Circles of Resistance

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Author: John M. Cox

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Advance Praise for

Circles of Resistance “This well-written, thoroughly researched study of Jewish resistance in Germany during the Holocaust opens new vistas on this important subject and provides new insight into the whole question of Holocaust memory in post–World War II East Germany. It is essential reading for anyone interested in Jewish resistance and Holocaust memory.” David M. Crowe, Professor of History and Law, Elon University, North Carolina; Author of, Among Other Works, Oskar Schindler: The Untold Account of His Life, Wartime Activities, and the True Story Behind the List and The Holocaust: Roots, History, and Aftermath

“John M. Cox manages to rescue for history a long-obscured dimension of resistance in wartime Berlin—that of left-wing Jewish youth to a regime determined to destroy them. Using archived police interrogation records, a few memoirs of participants, and interviews with others, Cox reconstructs the milieu in which Jewish leftists managed to function in wartime Berlin. He concludes with a chapter of reflections on how Cold War exigencies produced strikingly contradictory memories of this resistance in East and West Germany.” Karl A. Schleunes, Professor of Modern German and Holocaust History, University of North Carolina at Greensboro; Author of, Among Other Works, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy Toward German Jews, 1933–1939

Circles of Resistance

Studies in Modern European History

Frank J. Coppa General Editor Vol. 62

PETER LANG New York ! Washington, D.C./Baltimore ! Bern Frankfurt am Main ! Berlin ! Brussels ! Vienna ! Oxford

John M. Cox

Circles of Resistance Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany

PETER LANG New York ! Washington, D.C./Baltimore ! Bern Frankfurt am Main ! Berlin ! Brussels ! Vienna ! Oxford

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cox, John M. Circles of resistance: Jewish, leftist, and youth dissidence in Nazi Germany / John M. Cox. p. cm. — (Studies in modern European history; v. 62) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Jews—Persecutions—Germany—History—20th century. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Jewish resistance. 3. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Germany— Berlin. 4. Anti-Nazi movement—Germany—Berlin. 5. Herbert-Baum-Gruppe. 6. Germany—Ethnic relations. I. Title. DS134.255.C69 943’.155004924—dc22 2009011345 ISBN 978-1-4331-0557-9 ISSN 0893-6897

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek. Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.ddb.de/.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council of Library Resources.

© 2009 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York 29 Broadway, 18th floor, New York, NY 10006 www.peterlang.com All rights reserved. Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm, xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited. Printed in Germany

Table of Contents Acknowledgments

vii

List of Abbreviations

ix

Introduction Varieties of Anti-Nazi Resistance Sources of Resistance: Jewish, Youth, Leftist Movements

1 4 6

Chapter 1: Assimilation and Alienation: The Origins and Growth of German-Jewish Youth Movements The Jewish Experience in Germany Assimilation: An Uneasy Balance German and German-Jewish Youth Groups, 1900-1933 German-Jewish Youth Groups, 1933-1939 Socialism and Jewish Youth Politics

11 12 14 15 19 22

Chapter 2: Neither Hitler Nor Stalin: Resistance by Dissident Communists and Left-Wing Socialists End of Weimar Democracy and the Emergence of Left Splinter Groups The “Org” (Neu Beginnen) Decline and Demise of the Org The Left Opposition in Berlin Clandestine Activities of the Left Oppositionists Jews in Socialism’s Left Wing

33 34 40 41 44 47

Chapter 3: Repression and Revival: Contradictions of the Communist-led Resistance in Berlin Initial Setbacks and Underground Organization Stalin-Hitler Treaty: Disorientation and Accommodation German Marxism and the “Jewish Question” Jews in Berlin’s Communist-led Resistance Communist Politics: Weapon or Obstacle?

57 58 61 63 67 73

27

vi

Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany

Chapter 4: “Thinking for Themselves”: The Herbert Baum Groups Herbert Baum: Origins and Influences Baum and the Structure of His Groups, 1933-1942 Toward Anti-Nazi Action

81 83 86 91

Chapter 5: “We Have Gone on the Offensive”: Education and Other Subversive Activities Under Dictatorship Persecution and Perseverance Heimabende: Underground Self-Education The Impact of Kristallnacht and the Non-Aggression Pact New Opportunities, New Dangers “We have Gone on the Offensive” The Final Period of the Baum Groups The Noose Tightens

95 96 98 104 108 110 114 116

Chapter 6: The “Soviet Paradise” and the Demise of the Baum Groups Countering Goebbels’ Exhibit: Debates and Motives The Attack on the “Soviet Paradise” Arrests, Reprisals, Recriminations Were They Betrayed? Epilogue: Escape and Reunion

125 126 129 131 135 137

Chapter 7: The Baum Groups Remembered: Communist Martyrs or Jewish Resistance Fighters? Official Memory in the German Democratic Republic Antisemitic Campaigns in East Germany Baum as East German Hero Baum Veterans Remember Their Life in the Resistance Other Baum Veterans Replacing a Lost German Identity

145 146 150 152 154 161 164

Chapter 8: Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Resistance in Its Time and Beyond Jewish Resistance and Memory Legacies

177 180 182

Bibliography Index

187 197

Acknowledgments Numerous colleagues and mentors have enriched this manuscript with their insightful critiques, but space allows me to single out only a handful of them: Konrad Jarausch, whose patience, wisdom, and trust were indispensable; David Carlson, who subjected most of these chapters to a challenging and incisive “ruthless criticism of everything existing,” as we used to say; Cora Granata, whose comments were especially helpful on Chapter Seven; and Chris Hamner and Sharon Kowalsky. I also wish to express my gratitude to several institutions and their respective staffs for supporting my research, travel, and writing: The Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, which provided a fellowship that allowed me to research this book; the Center for European Studies at the University of North Carolina; and UNC’s Department of History. I profited greatly from the resources of the following archives and institutions: the Bundesarchiv in Lichterfelde, Berlin; the BA Zwischenarchiv at Dahlwitz-Hoppegarten; the Yad Vashem Archives; the Gedenkstätte deutscher Widerstand and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Berlin; the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine in Paris; Amsterdam’s International Institute of Social Research; and the Wiener Library in London. I would also like to acknowledge the encouragement and guidance I have received from past professors, particularly Rennie Brantz, Christopher Browning, Don Reid, Jay Smith, and Jim Winders. Some of the most valuable and stimulating exchanges I’ve had in recent years have been with friends who happen to reside outside the world of higher education, so thanks also to Will, Tim, Edwin, Andy, and Martin. Michael Kreutzer was very generous in sharing his expertise at an early stage of my research. I would not presume to match the work of the leading authorities on the Baum groups—Eric Brothers and Regina Scheer, in addition to Michael—but I hope my chapters on Baum complement their efforts in some small way. I also owe a large debt to the veterans of the anti-Nazi underground who shared their

viii


experiences with me. Thanks in particular to Gerhard Zadek, who up until his passing in October 2005 dedicated great time and energy to the memorialization of the resistance and of pre-1933 German-Jewish life. Above all I thank my parents, who instilled in me a love not only for education but also for justice, and my wife, Marty—also my dearest friend and most valued compañera, to whom this book is dedicated. She knows I can’t express here how much she’s meant to me throughout this process. John Cox April 2009

Abbreviations BA Bundesarchiv Lichterfelde, Berlin BAZw Bundesarchiv Zwischenarchiv, Dahlwitz-Hoppegarten, Berlin CV Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Union of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith) DJJG Deutsch-Jüdische Jugendgemeinschaft (German-Jewish Youth Society) GDR German Democratic Republic (East Germany) GdW Gedenkstätte deutscher Widerstand, Berlin (German Resistance Memorial Center) IfZ Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich (Institute for Contemporary History) KJVD Kommunistische Jugendverband Deutschlands (Communist Youth Association of Germany) KPD Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (Communist Party of Germany) SED Sozialistische Einheitspartei (Socialist Unity Party, East Germany’s Communist party) SPD Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Party of Germany) Stasi Staatssicherheitsdienst (East German State Security Service) USPD Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany) YVA Yad Vashem archives, Jerusalem

Introduction On May 8, 1942, the Sowjetparadies (the “Soviet Paradise”), an exhibition staged by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels depicting the poverty and degradation of Russia under the “Jewish-Bolshevik” regime, opened with great fanfare in central Berlin’s Lustgarten square. Almost three years to the day before the real Red Army brought down the “thousand-year Reich,” a captured Soviet tank rumbled down the Unter den Linden boulevard to inaugurate the show. One newspaper predicted optimistically that it would be “the most successful political exhibition yet.... Several million people shall visit.”1 Not everyone was quite as enthusiastic. At approximately 8:00 p.m. on May 18, several explosives ignited around the periphery of the exhibition. Although fire trucks responded quickly, a portion of the installation burned that evening. “Again in our big cities a communist opposition…has established itself,” angrily wrote Goebbels in his diary the next day.2 Had the propaganda minister and his immediate superior, Adolf Hitler, known the identity of the saboteurs at the time, they would undoubtedly have been even more enraged: This bold action was organized by young Jews, and, further, by German Jews who were members of far leftist organizations. In the very same location—the Lustgarten—four decades later, East Berlin’s city government unveiled a memorial to the Herbert Baum groups, a network of resisters that was coordinated by GermanJewish Communist Herbert Baum, who had personally led the sabotage of the “Soviet Paradise.” The organizers of the November 1981 event saw in the Baum groups a stirring example of Communist resistance to the Hitler regime, the continuous invocation of which was essential to the legitimacy of the East German state. An inscription on the square, granite memorial celebrated the “young Communist Herbert Baum.” On the other side of the stone read the text: “Forever allied in friendship with the Soviet Union.” Two years later and only a few kilometers west of the Lustgarten, West German students campaigned to memorialize Herbert Baum on the campus of the Technical University of Berlin (TU). The Christian

