page_title: Saefkow-Jacob-Bästlein Organization
section_title: Organization and its goals
hierarchical_section_title: Saefkow-Jacob-Bästlein Organization / Organization and its goals
caption_attribution_description: Ausgabepreis: 10+5 Pfennig First Day of Issue / Erstausgabetag: 24. März 1964 Auflage: 3.000.000 Entwurf: Sauer Druckverfahren: Offsetdruck Michel-Katalog-Nr: Ländercode-MiNr: 1015 Licensing This file is most likely NOT in the public domain. It has been marked for review, and will be deleted in due course if the review does not find it to be in the public domain. This file was previously considered to be in the public domain as a German stamp; it is possible that it is in the public domain for other reasons, in which case a new rationale will be applied as part of the review process. See below for the previous rationale. Previous public domain rationale, no longer applicable This stamp is in the public domain in Germany because it was released by the postal administration of the German Democratic Republic or the Soviet occupation zone (Deutschen Post der DDR) whose legal successor is the Federal Republic of Germany. Thus it is an official work according to German copyright law (§ 5 Abs. 1 UrhG). Boarisch&#160;| Deutsch&#160;| English&#160;| suomi&#160;| македонски&#160;| Türkçe&#160;| +/−
context_page_description: The Saefkow-Jacob-Bästlein Organization was an underground German resistance movement acting during the Second World War, that published the illegal magazine, Die Innere Front.
  In the 1940s, the Communist Party of Germany, with support from the Soviet Union, tried to work underground to build an "operative leadership". It was particularly active in 1943 and 1944 and was one of the largest groups in the German resistance against the National Socialist state. Its hub was in Berlin. Many of its members were arrested by the Gestapo in 1944 and later killed.
context_section_description: In 1939, after Communist Party official Anton Saefkow was released after having been arrested, he resumed his illegal work. After the arrest of members of the Robert Uhrig Group in February 1942 and of the group around Wilhelm Guddorf and John Sieg in autumn 1942, Saefkow and Franz Jacob, who had fled Hamburg to Berlin after a wave of arrests, began building a new resistance network of illegal cells in the factories of Berlin.
  An air raid on Plötzensee Prison in Berlin made it possible for Bernhard Bästlein to escape in January 1944. He ran into Jacob by chance, after which he joined them in forming the Saefkow-Jacob-Bästlein Organization. It was one of the larger resistance groups in Germany. They focused on disseminating information that they were able to glean from foreign newspapers and from radio broadcasts from Moscow.
  They also organized the Bewegung Freies Deutschland (Free Germany Movement) to work with people in factories, military units, opposition parties and others, growing to several hundred people. In his publication, Am Beginn der letzten Phase des Krieges ("At the beginning of the last phase of the war"), Jacob wrote that to end the war and overthrow the fascist dictator, Communists should concentrate all their strength "on developing a broad, national front composed of all groups that stand opposed to fascism.
  The goal was to give the splintered resistance a central leadership. Together with Bästlein and Jacob, Saefkow formed the head of the organization, later also known as the "Operative Leadership of the Communist Party in Germany". There were strong links to other resistance groups in many of the bigger German cities, such as Magdeburg, Leipzig, Dresden and Hamburg. The plan was to build a united front, with anti-fascist circles of the Social Democrats and the middle class, that would topple Adolf Hitler through sabotage and other acts. The 500 members of the Saefkow-Jacob-Bästlein group, one of the biggest resistance groups in Germany, included not just workers, but doctors, teachers, engineers and artists. About one-quarter of the members were women. The largest factory group of the organization was at Teves, a machine and tool manufacturer, with about 40 members (a very small percentage of their roughly 2,400 employees). A plaque there now honors their memory. (See photo, below.)
  Following a betrayal in 1944, over 280 members of the organization were arrested. Of that number, 104 either perished in concentration camps or were executed by the Nazis.
caption: Franz Jacob, 1964 stamp from the GDR
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