National Committee for a Free Germany

The National Committee for a Free Germany (German: Nationalkomitee Freies Deutschland, or NKFD) was a German anti-Nazi organization that operated in the Soviet Union during World War II.

The rise of the Nazi Party to power in Germany in 1933 led to the outlawing of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and persecutions of its members, many of whom fled to the Soviet Union.

With the German invasion of the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa, German prisoners of war began to fall into Soviet hands. Several attempts to establish an anti-Nazi organization from those POWs were made with little success since most of them still believed in the final victory of the Wehrmacht.

With the German defeat at the Battle of Stalingrad, the number of German POWs rose and their belief in a victorious Germany was damaged, hence they were more open to the idea of a membership in an anti-Nazi organization.

At the beginning of June, 1943, Alfred Kunella and Rudolf Herrnstadt started to write the manifesto of the Committee, in which historical Prussian figures who allied with Imperial Russia against Napoleon were depicted as exemplary Germans (e.g. vom Stein, Arndt, Clausewitz and Yorck). The National Committee for a Free Germany (NKFD) was founded in Krasnogorsk, near Moscow on 12 July 1943; its president was the exiled German communist writer Erich Weinert, with his deputies Lieutenant Heinrich Graf von Einsiedel and Major Karl Hetz. Its leadership consisted of 38 members, including 28 Wehrmacht POWs and 10 exiled communists.

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