2


Democrats’ student organization vigorously fought the proposal, declaring that “Herbert Baum fought a deeply inhuman system in order to establish a no less inhuman one.”3 The “Herbert Baum Building” would have been located on “June 17 Street,” which commemorates the 1953 workers’ uprising against the East German state—an event that the West German government never tired of citing to buttress its own narrative of Germany’s recent history.4 Weary of constant reminders of Communist “totalitarianism”—and now enduring the second year of the Helmut Kohl government—some of TU’s leftist students wished to advance their own interpretation of Germany’s tumultuous twentieth century. How would Herbert Baum and his comrades have regarded all this? Probably in widely differing ways, reflecting the multiple identities and political views that Baum’s network accommodated. Like many loose-knit circles of young dissidents, the Baum-organized groups were heterogeneous and should not be easily categorized. Although Baum was a committed member of the German Communist Party (KPD), his colleagues represented a variety of movements and influences and adhered to no single, rigid ideology. They were not alone in exhibiting open-mindedness and heterogeneity. While the Baum groups were the largest, they were but one of several resistance operations that constituted a vibrant subculture in Berlin, situated partially within the milieux created by Communists, Socialists, Trotskyists, and radical Jewish youth groups. Their larger organizations devastated by Nazi violence and police repression, young German-Jewish radicals and non-Jewish dissidents organized in small opposition circles, which were often connected through mutual friends or “members,” an indeterminate category. These underground groups were loosely structured and often congregated around one or two central figures. Therefore they are usually remembered by the names of the leaders: the Schulungskreise um Werner Schaumann, the Kreis um Heinz Joachim, or the Freundeskreis um Siegbert Rotholz, for example. A few dozen of these circles existed in Berlin in the 1930s and early 1940s, many of which shared some qualities of the Baum groups, such as secular left-wing politics, intellectual curiosity, and intense interest in literature and music. A typical meeting consisted of a half-dozen or so people gathered in an

Introduction

3

apartment discussing a novel or political tract. The same titles often appear on the “reading lists” of various underground groups, including circles that had no discernable connection with one another: novels by Upton Sinclair and B. Traven, plays by Goethe and Schiller, and the writings of Marxist thinkers. Some of these groups also carried out semi-public activities, stealthily distributing leaflets or waging “graffiti actions” by night. Others were more covert, and not all groups considered themselves to be explicitly political; in short, their actions ranged across a broad spectrum of refusal, nonconformity, and resistance. These groups often crossed paths, sometimes collaborating, at other times engaging in political debates or disagreements. Most of their members had been active in left-wing Zionist youth movements, non-Zionist Jewish groups, or smaller radical organizations, including anarchist or libertarian groups. Many young Jews involved in underground groups had been members of the Communist Party or the Social Democratic Party (SPD), or, if too young to have been politically active before the banning of the parties in 1933, at least identified with those traditions. (The Nazi government tried to facilitate Jewish emigration, and therefore did not ban all Zionist organizations until 1939. From 1933-39 the Haschomer Hazair—the major leftist Zionist movement—and many other Zionist youth groups maintained public or semi-public existences.) Young German Jews created an intellectually and politically robust subculture under the Third Reich. This subculture was distinct from the larger forces that fostered it because of the marginal status of these youths not only within Germany, but within the left parties and their underground operations. And in addition, these radical young Jews were even alienated from the larger Jewish community, which was dominated by their parents’ generation and its relatively conservative attitudes and politics. It was this triple alienation—from a society that rejected them; from their parents’ generation, whose faith in assimilation they could not uphold; and to a lesser degree from the two working-class parties whose politics they largely shared—that drove them to form or join groups that were outside the preexisting political movements.

4


Groups such as those led by Baum defy easy categorization, as they inherited some characteristics from the various traditions mentioned above. Therefore, these small circles, and their interconnections, have largely escaped the notice of historians concentrating on one or another facet of anti-Nazi resistance or of youth subcultures. This book challenges prevailing research, which has examined such groups separately, if at all; illuminates in a new way the collective experience of thousands of young Jews by exploring the intersections of these dissident circles; analyzes why the story of Jewish left-wing resistance does not fit neatly into any of the various national and political narratives that were constructed after the war; and offers new arguments regarding the ultimate legacies of German-Jewish resistance. Chapter One establishes the historic background by briefly discussing the German-Jewish experience and the origins and growth of Jewish youth groups in Germany. The second chapter brings us up to the disaster of January 1933 and examines the involvement of young Jews in leftist groups that had split from the Social Democrats and Communists. Chapter Three analyzes the successes and failures of Berlin’s KPD underground, focusing on the experience of several young Jews who, at various times, collaborated with Herbert Baum. I then introduce the Baum groups, providing an overview of their history in Chapter Four before delving more deeply into their internal lives and activities in the next two chapters. The seventh chapter discusses the use—or misuse—of the Baum groups by the post-war Communist state in East Germany and the contrasting memories of various veterans of Baum’s resistance network, while the eighth and final chapter argues for the importance of these forms of resistance to Jewish as well as German history. Varieties of Anti-Nazi Resistance For many years after World War II public and scholarly understanding of the anti-Nazi resistance was distorted by Cold Warinspired political considerations. Many of the early studies of German anti-Nazi resistance advanced a very narrow definition of “resistance”: Only a force that could have potentially overthrown Hitler was worthy of the term “resistance” and merited serious study. Accordingly, most West German and U.S. studies of resistance focused nearly exclusively

Introduction

5

upon Claus von Stauffenberg and his fellow conspirators, who attempted to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944. “A rehabilitated and democratized [West] Germany needed heroes,” pointed out historian Theodore Hamerow—preferably conservative ones. By presumably providing continuity with Germany’s more humane, pre-Nazi traditions, the nationalist July 20 opposition bolstered West Germany’s democratic credentials.5 Numerous books were published that examined only von Stauffenberg and his allies, but that were adorned with titles or subtitles referring to “the Resistance,” suggesting (not so subtly) that this was the extent of conscious or organized opposition to Nazism. By limiting the “resistance” in this manner, Western politicians and academics could also ignore or denigrate all resistance originating in Germany’s leftist parties—further reinforcing Cold War prejudices.6 Reversing this approach, many East German historians countered that the only true “Widerstand” (resistance) was that which consciously struggled against the system responsible for fascism, i.e., capitalism.7 Such tendentious definitions turned “resistance” into a posthumous honorific to be bestowed by the historian on both sides of the Berlin Wall. Fortunately, an evolution in research—as well as in the social and political climate—engendered more subtle understandings of resistance, particularly in the West, that were no longer determined by Cold War categories. In 1979, Konrad Kwiet asserted that “any action aimed at countering the ideology and policies of National Socialism” should be deemed resistance, including those that, “even without the intention, were nonetheless directed against” Nazism.8 Other historians have supplemented Kwiet’s argument, if not establishing quite as broad a definition.9 Martin Broszat used the term Resistenz—which has medical connotations of the body's natural resistance to foreign impurities—in the socio-political context, describing unconscious resistance to the encroachment of National Socialist ideology and racial indoctrination. In an essay published in 1991, Detlev Peukert outlined a continuum of more tangible and conscious oppositional behavior, from “occasional, private nonconformity, proceeding to wider acts of refusal, and then to outright protest, in which some intentional effect on public opinion is involved.”10 The state’s totalitarian ambitions and its dread of any sort of independent thinking converted relatively in-

6


nocuous acts into resistance. The average citizen who relayed an antigovernment joke or surreptitiously listened to foreign radio on occasion became, in the view of the Nazis, a political opponent. Therefore, the distinction between conscious and unconscious resistance should further discourage us from establishing rigid, static definitions. Focusing more narrowly on Jewish resistance, Yehuda Bauer has used the Hebrew term amidah to illuminate other ways in which many thousands of Jews defied their tormentors. Amidah literally translates as “standing up against,” according to Bauer, “but that does not capture the deeper sense of the word.” For Bauer, amidah includes “smuggling food into ghettos; mutual self-sacrifice within the family to avoid starvation or worse; cultural, educational, religious, and political activities taken to strengthen morale; the work of doctors, nurses, and educators to consciously maintain health and moral fiber to enable individual and group survival; and, of course, armed rebellion or the use of force” against the “Germans and their collaborators”—in short, “refus[ing] to budge in the face of brutal force.”11 Nechama Tec, who survived the German occupation of her native Poland and has written extensively on the Holocaust and Jewish resistance, argued that acts “motivated by the intention to thwart, limit or end the exercise of power by the oppressor over the oppressed” constituted resistance.12 For the purposes of this study, I will define “resistance” as any individual or collective effort to impede Nazism’s goals and ideology. The Nazis sought not only total societal control and, eventually, the physical destruction of European Jewry—they also aimed to degrade and dehumanize their victims, stripping them of their dignity and, in the case of the Jews, their cultural heritage and traditions. Therefore the actions of Jews and others to assert their dignity and uphold human solidarity also qualify as resistance.13 Sources of Resistance: Jewish, Youth, Leftist Movements The Nazi dictatorship was too efficient and ruthless to be threatened by opposition from any source, as attested to by the grisly fate of the July 20 conspirators, many of whom were cruelly tortured before their executions.14 But like other tyrannies before and since, the regime was unable to fulfill its totalitarian ambitions. Young people in

