He was also a member of the military court that tried ( and mostly acquitted ) those involved in the assassination of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.

Seventy-five delegates assembled: from Great Britain, the 6 members of the General Council, Applegarth, Eccarius, Cowell Stepney, Lessner, Lucraft, and Jung ; from France, which sent 26 delegates, among whom we may mention Dereure, Landrin, Chémalé, Murat, Aubry, Tolain, A. Richard, Palix, Varlin, and Bakunin: Belgium sent 5 delegates, among whom were Hins, Brismée, and De Paepe ; Austria 2 delegates, Neumayer and Oberwinder ; Germany sent 10 delegates, among whom were Becker, Liebknecht, Rittinghausen, and Hess ; Switzerland had 22 representatives, among whom were Burkly, Greulich, Fritz Robert, Guillaume, Schwitzguébel, and Perret ; Italy sent but one delegate, Caporusso ; from Spain there came Farga-Pellicer and Sentinon ; and the United States of America was represented by Cameron.

When the revolt was crushed by the social democratic government and the Freikorps ( World War I veterans who banded together into right-wing paramilitary groups ), Luxemburg, Liebknecht and some of their supporters were captured and murdered.

Some historians have defended Ebert's actions as unfortunate but inevitable if the creation of a socialist state on the model that had been promoted by Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and the communist Spartacus Group was to be prevented.

Under the leadership of Liebknecht and Luxemburg, the KPD was committed to a violent revolution in Germany, and during 1919 and 1920 attempts to seize control of the government continued.

Because the seat was heavily contested, important SPD figures like August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Georg von Vollmar, and Paul Singer visited the town to help Jöst and Rocker had a chance to see them speak.

He was rather impressed by the Dutch socialist and later anarchist Domela Nieuwenhuis, who attacked Liebknecht for his lack of militancy.

The uprising was crushed by the social democrat government and the Freikorps ( paramilitary units formed of World War I veterans ) and Liebknecht and Luxemburg were murdered.

Liebknecht was born in Leipzig, the son of Wilhelm Martin Philipp Christian Ludwig Liebknecht and his second wife Natalie ( née Reh ), who also came from a family with a strong political background ; her father, Karl, was a member of the Frankfurt Parliament of 1848.

His father, Wilhelm Liebknecht, was one of the founders of the Social Democratic Party of Germany.

However, Karl Liebknecht was more radical than his father ; he became an exponent of Marxist ideas during his study of law and political economy in Leipzig and Humboldt University of Berlin.

As a lawyer, Liebknecht often defended other left wing socialists who were tried for offences such as smuggling socialist propaganda into Russia, a task in which he was also involved.

Liebknecht was an active member of the Second International and a founder of the Socialist Youth International.

In 1912 Liebknecht was elected to the Reichstag as a Social-Democrat, a member of the SPD's left wing.

At the end of 1914, Liebknecht, together with Rosa Luxemburg, Leo Jogiches, Paul Levi, Ernest Meyer, Franz Mehring and Clara Zetkin formed the so-called Spartacus League ( Spartakusbund ); the league publicized its views in a newspaper titled Spartakusbriefe (" Spartacus Letters ") which was soon declared illegal.

Liebknecht was arrested and sent to the eastern front during World War I despite his immunity as a member of parliament ; refusing to fight, he served burying the dead, and due to his rapidly deteriorating health was allowed to return to Germany in October 1915.

Liebknecht was released again in October 1918, when Max von Baden granted an amnesty to all political prisoners, on his return to Berlin on 23 October he was escorted to the Soviet embassy by a crowd of workers.

Liebknecht also wrote extensively against militarism, and one of his papers, Militarismus und Antimilitarismus (" militarism and antimilitarism ") led to his being arrested in 1907 and imprisoned for 18 months in Glatz, Prussian Silesia.

Falsely accused of being in league with the French and part of a conspiracy to free French prisoners of war held in Germany and to lead them in an attack from the rear, Bebel and Liebknecht were arrested for high treason, but no prosecution was possible for lack of evidence.

In 1850, Liebknecht was arrested for his initiatives to unite Switzerland's German workers ' associations, and he was banished from the country.

On the evening of 15 January 1919 Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were discovered in a Berlin-Wilmersdorf apartment, arrested and handed over to the largest Freikorps, the heavily armed Garde-Kavallerie-Schützen-Division.

Again and again attempts were made on the lives of left-wing, pacifist and even merely liberal politicians and publicists, for example Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, Walther Rathenau, Matthias Erzberger, Hans Paasche and Philipp Scheidemann or Maximilian Harden.

