ABSTRACT
When World War II ended, Heinz Koeppler had intended to return to his work at Oxford. Now, however, Ivone Kirkpatrick’s encouragement offered a chance that his wartime efforts for democracy in Germany could continue and his 1943/ 44 ideas might eventually bear fruit. ‘It appeared to me’, he wrote later, ‘that trying to set up a centre for prisoners-of-war would provide us with a good testing ground for the practicability of these ideas.’ But it was still by no means certain that he himself would be asked to run such a centre; nor was there any notion of where, if anywhere, his proposed ‘institution’ might be housed.
