Neu Beginnen
Neu Beginnen was a German underground and exile socialist group active during the Nazi period.[1]
Neu Beginnen emerged a result of a 1935 split from the Gruppe Leninistiche Organisation, an earlier group that had been active in late 1920s Berlin.[1]
Paul Hagen Memo
In April 1942, using the pseudonym "Paul Hagen", the Neu Beginnen activist Karl Frank sent a memo to Allen Dulles, outlining a potential programme of political warfare based on linking allied intelligence with the German underground:
- The first necessary step would be the careful study of these groups, their personnel and their contacts. That could be done through a special agency in cooperation with such people experienced in underground work, carefully selected as trustworthy to the cause of an allied victory and the defeat of Nazism. This agency would have to make out a plan how to make contacts; first in the few border places in Europe where inside contacts can still be reached; in consequence with the inside groups themselves.
- ...At the same time another staff, selected by the same agency could set up a research office in America, to analyse and study carefully German newspapers, and above all, all of the available local newspapers, reviews, books, etc. ... The section could have an official research institute affiliated with it, which would be able to co-ordinate knowledge and expert experience of many things; emigrations from Germany, Jewish refugee knowledge, technical and economic facts, etc. It might even be possible to get additional military information through such a careful digest of this material. It would certainly produce important political information.
- ...Another section of the agency could train trustworthy refugees for investigation, help in questioning war prisoners and similar people.
- ..In Sweden as well as in Switzerland contacts may be reorganized from reliable elements of the labour organisations like the Swiss Social Democratic Party or the Swedish Social Democratic Party.[2]
People
External Resources
Neu Beginnen Archives, International Institute of Social History.
- Terence Renauld, The German Resistance in New York: Karl B. Frank and the New Beginning Group, 1935-1945, 2007.
