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New Beginning (NB), also Leninist Organization (ORG or LO) or Miles Group , was a Marxist organization of resistance against National Socialism .

history

1929 to 1933

Around 1929, because of fundamental criticism of the two workers' parties KPD and SPD , the founding core of the organization around Walter Loewenheim (pseudonym Miles ), his brother Ernst Loewenheim and several other former KPD functionaries emerged; to them these parties were seen as “sectarian” and “bourgeois”. Referring to Lenin's writing What to do? they planned to build a clandestine , hierarchically structured, revolutionary cadre network freed from bourgeois and cultural influences . In Berlin in particular, but also in other university cities, other critical, intellectual members from the SPD, KPD and KPO were recruited , including Karl Frank , Ossip K. Flechtheim , Richard Löwenthal and Georg Eliasberg .

In the autumn of 1931 the organization, which at that time had 40 members, succeeded in winning parts of the leadership of the Berlin SAJ around Fritz Erler , Erich Schmidt and Kurt Schmidt for the ORG and thus influence on Berlin SPD structures. In addition, individual KPD, KPO and SAPD members were also recruited, so that the group had around 100 members at the beginning of 1933.

After 1933

Berlin memorial plaque on the house at Rudolstädter Strasse 8 in Berlin-Wilmersdorf

After the seizure of power by the Nazi Party in 1933, the organization was due to its strictly conspiratorial good functioning of the illegality of the labor movement prepared initially barely affected by the repression and was able to further expand its functioning underground network initially. By 1935 the group grew to around 500 members. Among other things, close ties were established with the Berlin group of the Association of Religious Socialists in Germany around Erich Kürschner (which had belonged to the ORG since 1932), with a group of critical KPD members around Werner Peuke , with the resistance group of railway workers around Hans Jahn and with other union resistance groups . The main focus was on training, building the network and a functioning courier system with little external propaganda.

The group, called New Beginning (NB) since 1933, published two manifestos, Pentecost theses and New Beginning , written by Walter Loewenheim and widely discussed in resistance and exile circles . Fascism or socialism. Discussion basis on the controversial issues of socialism in our epoch , in which their program and their claim to leadership within the German workers' and resistance movement was formulated. It invoked a “failure of the SPD and KPD” and emphasized Germany's own functioning, conspiratorial member network, whose leadership could only be active resistance fighters . A complete break with the past was demanded: only the younger, more energetic forces as the “vanguard of the proletariat” are capable of renewal . Loewenheim criticized the "subjugation policy" of the SPD at the end of the Weimar Republic and emphasized the "movement character" of socialism . He also criticized the “insane policy” of the KPD, which he, like the Communist International , made responsible for the split in the German labor movement. He warned against underestimating National Socialism as an episode. The struggle against the regime until the victory of the socialist idea would take many years. He demanded a free and critical discussion about the renewal of the socialist movement out of a combative spirit and Marxist knowledge ..... The fight against German fascism will not be decided in Paris and Prague, nor in Switzerland and Saarbrücken. He must be beaten in the German factories, towns and villages. The next great task of the renewed party is to collect all German organizations that are committed to the class struggle and to unite them in a united front that is willing and able to fight. Loewenheim estimated the chances of including the KPD as rather slim.

The exile structures of the SPD, which Sopade , as well as the Socialist Workers' International supported initially until 1934 NB . A Sopade foreign office in Prague, headed by Karl Frank, attempted ideologically with the Prague Manifesto of 1934, partly successfully, of the inner-party left opposition (in addition to the NB , the Revolutionary Socialists of Germany around Karl Böchel and Siegfried Aufhäuser and the Red Shock Troop around its foreign leader Robert Keller ) to meet them and involve them in this way. At the same time succeeded in NB , with Waldemar von Knoeringen , Erwin Schoettle and Franz Boegler to win three border secretaries of Sopade for their organization. However, the exile organization of the SPD withdrew its support for the NL at the end of January.

In 1935 there were internal conflicts: As the Nazi regime increasingly stabilized, the majority of the organizations favored more active resistance work, while a minority around Loewenheim wanted to withdraw most of the cadres from Germany and leave only 30 observers and reporters on site. Loewenheim even declared the NL to be dissolved and recommended that the members join the SPD. However, the group did not follow suit and continued its work. In June, the majority around Frank, Peuke and Löwenthal formed a new management team and deposed Loewenheim, who was expelled from the NL in September and went into exile. Despite a conversation between leading representatives of the KPD and the Sopade in November 1935, which was generally viewed as positive, the NL continued to be skeptical of a united front .