Introduction

7

particular were a constant, nettlesome fount of discontent and rebellion—also similar to other cases throughout history. Normal youthful impulses toward rebellion could easily lead to nonconformist behavior under the abnormal conditions of dictatorship. Particularly noteworthy among young German dissidents were the so-called Edelweiß Pirates, bands of freedom-loving Germans steeped in the romantic, semi-anarchistic culture of bygone days. “Armed with their rucksacks, sheath knives and bread-and-butter rations … they spent a carefree time with like-minded peers from other cities, away from adult control, though always on the watch for Hitler Youth patrols, whom they either sought to avoid, prudently calculating their own strength, or taunted and fell upon with relish.”15 Few of the teenagers who formed these bands were guided by any political ideology, although most came from the working class. Other German youths were spurred to action by political or religious convictions and constituted a self-conscious, organized resistance. Young students at the university in Munich, for example, courageously published and distributed literature in 1942-43, invoking humanistic Christian values in their eloquent condemnations of Nazism. Emboldened by the German army’s defeat at Stalingrad at the end of January 1943, Hans and Sophie Scholl and other members of the “White Rose” organized a final leaflet action at the university that led to their arrest. After a series of trials, leading inevitably to executions—which usually followed the verdicts by no more than three hours—the White Rose was suppressed, but its defiance helped fortify other resisters. “The courageous deeds of the White Rose became known beyond Germany even during the war,” reported one historian. “Thomas Mann, among others, honored them” in BBC broadcasts in June 1943, and the Communist-led “National Committee ‘Free Germany’” published a leaflet praising them, thousands of which were dropped by English airplanes over Germany.16 For young Jews, opposition to the dictatorship was not a choice or a luxury, as it was for many of the antiauthoritarian, if hedonistic, Edelweißpiraten. Prior to 1933 young Jews had become segregated from the large German youth movements and could not rely on social support networks that originated within that environment. Yet if much separated Jewish youth dissidents from their non-Jewish coun-

8


terparts, they had much in common in well. Like other young people, they often forged alliances through informal contacts and friendships. Several members of a group loosely organized by Lisa Attenberger in the mid-1930s, for example, became acquainted at a party; some of them met others through personal and sexual relationships—the prevalence of which also introduced some tensions into Attenberger’s group. And this was a group organized by youths who attempted to adhere to the discipline of the KPD, an organization not known as a den of libertines. To the degree that German Jews organized to combat the Nazi state, they did so primarily by joining groups that originated in the pre-1933 working-class and Zionist movements. Even for conservative Jews who sought allies, there was very little room within the bourgeois resistance, whose leaders had no intention of restoring the civil rights denied Jews.17 Yet Germany’s working-class parties, the Communists in particular, were not always accommodating of Jews or of Jewish concerns. In studying the connections between Jewish youths and “Marxist” groups, I also confront these questions: How were Marxist or Communist doctrines adapted by left-wing Jewish groups and circles? Why were Marxism or Soviet Communism more attractive to many young Jews than were liberalism or Zionism, and, in some cases, how did young leftist Jews attempt to reconcile Jewish ethics and traditions with Marxism? But Jewish resisters were often motivated less by political fervor than by a desire to maintain the social networks and sense of solidarity of the pre-1933 days. Felix Heymann said that he and his friends did not “originally come together in order to form a communist group,” but out of a “yearning for the sense of togetherness that we had experienced in the Jewish youth groups,” which grew “ever stronger” during the years suffered under the Nazi dictatorship.18 His recollection is all the more poignant as it was given under interrogation in the last weeks of his short life; he was executed at the age of twenty-five for his activity in one of Baum’s groups. Yet Heymann and his comrades left a memorable record of the creativity and resilience of young Jewish Germans as they faced the abyss.

Introduction

9 NOTES

1

Quoted in Kurt Schilde, Jugendorganisationen und Jugendopposition in BerlinKreuzberg 1933-45: Eine Dokumentation (Berlin: Elefanten Verlag, 1983), 114.

2

Joseph Goebbels, Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, part 2, vol. 4 (Munich: K.G. Saur, 1995), 318.

3

Allgemeiner Studentenausschuβ of the Technical University of Berlin, eds., Die Berliner Widerstandsgruppe um Herbert Baum: Informationen zur Diskussion um die Benennung des Hauptgebäudes der TU Berlin (Berlin: AStA-Druckerei, 1984), 71.

4

The campaign by the TU students, who demanded that the university’s main building be renamed after Baum, stretched into 1984, but was ultimately unsuccessful.

5

“Those who died in the resistance became the martyred forerunners of the Federal Republic…. They provided moral legitimation [sic] for the postwar order in Central Europe.” Theodore Hamerow, On the Road to the Wolf’s Lair: German Resistance to Hitler (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997), 6.

6

In an influential 1950 book on the national resistance, Gerhard Ritter, a leading German historian of the mid-twentieth century, dismissed the German Communists, in particular those involved in the Rote Kapelle spy network, as “traitors” who worked “in the service of the enemy.” Ritter, Carl Goerdeler und die deutsche Widerstandsbewegung (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1955), 103.

7

Walter Ulbricht, Zur Geschichte der Neuesten Zeit, vol. 2, Aus Reden und Aufsätze, 1933-1946 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1953), 7-58. GDR politicians and historians used the term “antifascist resistance” to designate those—the Communists—who were opposed not simply to Hitler but to fascism, which itself was simply the logical, if extreme, culmination of capitalist relations.

8

Konrad Kwiet, “Problems of Jewish Resistance Historiography,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 24 (1979), 41.

9

For other perceptive discussions of this debate, see Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problem and Perspectives of Interpretation (London: Edward Arnold, 2000), 183-217, and Francis Nicosia, “Resistance and Self-Defense: Zionism and

10

Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany Antisemitism in Inter-War Germany,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 42 (1997), 125-34.

10

Detlev Peukert, “Working-Class Resistance: Problems and Options,” in David Clay Large, ed., Contending With Hitler: Varieties of German Resistance in the Third Reich (Washington: German Historical Institute, 1991), 36-37.

11

Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 120.

12

Nechama Tec, Jewish Resistance: Facts, Omissions and Distortions (Washington: Miles Lerner Center for the Study of Jewish Resistance, 1997), 4.

13

I do not claim that this working definition is wholly original, and hasten to acknowledge my debt to Tec, Peukert, Bauer, and others who have meditated at length on these questions. My definition of “resistance” is also informed by my study of other historical examples of resistance to oppression, in particular in U.S. slave society and in Latin America during the second half of the last century.

14

Peter Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance 1933-1945 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1977), 509-34.

15

Detlev Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 156. Peukert provided the classic account of the Edelweiß Pirates in his 1980 Die Edelweißpiraten: Protestbewegung jugendlichen Arbeiter im Dritten Reich (Cologne: Bund-Verlag, 1983). For an entertaining first-hand account, see Kurt Piehl, Latscher, Pimpfe und Gestapo: die Geschichte eines Edelweisspiraten (Frankfurt am Main: Brandes & Apsel Verlag, 1988).

16

Monika Mayr, “The White Rose,” in Wolfgang Benz and Walter H. Pehle, eds., Lexikon des deutschen Widerstandes (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1994), 320.

17

Theodore Hamerow examined the attitudes of the conservative resistance toward Jews—which ranged from traditional antisemitism to ambivalence and, in some cases, opposition to Nazi persecutions of the Jews—in On the Road to the Wolf’s Lair, especially 126-30, 157-62, 294-311, and 381-85.

18

BA Zw, Z-C 10905. 30 November 1942 Felix Heymann interrogation record.

