The Circles subsumed three initially religiously motivated working groups whose memberships overlapped, namely the Freiburger Konzil, the Bonhoeffer Kreis, and the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Erwin von Beckerath, that arguably provided the platform for the renaissance of liberal political and economic thinking in post-war Germany.
[1] In particular the latter working group, presided over by Erwin von Beckerath, as a private continuation of the former Arbeitsgemeinschaft Volkswirtschaftslehre (Working Committee of Political Economy), which was established within the Akademie für Deutsches Recht (Academy for German Law) in 1940, but suspended on 1 March 1943, was concerned with the transformation of a wartime economy into a peacetime one and finding an order to govern it.
For further meetings, the former chief editor of the Industrie- und Handelszeitung, Hans Gestrich, received invitations; he unexpectedly died in November 1943.
[2] In the context of the rehabilitation of classical economics in the face of the Nazis’ plans for an autarkic economic system, but even more due to its submitting reports directly to the political leader of the anti-Hitler resistance, Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Erwin von Beckerath has predominantly been viewed as an opposition circle to National Socialism.
[3] According to the economists around Erwin von Beckerath, the economic and socio-political reconstruction of post-war Germany could be achieved only by the reinstatement of a market economy fostering individual freedom and entrepreneurship.