PEACE banners dominated the annual procession to lay flowers on the tombs of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in Berlin today, the 104th anniversary of their murder.

Crowds marched to revolutionary songs including Rote Fahne, Bella Ciao and the Internationale from the Frankfurt Gate to the monumental memorial to fallen socialists where their tombs lie.

The march came a day after the biggest yet Rosa Luxemburg  onference in the city, with over 3,000 people attending in person and over 20,000 following the event — themed Stop World War III, and organised by the Morning Star’s German sister paper Junge Welt — online.

Sessions included a study of war propaganda from the first world war to the present day, discussions of Chinese and Cuban socialist strategies and a recorded address from jailed US political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, followed by an appeal for freedom for all political prisoners including Julian Assange, who still languishes in London’s Belmarsh awaiting possible extradition to the United States.

Die Linke MP Sevim Dagdelen warned that Nato was “mobilising for a third world war” and that the supply of weapons to Ukraine must be stopped.

“No previous history justifies a war,” she stressed. “Every war is a crime, but this year we need to prevent a greater escalation of war.”

She criticised Die Linke for not taking a clear anti-war line, when it had previously been the only anti-militarist party in the Bundestag.

“There are enough two-legged tanks in the Bundestag as it is — we don’t need more in Die Linke,” she said to applause.

Ms Dagdelen and Hamburg peace activist Christin Bernhold said the left needed to forge alliances but on “clear class positions,” and argued that a tendency to no platform speakers over political differences was undermining the whole left.

Unsere Zeit journalist Melina Deymann argued that German trade unions were failing workers by accepting the lie that “we need to show solidarity with the exploiter class and moderate wage demands to unite against the evil Russians and the evil Chinese behind them,” and called for greater industrial militancy like that currently seen in Britain.