The National Committee for a Free Germany (NKFD) was founded in Krasnogorsk, near Moscow,[3]: 120  on 12 July 1943; its president was the exiled German communist writer Erich Weinert, with his deputies Lieutenant Heinrich Graf von Einsiedel and Major Karl Hetz.

A number of officers held as Soviet prisoners of war eventually joined the BDO, the most prominent of them being Field-Marshal Friedrich Paulus, commander of the Sixth Army captured at the Battle of Stalingrad.

In one of his speeches, Ernst Hadermann [de; ru], one of the leaders of the NKFD, insisted that by advocating democracy he did not intend a resurrection of the Weimar Constitution which he described as feeble.

The criticism of the Weimar Germany became one of the reason of the choice of the flag: the NKFD used the Reichsflagge which was used by the German Empire and earlier the North German Confederation, the conservative politicians of the Weimar Republic and by the Third Reich during its first two years; the other reason of this choice was that the KPD leaders wanted to reassure its non-Marxist majority that the NKFD was not a Communist outfit but a union with all kind of views opposed to Nazism.

Initially its main activities were political reeducation and indoctrination and propaganda and psychological warfare aimed at the Wehrmacht, and Seydlitz participated only in this side of the NKFD while disassociating himself from the armed struggle also conducted by the organisation, being the author and a spokesperson of pro-Soviet radio broadcasts and a parlimentaire while negotiating surrenders of the Germans.

As the captured German officers failed to justify their roles as Soviet "mouthpieces", the influence in the organisation had been flowing to the KPD leaders, and in January 1944, they announced the "second phase" of the movement.

The main goal of the KPD was a creation of a popular partisan movement which would at least launch a full-scale guerrilla warfare in Germany if not mass anti-Nazi uprisings or even overthrow Hitler.

A few hundred German POWs in the United States and Britain, some of whom had joined the Freies Deutschland movement, helped the Western Allies organize several guerrilla and counter-guerrilla bands trained for parachute deployment in the Alps.

As the Red Army stepped on German soil, the significance of the NKFD as a means to demonstrate the support of its invasion among the Germans had grown; the failure of the guerrilla warfare determined the Kampfgruppen being used for such activities as commando assault since these had a practical use for the Red Army as a means to harass and divert the Wehrmacht and did not require popular support at the same time, and Hitler warned about the danger of the NKFD commandos in his final address to the Ostheer on 15 April 1945.

[21][2] The first involvement Kampfgruppen in actions against the Wehrmacht was on 21 December 1943: as usual, it was given a task to reach a Wehrmacht rear area and spread propaganda, but failed to cross the frontline, so it joined a Soviet partisan unit and its assault on a German convoy of 25 trucks, guarded by tanks and armoured vehicles; partisans and the NKFD unit successfully destroyed 4 of the trucks and neutralized 72 soldiers; a similar situation happened in June 1944, when an NKFD unit after failing to complete propaganda tasks became attached to the 90th Rifle Division of the Red Army and conducted propaganda and reconnaissance activities, disrupted Wehrmacht communication lines, blew up bridges and captured German soldiers until December.

[23] Mainly this name was used to the "traitor officers" who appeared at the front and misled the army by issuing or orally giving false orders: for example, Reich's Chancellery warned of the "Seydlitz Troops" in a circular,[24] and Hermann Fegelein wrote to Himmler that he "came to the conclusion that a significant part of the difficulties on the Eastern Front, including the collapse and elements of insubordination in a number of divisions, stem from the cunning sending to us of officers from the Seydlitz Troops and soldiers from among the prisoners of war who had been brainwashed by communists".

[5] In response, Oberkommando des Heeres issued an order to Army Group Vistula that they take strong measures against any unknown or unauthorized German soldiers, officers or generals found in their area of operations,[23] and the families of the members of the NKFD became subject to Sippenhaft; Friedrich Hossbach was dismissed from command over the 4th Army as Hitler accused him of being complicit with "Seydlitz officers" due to withdrawal of his troops from the East Prussia.

[24] There are several testimonies by the Germans who participated in the war that at the end of the war they met "Seydlitz Troops", and although usually they described suspicious officers who gave false orders, such Western historians as Stephan Hamilton and Tony Le Tissier [de] also cite descriptions of the Germans in Wehrmacht uniform directly fighting at the front alongside the Red Army, some of these mention the Freies Deutschland insignia.

Since 1943, participants of the movement, deserters from the Wehrmacht and German defectors, had been creating organisations modeled after the NKFD, the names of which also included the words "Committee" and "Free Germany".