Building on considerations that had already significantly shaped the SPD's policy of understanding during the Weimar Republic, exiled politicians such as Rudolf Hilferding, Curt Geyer, Friedrich Stampfer, and Albert Grzesinski developed the vision of a reorganization of international relations under the banner of peace, freedom, democracy, and law. Their ideas about the integration of a Germany liberated from National Socialism into a community of democracies shaped by the West point in many ways to the foreign policy of the future Federal Republic. The study also sheds new light on the left-socialist-revolutionary beginnings of later SPD politicians such as Willi Eichler, Richard Löwenthal, and Willy Brandt.