The NKFD did not really accomplish that much during the war in terms of its impact on German armies. The NKFD recruited among German POWs, but despite promises of better food and less strenuous work details, they found few volunteers. The organization itself suffered from a confused origin. The Soviets initially preferred a more class-based strategy to recruit among proletarian POWs or those prisoners who had a familiarity with the KPD. The poor response from both enlisted and non-flag officers prompted the later formation of the BDO, under the auspices of General Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach. The most documented activities of the NKFD were its production of leaflets and German-language radio broadcasts, much of which was written by the more educated officers of the BDO. Reports from the field indicate that some German units had access to this literature, but it did not achieve much in the way of actual results. A May 1944 report from the chief of staff of the 6th Army concluded that the NKFD showed that "the Jews are using Prussian-German officers to establish a German Soviet republic." OKW devoted a special issue of Mitteilungen für das Offizierkorps in October 1943 to the activities of the NKFD, countering its charges with the usual shrill denunciations of a Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy to undermine the moral of the German fighting man. But NKFD propaganda had relatively little impact on the frontlines other than underscoring the overall tide had turned against Germany.

Outside of the frontlines, the impact of the NKFD was twofold. Firstly, the existence of the NKFD prodded both the loose resistance networks in the Heer, as well as their contacts on the OSS to be more proactive. For the largely conservative and aristocratic officers among what would later become the July Plotters, the existence of an alternative military resistance organization threatened their monopoly on opposition to the Hitler regime. Additionally, the NKFD's call for mass desertions and its affiliation with the USSR summoned up fears of both the destruction of the Heer and a Communist takeover of Germany; hypotheticals that were anathema to the July Plotters. Within the American OSS, the NKFD sowed both confusion and concern about the future of Germany after the war. The relatively low priority the Soviets accorded to the NKFD meant that its propaganda was somewhat divorced from stated Allied claims of unconditional surrender. A number of the OSS's German experts, many of whom were non-KPD emigres, interpreted the NKFD as part of a wider political game played by the Soviets to appeal to various landed interests and other elites so they could be mobilized in the immediate postwar period. Of course, this was about as likely as feared communist upswell in the Heer and such phantoms tell more about the mentality and biases of those concocting them than actual reality, but the existence of the NKFD gave an impetus for OSS agents in Switzerland to make contact with the "Breakers", as the OSS termed the July plotters.

Secondly, the formation of the NKFD gave the emigres within the KPD such as Walter Ulbricht something to do within the war. The KPD had already formed its own antifascist organization with Barbarossa, and the formation of the NKFD gave these exiled Communists the appearance of leading an enlarged German antifascist movement. The NKFD helped to raise the public profile of various leaders of the postwar KPD/SED such as Otto Grotewohl. The failure of the NKFD to accomplish little in the way of actual results by 1944 led the KPD leadership to come to the realization that a revolution was not in the offing for Germany, and that the postwar KPD would have to be hierarchically organized and disciplined to advance the cause of German communism. The NKFD helped to provide a vetting process postwar for some KPD activists, but also for the GDR's rearmament in which the NVA initially relied on ex-POWs for the nucleus of its armed forces, and a prior relationship with the NKFD helped in this process.

So in a roundabout way, the NKFD's failures proved to be more important to both the war and its aftermath than its successes. Its appearance and uncoordinated propaganda spread a degree of confusion in resistance circles and Western intelligence. Conversely, its failures reinforced the tendencies of the KPD to want to rely upon smaller cadres than recruit among the larger population. However, had the NKFD not existed at all, the reaction of both the July Plotters and the KPD would have likely been the same as the group's failures only reinforced existing prejudices.

Sources

Mauch, Christof. The Shadow War against Hitler: The Covert Operations of America's Wartime Secret Intelligence Service. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.

Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt. Germany and the Second World War. politicization, disintegration, and the struggle for survival Vol. 9/1. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008.

Morina, Christina. Legacies of Stalingrad: Remembering the Eastern Front in Germany Since 1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.