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 ("The Internal 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.
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.