In autumn 1935 and spring 1936, the Gestapo succeeded in searching the NL for the first time. Eliasberg and Peuke, among others, were arrested. A new domestic line was then formed under Erler, Kurt Schmidt, Kürschner and Oskar Umrath . These were taken prisoner in 1938 as part of the break-up of the Berlin Popular Front group led by Otto Brass and Hermann Brill . In a series of trials, members of the NL and the Popular Front Group were sentenced to long prison terms. Otto Brass and Hermann Brill received twelve years, Fritz Erler ten years in prison. A network of resistance groups in Bavaria, Tyrol and Vienna led by Waldemar von Knoeringen, including Bebo Wager , Hermann Frieb , Eugen Nerdinger and Johann Otto Haas , remained undiscovered by the Gestapo until 1942.

The exile organization

In exile, NB described itself since 1935 as a "positive working opposition" within the social democracy. Since 1937, the international office published the Social Democratic Information Service . In the summer of 1939, Karl Frank, Richard Löwenthal, Erwin Schoettle and Waldemar von Knoeringen moved the headquarters from Paris to London. In December of the same year at the beginning of the Second World War , the previously published Social Democratic information letter had to be discontinued. However, the exile group tried to use the font New Beginning, What It Wants, What It Is and How It Was Become, to demonstrate its social democratic character. The situation in the USA was problematic: NB defended itself against a conference of German-speaking social democrats and trade unionists, which they accused of being undemocratic. In London, NB tried several times in vain to bring together socialist exile groups such as the Working Group for Socialist Domestic Work and the Union of German Socialist Organizations in Great Britain . Most of the surviving NB members who had returned to Germany became involved in the SPD after 1945, some like Robert Havemann or Erich Kürschner joined the SED .

literature

  • Kurt Kliem: The socialist resistance against the Third Reich, represented by the group '' New Beginning '' . Phil. Diss., Marburg 1957.
  • Miles (Walter Löwenheim): Start over! Fascism or Socialism , Karlsbad 1933. The platform appeared in September 1933 as issue 2 of the SoPaDe series of publications, Problems of Socialism, published by Rudolf Hilferding , with a circulation of 12,000 copies. There was also a camouflage edition in small format: Arthur Schopenhauer, Über Religion . The platform was translated into English and French in 1933.
  • Walter Loewenheim: History of the Org [New Beginning] 1929 - 1935. A contemporary analysis. Edited by Jan Foitzik. Berlin 1995 ISBN 3-89468-111-X
  • Hans J. Reichardt: Starting anew. A contribution to the history of the resistance of the workers' movement against National Socialism , in: Yearbook for the History of Central and East Germany, Volume 12, Berlin (West) 1963.
  • Franz Osterroth, Dieter Schuster: Chronicle of the German social democracy. Vol II: From the beginning of the Weimar Republic to the end of the Second World War . Berlin / Bonn 1980 ISBN 3-8012-1084-7
  • Claus Leggewie: New Beginning - Org: Leninist organization and subjective factors in the anti-fascist resistance. In: Ulrike May, Elke Mühlleitner (eds.): Edith Jacobson . Psychosozial-Verlag , Giessen 2005, pp. 171–178

Web links

Commons : Start over  - collection of images, videos, and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ cf. Walter Loewenheim: History of the Org [New Beginning] 1929 - 1935. A contemporary analysis. Edited by Jan Foitzik . Berlin 1995, p. 14f and p. 47ff
  2. ↑ Jan Foitzik: Between the fronts. On the politics, organization and function of left political small organizations in the resistance from 1933 to 1939/40. Bonn 1986. ISBN 3-87831-439-6 , pp. 27f
  3. ↑ on Kurt Schmidt, see German Resistance Memorial Center - biography of Kurt Schmidt
  4. ↑ see above: Foitzik, p. 28
  5. ↑ see above: Foitzik, p. 70ff
  6. ↑ http://www.gdw-berlin.de/pdf/B20.pdf , pp. 18–34
  7. ↑ (as Arthur Schopenhauer's work On Religion , smuggled into Germany undercover)
  8. ↑ cit. according to Chronicle of the German Social Democracy, Vol. 2, pp. 325–327
  9. ↑ Wolfgang Benz / Walter H. Pehle (ed.): Lexicon of German Resistance. 2., through Ed . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1994 ISBN 3-10-005702-3 , p. 272, Chronik der Deutschen Sozialdemokratie, Vol. 2, p. 342
  10. ↑ cf. Walter Loewenheim: History of the Org [New Beginning] , p. 18, and see: Foitzik, p. 78ff, Chronik Sozialdemokratie Vol. 2, p. 347
  11. ↑ Wolfgang Benz / Walter H. Pehle, p. 52f
  12. ↑ Chronik der Deutschen Sozialdemokratie, Vol. 2, p. 382, ​​p. 408f.
  13. ↑ see: Mario Keßler : Heroic Illusion and Stalin Terror. Contributions to communism research . Hamburg 1999., p. 149f and p. 159