At the same time, the Spartakusbund, led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, separated from the USPD again as well to merge with other left wing groups and form the KPD ( Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, " Communist Party of Germany ").

The USPD was continued as an independent party by Georg Ledebour and Theodor Liebknecht, who refused to work with the SPD, but it never attained any significance again and merged into the Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschland ( SAPD, Socialist Workers ' Party of Germany ) in 1931.

Liebknecht was to meet up again with his old ADAV colleagues, however, as the lack of support for the ADAV led them to join forces with Liebknecht's SDAP in 1875.

** Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht are murdered following the Spartacist uprising.

The following year, she toured the United States along with Aveling and the German socialist Wilhelm Liebknecht, raising money for the Social Democratic Party of Germany.

The wave was started when on 4 January the government dismissed the chief constable of Berlin, Emil Eichhorn, who was a member of the USPD and who had refused to act against the demonstrating workers in the Christmas Crisis resulting in the USPD, Revolutionary Stewards and the KPD chairmen Karl Liebknecht and Wilhelm Pieck Eichhorn's calling for a demonstration to take place on the following day.

On New Year's Day in 1912, and the following weeks, Nerman and some of his Swedish friends went to Germany to follow Karl Liebknecht during his election campaign.

He was shaped by important political and social events of the era, such as World War I, the anti-war demonstration in Berlin on May 1, 1916 when Litten was not quite 13, the German Revolution of 1918-1919, and the arrest and murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg by Freikorps soldiers in January 1919.

Not wanting to release such important opponents of the war effort, old charges of preaching dangerous doctrines and plotting against the state were levied against Bebel and Liebknecht in 1872.

In 1870, when the Franco-Prussian War began, Liebknecht used his newspaper to agitate against the war, calling on working men on both sides of the border to unite in overthrowing the ruling class.

As of 2 December 1914 and initially the only deputy of the Reichstag, Liebknecht voted against further war bonds.

This open opposition against the party line put Liebknecht at odds even with those party members around Haase who actually were against the war bonds themselves.

Two outstanding examples of Communists who fought against social-chauvinism in Germany during World War I were Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

His friend Karl Liebknecht stood alone in the Berlin Reichstag, and against 110 of his own Party members, when he voted against German war credits.

Lenin and a small group of anti-war socialist leaders, including Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, denounced established socialist leaders of having betrayed the socialist ideal via their support of the war.

Left-wing members of the party, led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, strongly opposed the war, and the SPD soon suffered a split, with the leftists forming the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany ( USPD ) and the more radical Spartacist League.

Besides their opposition to what they saw as an imperialist war, Luxemburg and Liebknecht maintained the need for revolutionary methods, in contrast to the leadership of the SPD, who participated in the parliamentary process.

Although he had voted for war credits in August 1914, from July 1915 he opposed World War I and in 1917 he was among the founders of the USPD, which united anti-war socialists ( including reformists like Bernstein, " centrists " like Kautsky and revolutionary Marxists like Karl Liebknecht ).

Bebel and Liebknecht were the only members who did not vote the extraordinary subsidy required for the war with France.

It is worth noting that Liebknecht opposed the war regardless of which side started it.

At that time, with Liebknecht long dead, his successors opted to back the German cause in the war.

The Second International dissolved during the war, while Lenin, Trotsky, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, together with a small number of other Marxists opposed to the war, came together in the Zimmerwald Conference in September 1915.

The parliamentary leaderships of the socialist parties of Germany, France, Belgium and Britain each voted to support the war aims of their country's governments, although some leaders, like Ramsay MacDonald in Britain and Karl Liebknecht in Germany, opposed the war from the start.

Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, together with a small number of other Marxists opposed to the war, came together in the Zimmerwald Conference in September 1915.

Kollwitz was a committed socialist and pacifist, who was eventually attracted to communism ; her political and social sympathies found expression in the " memorial sheet for Karl Liebknecht " and in her involvement with the Arbeitsrat für Kunst, a part of the Social Democratic Party government in the first few weeks after the war.

Even Karl Liebknecht, who became one of the most outspoken opponents of the war, initially followed the party line: he abstained from voting to not defy his own faction.

The hopes of internationalists such as Lenin, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were dashed by the initial enthusiasm for war.

During the First World War Zetkin, along with Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg and other influential SPD politicians, rejected the party's policy of Burgfrieden ( a truce with the government, promising to refrain from any strikes during the war ).