Chapter One

Assimilation and Alienation: The Origins and Growth of German-Jewish Youth Movements During the last years of the Weimar Republic young Jews felt increasingly besieged by the prejudice and hatred stirred up by radical rightists. Even before 1933, many young German Jews had become estranged from their peers, alienated from their role models in society and in their own communities, and disillusioned with long-held values and beliefs. Two generations after legal emancipation—and despite their genuine attachment to German culture and efforts at assimilation—they were painfully aware of the persistence of antiJewish prejudice and discrimination in German society. They also faced the same problems encountered by non-Jewish youth in Germany, which stemmed from the deepening socio-economic crisis and the consequent political instability that was manifested in daily street fights between rightists and leftists by the early 1930s. Many thousands of young Jews responded to these challenges by joining groups that not only provided some shelter and comfort, but that could also be used to fight the ominous forces threatening German Jewry. As one writer astutely noted, the “intellectual and psychological support which was the sole means for personality to develop harmoniously … could only be obtained by young Jews within the milieu of the youth movement,” which grew exponentially after Hitler’s ascent to power.1 A large minority of these young people, confronted with various choices, formed far-left groups and circles—or reshaped the politics of existing groups—while maintaining, consciously or not, a deep connection with their backgrounds in the pre-1933 youth movements. The fragmented and uneven anti-Nazi resistance of the 1930s and early 1940s originated in the similarly fragmented and unstable youth movements and cultural trends of Weimar. Likewise, the anti-Nazi resistance of German Jews would emerge from an intermingling of diverse traditions. This process began well before 1933, when Jews

12


participated in the development of Germany’s huge youth movement, out of which they created an increasingly distinct Jewish youth movement and culture that would spawn the resistance circles of the Nazi period that are discussed in later chapters. The Jewish Experience in Germany One must avoid the temptation to view the German-Jewish experience entirely through the prism of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. While the Nazi genocide will continue to cast its shadow over German-Jewish relations for many generations, it is a mistake to overlook the long and rich history of German Jewry that preceded Hitler—or to simply view this history as the prelude to an inevitable slaughter. It was not predetermined that the Jews’ relation to German society and culture would lead inexorably to Hitler’s “final solution,” any more than Germany itself was destined to succumb to Nazism. The Jews of Germany had a troubled and contradictory relationship with German gentiles for many centuries before the advent of Nazism. The history of the Jews in German-speaking lands extends back to the fourth century C.E., when Cologne had a substantial Jewish population. Christian antisemitism—based upon the Jews’ presumed guilt for the death of Jesus and their failure to accept the divinity of Christ—separated Jews from Christian Europeans throughout the first millennium of the Common Era. The Crusades, however, signaled a drastic intensification of anti-Jewish sentiment and violence. The First Crusade was initiated in 1096 with the massacres of Jews in the Rhineland by rampaging French and German zealots. By the middle of the thirteenth century, Jews throughout central Europe were confined to reviled occupations such as money-lending and targeted by fantastic allegations, most notably the infamous “blood libel” myth: Jews allegedly murdered Christian children in order to use their blood for certain rituals. This legend first surfaced in Germany in 1235, and in German-speaking lands and elsewhere the Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century gave new force to the blood libel and similar myths. Traumatized by the massive loss of life and wracked by confusion, many Europeans found an explanation for this blight in the charge that Jews were poisoning the wells—or simply that God was punishing Christian Europeans for

German-Jewish Youth Movements

13

allowing the Jews to live in their midst. Germany made its own contributions to medieval Jew-hatred—most notably, Martin Luther’s lurid polemics of the 1540s—but the plight facing the Jews there was not significantly better or worse than in other parts of Christian Europe. With its emphasis on rational thought and its secularizing impulse, the Enlightenment created a far more tolerant atmosphere for European Jewry. The German Enlightenment flourished from about 1750-1848, and gave considerable impetus to the Jewish struggle for expanded legal and civil rights. The “Basic Rights of the People,” adopted by the short-lived Frankfurt Parliament during the 1848 revolution, granted Jews legal equality; while this act lost its force with the defeat of that revolution, several states subsequently granted Jews equal rights, including Hamburg (1860), Baden (1862), and Württemberg (1864). The most significant victory in the long campaign for emancipation was secured through a law passed by the North German Confederation in July 1869 that stated: “All remaining restrictions in civil and political rights based on differences of religion are hereby abolished.”2 And with the creation of the German Empire (Kaiserreich) in 1871, the 1869 law was extended to the entire Reich. The last quarter of the nineteenth century also witnessed a newfound assertiveness on the part of German Jews, which would have implications for Jewish politics of subsequent decades. While the struggle for emancipation had been waged almost entirely on legal terrain, pushed forward by a small number of lawyers and other Jewish professionals. With the establishment in 1893 of the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens—the Central Union of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith, usually shortened to Centralverein or CV—German Jews began to organize for the first time to protect and expand their rights. However, the promise held by legal emancipation was undermined by the daily reality of continued prejudice and discrimination. “They had become equal citizens,” noted one historian, “but remained excluded from the ranks of officers of the Prussian army, from government posts, and from most of academia. They had achieved considerable wealth but were not invited to certain social occasions. They had won their long battle for legal emancipation” but were

14


confronted with a new and even more poisonous variant of antisemitism—one based on “race”—that gained momentum in the last years of the century.3 Assimilation: An Uneasy Balance Within the context of German unification and the legal and political campaign for Jewish rights, the steadily growing Jewish population was assimilating into German culture.4 No more than 50,000 Jews lived in German territories in 1700; there were about a quarter-million by 1820, mostly in Prussia, and about 380,000 in 1871—1.5 percent, the highest proportion it would reach. (In 1933 the Jewish population was 503,000, representing 0.76 percent of the population.) As late as the early nineteenth century, most German Jews spoke Yiddish, rarely married non-Jews, resided in their own districts, and wore distinctive clothing. Yet by the middle of the century, a rapidly increasing number of Jews had moved to places that had heretofore been closed to them, sent their children to nondenominational schools, “and knew their Goethe and Schiller better than [they knew] any Jewish Bible commentator,” to quote one observer.5 In short, they had “moved out of the ghetto,” to borrow the title of a 1973 book.6 But the process of assimilation was never easy or straightforward. Some observers have written of the “anguish of assimilation,” a dilemma posed by dual loyalties of patriotism versus religious and family allegiances.7 The great German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, as one example, attempted without success to find a balance, and ended up estranged from both Jews and Germans; others were more fortunate, and found little intrinsic contradiction. Despite the quandaries, it is clear that most Jews felt a genuine attraction to German culture, and this was particularly true of intellectuals. As historian Konrad Fischer has pointed out, “Beginning with [Moses] Mendelssohn, Jewish writers in Germany almost universally used the German language to express their innermost thoughts, and they would carry this intellectual framework with them all of their lives, including into their eventual exile.”8 Meanwhile, more and more European Jews—especially those suffering persecution and economic privation in such countries as


15

Poland, Romania, and Russia—emigrated to Germany. “Many looked to the recently unified Germany for a permanent haven,” noted Fischer; “they were attracted by its advanced technology, its superb educational institutions, its world-renowned reputation as a land of great poets, philosophers, and bold speculators, and its standing as a Rechtsstaat (legal state) that had recently granted Jews full civil rights.” Fischer quoted a Jewish member of the Prussian parliament, who in 1871 “remarked with a sigh of relief…‘finally after years of waiting in vain we have landed in a safe harbor.’”9 So the Jewish experience in Germany in the century preceding Hitler was one rife with ambiguities: significant, if uneasy, assimilation and a genuine attraction to German culture co-existing with continued discrimination and occasional persecution, if less severe than in most neighboring lands. This is how it appeared even in the early years of the Nazi dictatorship to a young German-Jewish radical, Henry Kellerman, who later recalled: “I insisted that while the objective emancipation of Jews in Germany may have been suspended…the subjective one, that is our historic and cultural affinity to the environment in which we had grown up and lived our lives, would and must continue.”10 Kellerman insisted to his friends that it was “up to us to bring about the final synthesis between our spiritual heritage and our living environment, in this case, between Jewish religion and European or, more strictly speaking, German culture.” Consciously or not, Kellerman found himself echoing the words of Heine, who—exactly one century before Kristallnacht—celebrated “the deep affinity that prevails between these two ethical nations, Jews and Germans,” who together would create a New Jerusalem in Germany.11 Kellerman, and Heine before him, can be forgiven their excessive optimism; the honesty and passion of such sentiments only renders more painful the separation of later years. German and German-Jewish Youth Groups, 1900-1933 The nucleus of the post-1933 dissident subculture took shape during the three decades prior to Hitler’s rise to power. The principal German youth group of the Second Empire was the Wandervogel (literally, “wandering bird,” also translated as “bird of passage”). Founded at the turn of the century, this organization grew to about

