Rosa Luxemburg was a Polish Marxist economist, anti-war activist, philosopher and revolutionary socialist. Successively, she was a member of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, the Social Democratic Party of Germany, the Independent Social Democratic Party and the Communist Party of Germany. Born and raised in a Jewish family in Poland, she became a German citizen in 1897.
After the SPD supported German involvement in World War I in 1915, Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht co-founded the anti-war Spartacus League which eventually became the KPD. During the November Revolution, she co-founded the newspaper Die Rote Fahne, the central organ of the Spartacist movement. Luxemburg considered the Spartacist uprising of January 1919 a blunder, but supported the attempted overthrow of the government and rejected any attempt at a negotiated solution. Friedrich Ebert's majority SPD government crushed the revolt and the Spartakusbund by sending in the Freikorps, government-sponsored paramilitary groups consisting mostly of World War I veterans. Freikorps troops captured and summarily executed Luxemburg and Liebknecht during the rebellion.