Neu Beginnen
New Beginning ( NB), also Leninist organization (ORG or LO) or Miles Group, was a Marxist organization of resistance against National Socialism.
History
1929-1933
To 1929, the founding core of the organization to Walter Loewe Home (pseudonym Miles ) and his brother Ernst Loewe home and several other former officials of the Communist Party, which developed a fundamental critique of the two workers' parties KPD and SPD was born. The group saw the two parties as sectarian or embourgeoisified. To solve the problem, the group planned on the basis of Lenin's What To Do? the construction of a clandestine, hierarchical squad network, which should constitute the core of a liberated from bourgeois cultural influences revolutionary party. To this end, the group individual critical members of the SPD, KPD and KPO began mainly in Berlin, but also in some university towns, often intellectuals, including Charles Frank, Ossip K. Flechtheim, Richard Lowenthal and Georg Elias mountain to contact, leaving in to recruit their former parties and political- theoretical schools.
In the autumn of 1931, succeeded in at this time 40 -member organization sections of the leadership of the Berlin SAJ by Fritz Erler, Erich Schmidt and Kurt Schmidt for the ORG to win and thus to increase their influence on Berlin SPD structures were next to individual KPD -, KPO and SAPD members recruited so that the Group had approximately 100 members in early 1933.
After 1933
After the seizure of power by the Nazis in 1933, the organization was well prepared for the criminalization of the labor movement on the basis of their strictly conspiratorial operation, initially hardly affected by the repression and could her working underground network initially expand even further. By 1935 the group had grown to about 500 members. Close links based on, among other things, the Berlin group of the League of Religious Socialists in Germany by Erich furrier ( which since 1932, the ORG belonged ), trade union to a group of critical KPD members to Werner Peuke, the resistance group of railway workers to Hans Jahn and other resistance groups recorded. The group focused in the underground mainly to training work, the structure of a network organization and functioning of a courier system and operational comparatively little external propaganda.
The previously unknown to the public ORG published with Pentecostal theses and New Beginning. Fascism or socialism. ( Which was smuggled in as Arthur Schopenhauer's writing about religion camouflaged Germany ) basis for discussion on the issues of socialism in our time written in 1933, two of Walter Loewe home, in Resistance and Exile circles widely discussed manifests. In these, now called New Start group had formulated a claim to leadership within the German workers' movement and resistance in the context of their programs. The leadership was mainly associated with the failure of the SPD and the KPD, the functional conspiratorial network of members of the group in Germany and with the view that leadership can be formed only by active resistance fighters, justified. The group demanded a complete break with the past. Only the younger more energetic forces were able to form the basis for a renewed party. Loewenstein called for an avant-garde, both to lead the cause to victory as well as to maintain what has been achieved. The writings criticized the submission policies of the SPD at the end of the Republic, emphasizing the movement character of socialism. To a revolutionary work is the exile organization of the SPD also because of their past is not capable. At the same time criticized Loewe home the " madness policy" of the KPD and made this as well as the Communist International for the division of the German workers' movement responsible. He warned against underestimating the National Socialism as an episode. Instead, the battle would last against the regime and finally the victory of socialist thought for many years. Was the basis for a successful resistance, a free and critical discussion that keep the renewal of the socialist movement from a combative spirit and Marxist knowledge necessary and want to serve it. He wrote The central role of the illegal organization: The struggle against German fascism is decided not in Paris and Prague, even in Switzerland and Saarbrücken. He must be defeated in the German factories, towns and villages. The next major task of the renewed party is the collection of all German organizations that are on the bottom of the class struggle and their organization in a kampfgewillten and combat-capable unit front. However Loewe home appreciate the opportunity to include the KPD, as rather low.
The exile structures of the SPD, which Sopade, as well as the Socialist Workers International supported initially to 1934 New Beginning, which ran a run by Karl Frank foreign office in Prague. The Prague Manifesto of 1934, the Sopade tried ultimately partially successful, intra-party opposition left ( next to New Start are still the Revolutionary Socialists of Germany to name Karl Bochel and Siegfried Aufhäuser ) ideologically accommodate and integrate them so. At the same time succeeded in New Beginners to win with Waldemar von Knoeringen, Erwin Schoettle and Franz Boegler three border secretaries of Sopade for the organization. However, the exile organization of the SPD group withdrew its support New Start end of January.
In 1935 there were internal conflicts in the organization. While the organization majority favored a more active line in the resistance work that minority to Loewe home wanted due to the stabilization of the Nazi regime remove the bulk of the squad from Germany, leaving only 30 observers and commentators in Germany. Loewe home even told the New Beginners for dissolved. He advised the members to join the SPD. The illegal groups, however, did not follow the and continued their activity. In June, the majority formed around Frank, Peuke and Lowenthal, a new organizational line and took off Loewe Home, who was expelled in September from NB and went into exile .. Despite a generally been positive talks between leaders of the KPD and the Sopade in November 1935 NB showed up against a united front more skeptical. In the fall of 1935 and spring of 1936 the Gestapo come to achieve greater successes against NB manhunt for the first time. Here was arrested, among others, Eliasberg and Peuke. Thereupon a new domestic line under Erler, Kurt Schmidt, furriers and Oskar Umrath formed. These were captured in 1938 as part of the dismantling of the Berlin People's Front Group to Otto Brass and Hermann Brill. In a series of processes members of NB and the so-called Popular Front group were sentenced to long prison sentences. Brass and Otto Hermann Brill received twelve years: Fritz Erler ten years in prison. One of Knoeringen be initiated by Waldemar network of resistance groups in Bavaria, Tyrol and Vienna to Bebo Wager, Hermann Frieb, Eugen Nerdinger and Johann Otto Haas remained until 1942 by the Gestapo undetected.
The exile organization
In exile, NB designated since 1935 as "positive assisting opposition" within the social democracy. Since 1937, the Foreign Office issued the Socialists information service. In the summer of 1939, Karl Frank, Richard Lowenthal, Erwin Schoettle and Waldemar laid Knoeringen of the seat from Paris to London. In December of the same year the previously issued Social Democratic newsletter had to be stopped. However, the exile group tried in a font New Beginning what it wants and what it is and how it was to prove his social-democratic character. The problem was the situation in the United States. There NB not participated in a national conference of German Social Democrats and trade unionists in the U.S. because it accused the event an undemocratic composition. In London, she took part in various experiments of merging socialist exile groups such as the Association for the socialist domestic work and the Union of German Socialist Organisations in Great Britain. The majority of the surviving or returned to Germany NB- members engaged after 1945 in the SPD, some like Robert Havemann and Erich furrier joined the SED at.