16


two million members by the onset of the First World War. The activities of the Wandervogel, as its name suggests, centered on hiking and outdoor voyages. The group was inspired in large part by German neo-romanticism, with its emphasis on youth, beauty, and nature. The Social-Democratic Party (SPD), the chief working-class party of the era, developed its own youth culture and organizations, which by 1910 offered serious competition to the middle-class Wandervogel for the allegiance of young Germans. The SPD youth groups undertook many similar activities, while placing higher priority on politics and culture. It was only natural that, as Jews integrated into German society, young Jews joined these German youth movements. Yet they did not always find within the youth movements a haven from the daily pressures of life in a society that granted them legal protections but preserved a tradition of discrimination and prejudice. To the contrary: The Wandervogel proved to be all too typical of its time. The group’s leaders launched an antisemitic campaign in 1913, signaled by a special issue of its newspaper that featured lurid propaganda.12 Contemporaneously, some regional branches began to exclude Jews. Other branches, including some in Berlin, protested this campaign, which was a calculated move toward rightist and nationalist politics that saw the Wandervogel evolve into the super-patriotic Bündische Jugend at the beginning of the world war. Yet, as one veteran of the German-Jewish youth scene later opined, the exclusion of Jews from the German movement was due not only to antisemitism but also to “a kind of antisemitism—the feeling that an intense community like a youth group called for a mentality common to all its members and that Jewish boys and girls, with their different background and their different mental habits, just did not fit in.”13 For their part, many Jews harbored similar feelings; despite their assimilation into many areas of professional, cultural, and political life, there was still considerable social segregation between Jews and non-Jews, and each side was reasonably content with that state of affairs. The growth of specifically Jewish youth groups during and after the war was thus the product of interrelated factors: discrimination in the Wandervogel, the failure of genuine social assimilation, and the


17

development among many Jewish youths of a stronger national consciousness. The pre-war Jewish youth movements can be divided into three categories: those that sought a symbiosis of German and Jewish identities; those that were defined by their stress upon Judaism and that maintained a positive view of life in the Diaspora; and Zionist groups, most of which saw emigration to Palestine as a long-term rather than an immediate goal.14 Likewise, the development of two influential groups—one nonZionist (the Kameraden), the other Zionist (the Blau-Weiß)— transformed the Jewish youth subculture. Founded in 1916, the Kameraden (Comrades), to which many future anti-Nazi resisters belonged in their formative years, quickly became the largest nonZionist youth organization. The organization attracted many former members of the Wandervogel, along with youths who were oriented to the mainstream Centralverein (CV). In its celebration of nature and its glorification of a somewhat mythologized pre-industrial, rural society, the Kameraden was characteristic of the prevailing German youth culture.15 The Kameraden underwent a metamorphosis that mirrored—or more precisely foreshadowed—German Jews’ evolving views toward Jewish identity and also toward Zionism. Although the organization began as a rather mainstream, middle-class movement of assimilated Jews, in the early 1920s a split developed between those who advocated a stronger Jewish identity for the organization and those who affirmed a Jewish place in German culture. The world war had strongly affected the Kameraden, as it had every element within German society. The optimistic worldview of Germany’s urban middle classes, to which virtually the entire membership of the group belonged, had been severely shaken by the war and by the revolution of 1918-19, prompting the younger generation “to search for alternative values and identity.”16 This crisis enhanced the recruitment of virtually all the various youth groups, while simultaneously provoking many of the Kameraden to seek, in their terms, more “authentic” (as opposed to “bourgeois”) expressions of Jewishness. By the late 1920s, the group was divided into so-called Jewish and German factions, with the “German” faction dominant.

18


Never able to resolve this schism, the group finally disbanded in spring 1932, splitting into three formations, the most important of which, for our purposes, was the left-Zionist Werkleute. This group included Walter Sack, a friend of Herbert Baum’s who himself would organize underground groups after 1933, and the historian Walter Laqueur. The Werkleute's name (literally, “work-people” or workmen) was inspired by the great German poet Rainer Maria Rilke and by the Austrian-Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, whose intellectual influence upon the organization was pronounced.17 During its brief existence, the Werkleute maintained an internal life much like that of later underground dissident circles, characterized by a vibrant social and intellectual atmosphere and endless late-night discussions of social theory, Marxism, and Jewish history. Like other Zionist groups, its plans for settlement in Palestine gained greater urgency after January 1933; it began sending members there upon Hitler’s ascension, and established a kibbutz in 1935.18 The largest Zionist group, the Blau-Weiβ (“Blue-White,” the colors of the Zionist flag) also attracted many young Jews who in subsequent years participated in the underground struggle against Hitler. Gerhard Bry, later a member of a socialist resistance group, remembered the Blau-Weiβ for its “typical features of European youth movements: we hiked, we camped, we played ball, we sang and we danced around camp fires.” Bry linked the Blau-Weiβ in his memory with the underground subculture of the 1930s through his recollection of the group’s most noteworthy feature: “I omitted one activity which was very important and took up a lot of time: we talked. We talked not only about everything that existed between heaven and earth, but also about topics extending beyond this generous range. Of course we talked about socialism.”19 The German section of the left-wing Haschomer Hazair (the Young Guard), which attracted many future anti-Nazi dissidents, was founded in 1928, and was affiliated with a European-wide movement of about 38,000 members, mostly in Poland and elsewhere in eastern Europe.20 The Haschomer Hazair initially met with some hostility from the better-established Zionist organizations because of its rather intransigent socialist politics. The Haschomer Hazair functioned in a secretive manner for the first few years of its existence—doubtless


19

contributing to allegations of infiltration or “red assimilation” that followed its members—before launching itself as a public movement with a conference in Berlin in mid-1931.21 This group was significant for its inclusion of women in its leadership, and some former members recalled that discussions of women’s issues, as well as of homosexuality, were not uncommon. While the group’s ardently socialist politics distinguished it from the other leftist youth groups, its activities were quite similar: Former members remembered long evenings spent discussing and debating the writings of Stefan George and other poets, social theorists including Nietzsche and Freud, and such revolutionaries as Kropotkin and Trotsky. This broad-ranging intellectual palette reflected the spirit of intellectual curiosity, and aversion to dogma, that would also mark many of the circles that the group’s members would later form. Few self-respecting Trotskyists would be caught reading Kropotkin—nor would the typical anarchist be caught with the latest book by Trotsky, architect of the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion—yet there was ample space within this subculture for many seemingly contradictory ideas and theories. German-Jewish Youth Groups, 1933-1939 The political terrain for these youth movements changed drastically with the victory of the Nazi party in January 1933. For many non-Jews, the Nazis’ antisemitism could be ignored or trivialized—and, indeed, Nazi leaders up to and including Hitler were often circumspect and shrewd in their anti-Jewish demagogy. Also, the persecutions inflicted upon Jews proceeded in an uneven fashion; the round-ups and beatings of Communists and Social Democrats were much more visible in the regime’s early months. While it was impossible for the Jews of Germany to foresee their eventual fate, it was clear as the Nazi party consolidated its power that there was no turning back the clock—and indeed the new government and its thugs set about making life miserable for the nation’s Jewish population from the start. The Nazi takeover triggered an immediate, substantial growth in the size of Jewish youth groups. The proportion of young German Jews who were members of one or another youth formation jumped

20


from about one-fourth in the early 1930s to approximately one-half by 1935. As Jewish youth activist Henry Kellerman wrote, “As I think back to those turbulent days in 1933 where almost everything we had believed in and trusted was shattered overnight, nothing seemed more urgent or more important than to find something that we could hold on to, something that would steady and unite us as we drifted about in a sea of uncertainty with nobody to guide us, to restore our sense of direction and our self-confidence and, more urgently yet, to lift us above the dismal realities of the day.”22 Kellerman emphasized that his milieu offered some protection, which was what he and others needed before they could even begin thinking about resistance: “We needed each other. We needed the comfort of our company, the reassuring knowledge that, expelled as we were, we were not alone.”23 Several new groups emerged during the first years of the dictatorship, filling a void left by the 1929 disbandment of the BlauWeiß and accommodating the large numbers of youths who were eager to join a Jewish organization.24 While many of these groups represented continuity with the pre-Hitler Jewish youth movements, some young Jews gravitated to smaller, more radical groups, which gained sustenance from the ignominious collapse of the two mass working-class parties in the last months of Weimar. The Schwarze Haufen was one such group. Its members identified themselves as anarchists, and were influenced by Marxist theory as well as by the left-wing Jewish youth subcultures from which most of them came. The group’s name derived from a song from the German peasants’ uprisings of the mid-1520s—one indication of its members’ identification with a long tradition of German radicalism and resistance. Before joining the Communist Party, the young Jewish radical Rudi Arndt—who later organized the resistance at Buchenwald concentration camp, where he was murdered in 1940—led a Schwarzer Haufen group in Berlin. The ease with which young people like Arndt moved between anarchist and official Communist groups testifies again to the spirit of open-mindedness and non-sectarianism that often prevailed in the culture of the underground resistance. The non-Zionist Bund Deutsch-Jüdischer Jugend (Association of German-Jewish Youth, or BDJJ) was founded in December 1933 as an outgrowth of a larger organization that had originated in the mid-


