Thalheimer removed from the Communist Party of Germany in December 1928 and from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Comintern in January 1929. Formation Brandler and Thalheimer gathered their supporters into a new organization called the Communist Party of Germany (Opposition) (KPO), a group which was founded at the 30 December 1928 meeting which had originally prompted the wave of expulsions. The group also launched a new communist opposition journal, Gegen den Strom (Against the Current). Most of those who attended this conference were factional allies of Brandler and Thalheimer from previous years when they had headed the German Communist Party. The major exception was Paul Frölich, who had been allied with a third, so-called Conciliator faction which stood between the future KPO and the KPD leadership. Frölich and his partner Rosi Wolfstein, like Brandler and Thalheimer, had been allies and pupils of Rosa Luxemburg. Throughout 1929, the KPD expelled followers of Brandler and Thalheimer as well as the Conciliator faction, who sought a factional truce between the party's feuding left and right. Perhaps 1,000 members of the German Communist Party were affected. These expulsions paralleled similar efforts to purge the Soviet Communist Party of followers of Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov and Mikhail Tomsky. The KPO initially conceived of itself as a factional influence group, attempting to change the political line of the Communist Party of Germany rather than a new party in competition with it. The organization held a second conference in November 1929 at which in the words of M. N. Roy it "declared unequivocally that between Social Democracy and Communism there is no half-way house". Roy claimed that the KPO had 6,000 dues-paying members and was publishing eight weekly and bi-monthly publications by the fall of 1929, with a combined circulation of 25,000. Brandler was named Secretary of the organization at this time. While the group never met with broad influence or electoral success, it nevertheless became the first as well as one of the most prominent parties to be identified with the so-called International Right Opposition. On 1 January 1930, the KPO attempted to expand its influence even further with the launch of a daily newspaper, Arbeiterpolitik. Financial problems led it a reduction of frequency and by 1932 the paper was being issued only once a week. Despite Roy's protestations that the KPO did not constitute an independent political party, it was not