Freiburg and Kreisau Circles
- Date of Founding
- Date of Abolition
- Location
The Freiburg and Kreisau Circles (Freiburger und Kreisauer Kreise) were two German networks of academics, nobility, and politicians who resisted the Nazi regime through the clandestine production of blueprints for an alternative political order and the organisation of plots to thwart the government, such as the July 20, 1944 attack aimed at taking Hitlers life.
In Freiburg, academics from the local university, initially economists who were later joined by theologians, . At the behest of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who had met George Bell and Hans Schönfeld in Sweden in 1942, a subgroup was formed to draft up a memorandum containing the building blocks of a post-war economic, social and political order in Germany. This memorandum was drafted by Gerhard Ritter with contributions by Erik Wolf and others. When the Nazis arrested many Freiburgers, most copies were seized and destroyed. One, however, buried in Ritters garden, survived the war and was later republished as Helmut Thielicke, ed., In der Stunde Null – die Denkschrift des Freiburger Bonhoeffer-Kreises: Politische Gemeinschaftsordnung. Ein Versuch zur Selbstbesinnung des christlichen Gewissens in den politischen Nöten unserer Zeit (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1979). This document already contains the key elements of the economic theory that would come to be known as ordoliberalism post-war, associated with Walter Eucken, Franz Böhm and Ludwig Erhard.
In Kreisau, Helmuth James von Moltke and Adam von Trott zu Solz were the two intellectual and diplomatic motors of the group. Von Trott, who had studied at Oxford and met many prominent ecumenists there, kept in touch with one of these friends, Willem A. Visser ‘t Hooft in Geneva after the Second World War broke out. In 1942, he had drafted a request on behalf of the Kreisau Circle to the Allied governments and governments-in-exile in London for their help in the Kreisauers plans to replace Hitler and the most loyal Nazis by aristocratic conservatives and broker a peace between Germany and the Allies afterwards. This blueprint was transferred through Visser t Hoofts connections to England, where it was intended for Sir Stafford Cripps, the Leader of the House of Commons, and through him, Churchill himself. Although it remains unclear to this day whether Cripps actually forwarded the message to Churchill, the reply from Great Britain came back negative, to the great dismay of Von Trott and other German anti-Nazi groups.