21

1920s. The BDJJ drew much of its membership from the Centralverein, the major organization of German Jews since the end of the nineteenth century, with which it shared the view that the Jewish people would realize their “legitimate mode of existence” in the Diaspora, rather than in any Jewish homeland.25 The Bund changed its name to the Ring-Bund Jüdischer Jugend in 1936, when the state ordered the group to remove the word “German” from its name. It had about nine thousand members by this time, including several associates of Herbert Baum’s.26 The Ring-Bund developed an elaborate cultural and educational program to maintain the morale of its members. Walter Sack, an important figure in Communist and Jewish underground circles until his exile in 1937, was one of several of Herbert Baum’s friends who participated in the Ring-Bund. He recalled discussions of music and literature, mentioning novels by Jack London, Nikolai Bogdanov, and Upton Sinclair—as well as of “the classics of Marxism,” such as the Communist Manifesto and Capital.27 The intensifying repression and antisemitic campaigns of 1934-35 obliged the group to prepare its members for emigration. Palestine was not the first choice: The Ring-Bund joined with other groups investigating various sites in South America and elsewhere. The RingBund was finally banned in January 1937, when non-Zionist Jewish youth groups were suppressed. The state was content to tolerate the Zionist youth groups for a while longer—after all, they were, from the Nazi point of view, working to remove the Jewish presence from Germany—but the Zionists too were banned a few weeks after the November 1938 pogrom. Participation in the Jewish youth movement was, paradoxically, both a courageous assertion of Jewish identity and an attempt to retain some degree of involvement in German society. The growing awareness of Jewish heritage led to boldness as well as a certain pride, similar to that displayed by other oppressed peoples in recent history. Writing in 1994, Kellerman recalled that “in those April days of 1933 the Jüdische Rundschau, the chief organ of the Zionist movement in Germany, published a front page editorial that featured the banner headline ‘Wear the Yellow Badge with Pride’—a Jewish equivalent to ‘Black is Beautiful.’” Yet at the same time, involvement in organized

22


social and political activity signified a desire to remain a part of the broader culture: We “had decided to stay, partly from lack of alternatives, partly in order to wait out and stare down the Thousand Year Reich that Hitler had proclaimed,” recalled Kellerman.28 “Our return to Judaism, however, was not intended as an exodus from Germany. We never for a second accepted the Nazi verdict that expunged our German identity.” But Kellerman was speaking of the very earliest days of the Nazi tyranny. He and his friends would soon find it difficult to retain their faith in a German future, and would be pushed into exile, resignation, or resistance. Socialism and Jewish Youth Politics Why did the resistance activities of Jewish youth so often take a radical and even anti-capitalist character? One reason is that the socialist and labor movements were stronger in Germany than anywhere else in the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By 1912 the SPD possessed the largest delegation in the Reichstag, with about one-third of the popular vote.29 Despite the political collapse of the SPD on the eve of World War I, subsequent splits within the Social Democracy, and the defeat of the workers’ uprisings of 1918-19, leftist parties were strong throughout the Weimar years, and the two largest parties—the SPD and the Communist Party—commanded the allegiance of millions of workers. But this in itself does not adequately explain the attraction that socialist ideas held for many Jews. As the right-wing nationalists liked to point out, though with considerable exaggeration, Jews were disproportionately represented in both the membership and especially the leadership of the left-wing parties.30 From Karl Marx and Ferdinand Lassalle to Rosa Luxemburg and Kurt Eisner, Jews were often in the leading ranks of the socialist movements. Long-time SPD leader Eduard Bernstein estimated that approximately ten percent of his party was Jewish, and Jews constituted a similar proportion of the party's Reichstag delegations during Weimar.31 Approximately ten percent of the Communist Party’s leadership was Jewish in the late 1920s, although this figure would decline by 1933, and the number of Jews in the KPD’s membership was roughly proportionate to their percentage of the overall German population.32 It was also those


23

movements—the Social Democratic somewhat more consistently than the Communist—that not only welcomed Jews, but fought against anti-Jewish prejudice in German society. While their elders were much more likely to adhere to liberal political movements, the youths were, especially after the experience of war and the rise of antisemitism, drawn to more radical perspectives.33 The ethical dimension of Marxism was appealing to those steeped in Jewish moral traditions, and the natural tendency of the persecuted to seek answers helps explain the allegiance of many secular Jews. The intellectualism of many middle-class Jews also helps explain the appeal of Marxism, and many of the subjects of the following chapters discovered Marxism through a process of intellectual inquiry. Gerhard Bry was introduced to the ideas of Marx and Engels while studying at the university in Heidelberg, and it provided for him not simply a set of answers, as it did for many, but an intriguing new intellectual world. From his first encounter with the classics of the genre, Bry challenged some of Marx’s arguments. “I thought that I should not accept Marx’s claim that the interests of the oppressed classes tend to become the interests of society, and that their consciousness tends to become some sort of historical truth,” Bry countered.34 Other young Jewish radicals like Gerhard Zadek and Walter Loewenheim (see Chapter Two) approached Marxism in a similar manner, not worshipping the words of Marx, Engels, or anyone else as dogma, but prepared to defend Marxism from its detractors. This unorthodox, highly intellectual approach was typical of many of the youths who would populate the dissident subcultures of Berlin in the 1930s. It also helps explain why many young Jewish radicals fit uneasily in the SPD and, especially, the KPD, where open questioning of the tenets of the party was deemed heretical. Indeed, we will see that “socialism” and “Marxism” meant different things to different people: Many young Jews grafted those ideologies onto their own traditions; others, who had no interest in Jewish history or politics, fully accepted the programs of the KPD or SPD. Yet others—including many members of the Baum groups and other such groups during the Third Reich—created their own syntheses.

24

Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany NOTES

1

Chaim Schatzker, “The Jewish Youth Movement in Germany in the Holocaust Period (I): Youth in Confrontation with a New Reality,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 32 (1987), 168.

2

Michael A. Meyer, ed., German-Jewish History in Modern Times, vol. 3, Integration in Dispute, 1871-1918 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 1.

3

Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 19.

4

Wolfgang Scheffler, Judenverfolgung im Dritten Reich (Berlin: Colloquium Verlag, 1964), 14.

5

Brenner, 19.

6

Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770-1870 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973).

7

Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichroeder and the Building of the German Empire (New York: Knopf, 1977), 11.

8

Konrad Fischer, The History of an Obsession: German Judeophobia and the Holocaust (New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1998), 72. It is worth noting that Theodor Herzl wrote the programmatic document of modern Zionism, Der Judenstaat, in German. The Yiddish language itself partially represented “a remarkable venture in adaptation in its own right.” Ruth Gay, The Jews of Germany: A Historical Portrait (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 5.

9

Fischer, The History of an Obsession, 52.

10

Henry Kellerman, “From Imperial to National-Socialist Germany: Recollections of a German-Jewish Youth Leader,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 39 (1994), 316.

11

Quoted in Frederic V. Grunfeld, Prophets Without Honor: A Background to Freud, Kafka, Einstein and Their World (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979), 1. Heine would ultimately be frustrated by the failure of this synthesis.

12

Walter Laqueur, Young Germany: A History of the German Youth Movement (New York: Basic Books Publishing, 1962), 77.


25

13

Werner Rosenstock, “The Jewish Youth Movement,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 19 (1974), 98.

14

Chanoch Rinott, "Major Trends in Jewish Youth Movements in Germany,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 19 (1974), 77.

15

Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Rosenzweig and the Kameraden: A Non-Zionist Alliance,” Journal of Contemporary History 26: 3/4 (September 1991), 391.

16

Mendes-Flohr, 391.

17

Rilke wrote a short poem in 1899 entitled “Werkleute sind wir,” extolling the virtues of labor. Buber was born in Vienna, joined the Zionist movement in its early days (1899), and spent several years in Frankfurt and Berlin before emigrating to Palestine in 1938.

18

Walter Laqueur, Generation Exodus: The Fate of Young Jewish Refugees from Nazi Germany (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2001), 103.

19

Gerhard Bry, Resistance: Recollections from the Nazi Years (West Orange, NJ: published by author, 1979), 18-19.

20

The group’s Hebrew name is HaShomer HaTza’ir; most German-Jewish veterans of the group use the German spelling in their memoirs and other writings.

21

Alice and Gerhard Zadek, Mit dem letzten Zug nach England (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1992), 71-73.

22

Kellerman, 323. Kellerman was elected the head of the Bund Deutsch-Jüdischer Jugend in 1934.

23

Kellerman, 321.

24

This chapter is concerned principally with the groups that organized resistance or that attracted large numbers of future resisters. There were many other organizations, including such large Zionist groups as the Jewish Pathfinders and the Maccabi Hazair, that are beyond the purview of this book. As a point of reference, there were approximately 85,000 Jews between the ages of twelve and twenty-five living in Germany in 1936.

25

Schatzer, 160.

26

Gerhard Zadek, Hanni Meyer, and Lotte Rotholz, in addition to a few other members of Baum’s network, were members; see Chapter Five.

26


27

Michael Kreutzer, “Die Suche nach einem Ausweg,” in Wilfried Löhken and Werner Vathke, eds., Juden im Widerstand (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1993), 98.

28

Kellerman, 324.

29

Until the outbreak of World War I, even Lenin considered the German socialists to be in the forefront of the world movement and regarded its leaders (especially Karl Kautsky) as the leading Marxist theoreticians of the day.

30

The Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) were by far the two largest, but a few other groups came into existence during the Weimar period, most notably the Socialist Workers Party (SAP), which was founded in 1931 with about 25,000 members.

31

Donald L. Niewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2001), 26. It should be noted that many more Jews were involved in liberal than in socialist politics in Germany during the Kaiserreich (1871-1918) and Weimar, as Niewyk discusses at length.

