In a letter of 1952, the former German judge Lothar Kreyssig launched his idea of a reconciliation programme based on the religious – Christian – concept of atonement. From the manual work of German volunteers, those who had formerly been persecuted and their enemies, namely, the State and the People of Israel and Jews on the one hand and Great Britain and the British on the other, should benefit. The addressee of this letter was Graf Paul Yorck von Wartenburg, the brother of the executed resistance fighter Peter Yorck, then working for the Ecumenical Council of Churches in Geneva, who later worked as a German diplomat with a consul assignment in Lyon.