regular operation of the FRG's government led it to become a marginal political party in local and national elections. Although the KPD inherited a strong membership postwar and possessed a degree of legitimacy from its opposition to the Third Reich, the KPD increasingly winnowed down its leadership to SED loyalists in a series of internal purges in 1951. These active connections to the SED and its knee-jerk opposition to the elected governments made it a target of the Constitutional Court after the SRP decision. Unlike other Western European communist parties, the close connection of the KPD to the SED, and by extension, the USSR, gave anticommunist officials a solid pretext upon which to act. In addition to the KPD's actual activities, documentation forged by the CIA about the KPD and other communist parties' attempts to sabotage the implementation of the Marshall Plan gave further ammunition for the prosecution of the KPD.

Nonetheless, this was a highly contentious issue in the FRG. The banning of an oppositional party summoned up an uncomfortable parallel to the Third Reich's own seizure of power. Furthermore, although the KPD's electoral fortunes waned and its attempt to form a KPD-led large labor front came to naught, some of its positions enjoyed a degree of currency within FRG public opinion. German rearmament in particular was not a terribly popular initiative and the reinstitution of selective service for German youth created wide-spread sentiment of "without me' (ohne mich). Adenauer's position that the FRG was the sole sovereign German state looked increasingly odd in light of the emerging Cold War meant that reunification looked like an unrealistic dream. The FRG's close alliance with NATO and the US also summoned up fears that Germany would be caught up in yet another war.

The deciding factor in the five-year trial on the KPD's legality was its commitment to proletarian revolution which the prosecution argued was fundamentally incompatible with Basic Law. The prosecution framed KPD's reliance upon mass strikes, disruptive opposition, and internal political purges as indicative of an antidemocratic ethos. Ritter von Rex, the state prosecutor closed with the argument that the KPD was "a dangerous source of infection for the body of our people, sending poisonous substances into the bloodstream of the Federal Republic's state and social organism." Even though the KPD had little chances for electoral success, the Constitutional Court ruled that a party could be deemed unconstitutional even if it had little chance for immediate electoral victory.

Its federal ban caught the KPD off-guard and many of its offices and files were raided. For its part, the SED saw the dissolution of the KPD as a tactical victory as its press arm would portray the ban as a further sign that the FRG was a sham government whose commitments to democracy were a fig leaf for the money capital interests that supported Hitler. For the FRG radical left, the Court's decision exiled them into the political wilderness. Magazines like Konkret vocalized the radical left's critiques of the FRG's materialistic society and the government's close alliances with undemocratic states in the name of fighting communism, but there were no real mainstream political parties to represent these interests. The gradually thawing of the FRG's anticommunism of the late 1960s led to a reconstitution of sorts of the KPD into the Deutsche Kommunistische Partei (DKP) in 1968, but it never became more than a marginal party in German elections. By the late 1960s, the West German left had increasingly gravitated to a more youth-orientated Maoist ideology which saw the strict Marxist-Leninist hierarchy of the DKP as staid and constraining.

Sources

Bark, Dennis L., and David Gress. From Shadow to Substance 1945-1963. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.

Major, Patrick. The Death of the KPD: Communism and Anti-Communism in West Germany, 1945-1956. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.