32

Jeffrey Herf, “German Communism, the Discourse of ‘Anti-Fascist Resistance,’ and the Jewish Catastrophe,” in Michael Geyer and John W. Boyer, eds., Resistance Against the Third Reich 1933-1990 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 262.

33

Arnold Paucker, “Self-Defence Against Fascism in a Middle-Class Community: The Jews in Weimar Germany and Beyond,” in Francis R. Nicosia and Lawrence D. Stokes, eds., Germans against Nazism: Nonconformity, Opposition, and Resistance in the Third Reich (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 63. The high proportion of Jewish membership in the left-wing parties did not represent the “Jewish conspiracy” of right-wing fantasies. German socialists whose families were Jewish tended to be non-observant and were, in fact, often disdainful of Judaism; they acted not as Jews and certainly not as part of a non-existent international Jewish network.

34

Bry, 26-28.

Chapter Two

Neither Hitler Nor Stalin: Resistance by Dissident Communists and Left-Wing Socialists The devastation of World War I swept away aristocracies and ruling dynasties in some countries, generated revolutionary upheavals in much of the continent, and discredited long-standing political and economic arrangements virtually everywhere in Europe. In Germany, shortages and austerity combined with war-weariness to produce widespread discontent, culminating in massive strikes and civil unrest in April 1917 and a general strike in January 1918 that involved 300,000 workers in Berlin demanding a “just peace.” This upsurge in working-class militancy gave impetus to the left wing of German Socialism. The issue of support for the war effort precipitated a split within the Social Democratic Party, the largest socialist party in the world and the leader of the Second International. The SPD’s Reichstag delegation was instructed by the party leadership to vote for the war budget in July 1914; subsequently, the war deepened divisions within the party that had been developing for several years. A far left wing, based in Berlin and led by Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, and Georg Lebedour, was distinct by 1910; a right wing had also coalesced and was strengthened by the election of Friedrich Ebert as party co-chairman in 1913. The mass of the SPD was still grouped around the left center, represented until his death in 1913 by the venerable August Bebel and including such stalwarts as Hugo Haase and the party’s leading theoretician, Karl Kautsky.1 While the Ebert wing extended its vote for war credits into a broader conservative program, stifling workers’ demands under a policy of “Burgfrieden” or social peace, the left wing’s only proposed solution to the crisis was the immediate overthrow of capitalism in Germany and the other warring nations—a prospect that did not seem viable or even desirable to most workers in 1915 and 1916. The war greatly compounded the party’s divisions, eventually producing a split

28

Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany in the SPD Reichstag delegation, which led to the party’s expulsion of antiwar Reichstag members and the formation of an open faction (the Social Democratic Alliance) in spring 1916. The factions competed for control of local organizations and of the party’s formidable press apparatus throughout that year, and in April 1917 the left wing formed its own party, the Independent Social Democrats (USPD). The USPD was, however, not simply a product of dissension within the SPD leadership; it also reflected—and benefited from—the explosive social conditions of 1917 resulting from labor protests and a growing popular abhorrence of the senseless war. The October Revolution in Russia further promoted the growth of Communist and left-wing Socialist parties and movements throughout Europe. This influence was both direct—through the efforts of the Communist International, founded in March 1919—and indirect—through the inspiration that the Russian revolution initially provided to many thousands of workers and intellectuals, demonstrating the perceived necessity for movements that would transcend the methods of Social Democracy. The November 1918 revolution that swept away the Hohenzollern dynasty began with little direct guidance from either the SPD or the USPD. When navy leaders ordered an attack on the British at the end of October, sailors in Kiel rose up in protest, and within a few days a generalized mutiny erupted. The sailors’ grievances intersected with those of large sectors of German society, and sailors, soldiers, and workers quickly established revolutionary councils. Kaiser Wilhelm II fled Berlin and then the country, and on November 9 SPD leaders Friedrich Ebert and Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed a republic. By this time the Independent Social Democrats had grown to more than 100,000 members, a figure that would increase several-fold in subsequent months. National election results from 1919 and 1920 show the rapid growth in the USPD’s strength relative to the SPD. In January 1919, the SPD outpolled the USPD by 37.9 percent to 7.6 percent; in June 1920, the SPD received 21.7 percent, compared to 18 percent for the Independent Social Democrats.2 The USPD was strong in some of the industrial centers, most importantly Berlin, which had always been a bastion of left Social Democracy. But from its inception the USPD was no more unified than the party that had spawned it.

Resistance by Dissident Communists and Left-Wing Socialists

29

The most significant source of disunity was the party’s far left wing, which in 1918 adopted the name “Spartacus League” in homage to the first century BCE anti-Roman slave rebellion. From the beginning the Spartacists displayed little loyalty to the new party, demanding autonomy and working toward a left split-off. The Spartacists, a small minority, abandoned the USPD at the end of the year, meeting on December 30 to form the KPD in a spirit of hyperradicalism that (for what must have been the only time in her life) actually placed Rosa Luxemburg on the “right” on some issues.3 Within a few days of its founding, the nascent KPD would be deprived of both its most forceful orator (Liebknecht) and its sharpest theoretician (Luxemburg), whose ideas and leadership could possibly have prevented the party’s Stalinization in the years following her death.4 The two were murdered by rightist Freikorps troops serving the Ebert government on January 15. The SPD’s leading role in a government that was beset by severe economic problems, that forged alliances with discredited business and bureaucratic elites, and that sought pacification through the excesses of SPD leader Gustav Noske’s pitiless military forces drove large numbers of workers out of the political center and into the ranks of the socialist left in 1919.5 The radicalization of large sections of the industrial work force aided the USPD first and foremost. The USPD’s membership increased from approximately 300,000 to 750,000 during 1919, and continued to grow at a more modest pace for the first few months of 1920, although its political influence remained negligible. The KPD remained relatively small and marginal during this time, claiming a membership of approximately 100,000 by late 1919 but exerting little influence in industrial workplaces.6 The KPD’s weakness vis-à-vis the other working-class parties stemmed partially from its having been banned throughout much of 1919, but the Communists did not help themselves when they drove out many of the party’s founding members through an attack by Paul Levi on virtually all potential oppositionists at the party’s October 1919 congress. Denouncing as “syndicalists” imaginary enemies within his party’s ranks, Levi’s speech provides an early example of the doctrinal rigidity and intolerance that would hamper the party from its origins.7

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Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany The KPD continued to draw much of its membership from disgruntled Social Democrats in the left wing of the SPD. Communist leaders rarely missed an opportunity to remind audiences of the role of Gustav Noske and other SPD figures in the deaths of Liebknecht and Luxemburg, providing evidence for the Communists of the treachery allegedly intrinsic to Social Democracy. While the KPD routinely exploited this point for sectarian and self-serving reasons, the SPD leadership certainly gave credence to KPD propaganda through some of its actions, such as the suppression of a 1920 workers’ uprising in the Ruhr, which drove many workers to the Communists and further widened the gulf between the two parties. In alliance with General Walther Lüttwitz and other military leaders, Wolfgang Kapp staged a short-lived putsch in March 1920 that was defeated through a general strike. Workers in the Ruhr organized militias and raised demands that went far beyond the removal of the putsch leaders: the formation of councils modeled after the soviets, socialization of the economy, a purge of reactionaries from the state bureaucracy, and so on. The restored SPD government only regained control of the region through a violent counter-offensive that left hundreds dead.8 The Bolshevik Revolution continued to exert a multi-faceted influence on German Socialist politics. The revolution inspired some to join the USPD or the Communists; at the same time, even such leftists as Luxemburg, Georg Lebedour, and Rudolf Hilferding could not give unqualified support to a revolution that showed signs of authoritarianism and of betraying socialist values and aims. Even from her prison cell, Rosa Luxemburg could perceive that the revolution was more likely to institute a dictatorship “over” rather than “of” the proletariat, as she argued in a 1918 article.9 The subordination of the KPD to Moscow, which would shape German Communism until the fall of the East German state, began during this time. In 1920 the Comintern succeeded in its unsubtle campaign to split the USPD, a goal brazenly stated in a document by Grigory Zinoviev. The catalyst for the split was a debate within the USPD over joining the Communist International, which required acceptance of the “Twenty-One Conditions.” Enacted at its second congress, in July-August 1920, the Communist International’s


