Karl Roche was a German syndicalist and left communist trade unionist. Roche joined the Free Association of German Trade Unions

Free Association of German Trade Unions

The Free Association of German Trade Unions was a trade union federation in Imperial and early Weimar Germany. It was founded in 1897 in Halle under the name Representatives' Centralization of Germany as the national umbrella organization of the localist current of the German labor movement...

 (FVdG) around 1900 as a seaman. He became a prominent member of the organization. In 1913, Carl Windhoff

Carl Windhoff

Carl Windhoff was a German syndicalist trade unionist.He joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany in 1890. He was one of the most important SPD leaders Düsseldorf until he left the party in 1901. He then joined the Free Association of German Trade Unions and become one of its most prominent...

, Fritz Kater

Fritz Kater

Fritz Kater was a German trade unionist active in the Free Association of German Trade Unions and its successor organization, the Free Workers' Union of Germany...

, and he were the FVdG delegates at the First International Syndicalist Congress

First International Syndicalist Congress

The First International Syndicalist Congress was a meeting of European and Latin American syndicalist organizations at Holborn Town Hall in London from September 27 to October 2, 1913...

 in London. In 1919, he wrote the FVdG's first post-World War I platform Was wollen die Syndikalisten? Programm, Ziele und Wege der "Freien Vereinigung deutscher Gewerkschaften" (What do the Syndicalists want? Program, Goals, and Means of the "Free Association of German Trade Unions"). The program summarized the FVdG's theory: a reaffirmation of the importance of strikes as a vehicle for emancipation and a rejection of the centralized mainstream labor unions. Roche was also a resolute proponent of collaboration with left communists. In late 1918, Rudolf Rocker

Rudolf Rocker

Johann Rudolf Rocker was an anarcho-syndicalist writer and activist. A self-professed anarchist without adjectives, Rocker believed that anarchist schools of thought represented "only different methods of economy" and that the first objective for anarchists was "to secure the personal and social...

 returned to Germany, in March 1919 he joined the FVdG and started gaining influence. An avowed communist anarchist and follower of Kropotkin

Kropotkin

Peter Kropotkin was a Russian prince and anarchist.Kropotkin may also refer to:*Pyotr Nikolayevich Kropotkin , Soviet/Russian geologist, tectonician, and geophysicist*Mount Kropotkin, a peak in Antarctica...

, Rocker rejected such close collaboration with Marxists. His growing influence led Roche to leave the Free Workers' Union of Germany

Free Workers' Union of Germany

The Free Workers' Union of Germany was an anarcho-syndicalist trade union, which existed from the renaming of the Free Association of German Trade Unions on September 15, 1919 to its official disbandment in January 1933 after the Nazis came into power, although many of its members continued to be...

, as the FVdG was now known, in 1920 and join the General Workers' Union of Germany

General Workers' Union of Germany

General Workers' Union of Germany , was the name of factory organisations formed following the German Revolution of 1918–1919 in opposition to the traditional trade unions...

 (AAUD). He became the leader of the AAUD in Hamburg

Hamburg

-History:The first historic name for the city was, according to Claudius Ptolemy's reports, Treva.But the city takes its modern name, Hamburg, from the first permanent building on the site, a castle whose construction was ordered by the Emperor Charlemagne in AD 808...

. In the mid-1920s he left the AAUD for the Federation of Communist Anarchists of Germany and then re-joined the FAUD.