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“Conditions” directed all member parties to “remove reformists and centrists from all positions in the working class movement and to replace them with Communists; to denounce pacifism; to organize on the basis of democratic centralism and to conduct periodical purges of its membership; to revise its party program in accordance with the policies of the International; to accept all decisions of the Comintern as binding; to take the name of ‘Communist Party’; and to expel all members who voted against acceptance of the 21 conditions at a congress called for the purpose,” among other things.10 In retrospect, the “Conditions” spelled the end of any independence for member parties and represented an important milestone in the enforcement of a suffocating discipline throughout the Comintern. After an acrimonious debate that featured insulting letters from Moscow to the party leadership, about half the membership endorsed the “Conditions” and left the USPD to join the KPD; this severely weakened the USPD, the remnants of which eventually rejoined the SPD in 1922. Despite ill-conceived Communist uprisings in 1921 and 1923— each of which was met with harsh repression—the KPD remained a major political force throughout the Weimar years. In the midst of the generalized polarization and radicalization of 1930-33, the KPD’s membership burgeoned in the last years of the Weimar Republic from 117,000 in 1929 to approximately 360,000 by 1932. The party’s strength was demonstrated in the November 1932 elections—the last election before the Nazi takeover—drawing 16.9 percent of the overall vote and 38 percent in Berlin.11 By 1933 the KPD was the largest Communist party in the world outside the Soviet Union, as the SPD, which was still larger than the KPD, had been the largest socialist party before World War I and the Russian Revolution twenty years earlier. As the KPD’s numbers grew, so too did the same type of internal discord and factionalism that was evident in the Soviet Communist Party, the unquestioned leader of the Communist International. The emergence of a “Left Opposition” in the U.S.S.R. by 1924 inspired similar developments throughout the Communist world movement, particularly as Leon Trotsky’s criticisms of the Soviet leadership became more widely known. As elsewhere, a minority of German

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Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany Communists supported Trotsky’s opposition, while other small groups supported the “right” opposition associated with Nikolai Bukharin. The large majority of Communists throughout the world, however, maintained their faith in Stalin’s leadership of the Soviet Union and by extension in the excessively obedient leaderships of the other parties of the Communist International. Some of these reasons are easy enough to understand. The excitement and the hopes of 1917 were still fresh in the memory of many people, and Trotsky’s criticisms of the rightward drift in international Communism could be dismissed as “ultra-left” and unrealistic, the protests of a malcontent. Finally, perhaps the strongest motivation to remain loyal to Moscow was the argument that the Soviet Union was the bastion of workingclass power and therefore must be defended from international capital lest socialism be destroyed, as rank-and-file Communists were constantly admonished by their leaders. A former KPD member who eventually joined the leftist opposition articulated the emotional difficulty of breaking with her party: “Although I was deeply disappointed with the German Communist Party, resentful of its inactivity at the moment of crisis, and doubtful of its policies, I could not break away from it entirely. It seemed like a renunciation of all I believed in and had worked for over the years.”12 Even the victims of the Great Purges of 1936-38 could not, in most cases, recognize the Soviet state as the negation of their life’s work; at the hour of their deaths such “old Bolsheviks” as Nikolai Bukharin comforted themselves with the delusion that the Soviet party still represented “the historic interests of the proletariat” and would ultimately correct any deviations and problems. All these political and psychological factors were undergirded by the fact that there was scant knowledge, even among leading party members in other countries, of the dismal realities of life in Stalin’s Russia, which by the time of the first Five Year Plan (1929-34) more closely resembled a giant prison than a workers’ and peasants’ utopia. Another set of factors helped to ensure the allegiance of many Communists: the material and psychological benefits of staying with the “winning team,” as there was never much hope that the Stalinist authorities or their policies would be threatened by any opposition. As the Soviet party came to be led by a collection of career-minded


33

bureaucrats—many of whom had stood on the sidelines during the revolutionary years—the other parties of the Comintern were similarly corrupted, if less for material than for political reasons. End of Weimar Democracy and the Emergence of Left Splinter Groups The ignominious defeat of the German workers’ movement in 1933 provoked outrage and dismay among many partisans of both the KPD and the SPD. The Social Democrats, committed to legalism and a program of gradual reform, believed that the institutions of state and society would withstand the Nazi threat, while the Communists failed to recognize the extraordinary nature of this threat, seeing in Hitler simply another pawn of big business, barely distinguishable from other bourgeois politicians. While the SPD declined to resist the July 1932 Papen coup, which helped pave the way for the Nazi takeover, the KPD wiled away precious months denouncing their “enemies” within the working class. Both parties issued hollow threats of more resolute action, such as a general strike, as Weimar democracy collapsed and the Nazis moved to fill the void, but still there was no unified action.13 While each party underestimated the danger, the Communists are particularly blameworthy for their short-sighted, disastrous refusal to unite with the Social Democrats in the hour of greatest need. The KPD attacked the Social Democrats as “social fascists” and went so far as to label them the “major enemy” (Hauptfeind), a greater menace to the working class than the true fascists. Communist leader simultaneously preached that Hitler’s regime would only last a short time, and that the Nazi government would simply exacerbate the crisis of bourgeois rule, paving the way for a KPD victory. “First the Nazis, then the Communists!” went the KPD slogan, though as it turned out most Communists would be in exile, jail, or the grave well before the year was out.14 All these factors united to prevent any large-scale left movement outside the two established working-class parties. Despite its great cultural achievements and moments of political stability, Weimar democracy had degenerated into a cynical political game in its last three years; a brutal regime had seized power, crushing the largest

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Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany working-class movement in the world in a matter of weeks; and the parties of the left had responded to the crisis with cowardice and short-sighted sectarianism. Yet dismay over the failures of the SPD and the KPD did not always translate into a rejection of all socialist politics. There were also significant numbers of Germans, especially youths, determined to create alternative political organizations. This chapter analyzes two distinct networks of resisters that emerged from the left wing of the Communist and Socialist movements in the last years of Weimar and that survived into the early years of the Third Reich. The “Org” (Neu Beginnen) As early as 1925 various leftist oppositions, inspired by Trotsky’s criticisms of Soviet domestic and foreign policy, began to emerge within the German Communist Party. The Communist International responded with an “open letter” to the German Communists, accompanied by the first purges of members, and by 1927 most KPD cadre associated with Trotsky’s positions had been expelled.15 Through such means, and with the encouragement of Moscow, a Stalinist group initially led by August Thalheimer consolidated its control of the party leadership and apparatus.16 The Stalinization of the KPD inadvertently contributed to the evolution of a sub-culture on the left in Germany, most strongly in Berlin, that included expelled Communists, KPD members who were opposed to the evolution or degeneration of their party, and left Social Democrats, among others. Various socialist groups that would later undertake anti-Nazi resistance emerged from this new political landscape, which in many cases united individuals who could—or would—not have worked together when they were under party discipline. Young German Jews were instrumental in establishing two of the larger of these groups, the Org (also known as Neu Beginnen, or “New Beginning”) and the Linke Opposition (Left Opposition). These groups exhibited many characteristics of Herbert Baum’s network, despite the fact that, in contrast to the Baum groups, they were organized around political principles associated with leftist opponents of the Soviet Union and the KPD. These mutual characteristics, including similar activities and social composition, derived from


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common origins in the German youth movements, both Jewish and non-Jewish, of the pre-1933 era. Walter Loewenheim (1896-1977), a member of the KPD’s left wing, and a few close associates founded the Org (short for its original name, the “Leninist Organization”) in 1929 in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district. Loewenheim had been a member of the Wandervogel and of a Jewish youth group, the Jüdische Jugendbund. He fought in World War I and later participated in the Spartacist uprising of 1918-19, after which he joined the Communist Party.17 Loewenheim quickly rose to a prominent position within the KPD, leading the press department among other responsibilities.18 He became disaffected with KPD politics by the mid-1920s and began to take an interest in Leon Trotsky’s critique of Soviet domestic and foreign policies. Loewenheim resigned from the KPD in 1927, the year that Trotsky was removed from his positions and officially fell into disfavor. Loewenheim joined the Social Democrats two years later, chiefly to seek out other leftists who were disaffected by the courses taken by the two major working-class parties. While still a member of the SPD, Loewenheim began recruiting such people to his own group at the end of the 1920s in Berlin, and soon established contacts in a few other cities, including Mannheim, Düsseldorf, and Breslau.19 The Org remained very small, numbering about one hundred members at the time of Hitler’s victory in 1933, but grew in the first months of the dictatorship to approximately five hundred.20 By most accounts, the Org had many members and contacts among Berlin’s working-class population, and recruited several dozen trade-union leaders and functionaries. The group maintained a full-time staff of about twenty people that included a “secretariat,” archivists, and couriers. The Org profited not only from disillusionment among workers in the SPD and KPD but also, as one member averred, from the “political impotence of splinter groups,” which “tended to discourage their members and squash their hopes.”21 In addition, Loewenheim—or “Miles,” as he was known in the underground—was a skilled and charismatic organizer, shown by his recruitment of virtually the entire leadership of the Socialist Workers Youth (SAJ) to his group in 1931.22 The Org also recruited several leaders of the Communist Youth after the suppression of the KPD in 1933 and

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Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany cultivated an extensive network of sympathizers, including the underground leaders of the railroad workers’ union and leaders of the “Religious Socialists,” a group of about one hundred people based in Berlin.23 Loewenheim understood far better than most Marxists of his time that the world economic crisis and the ever-deepening instability of German politics would not inevitably lead to a victory of socialism.24 To the contrary, he anticipated that the economic and political crisis in Europe would lead not to a left radicalization of the workers, but more likely to a rise of fascism in several countries and renewed warfare in Europe. More deeply than most socialist or communist organizations of the time, the Org also recognized the necessity for unity among the working-class parties. Its members were fully aware of the disastrous consequences that had resulted from the internecine warfare on the left. Richard Löwenthal, an important leader and theoretician of the Org, said later that the group did not explicitly blame either the KPD or the SPD for this state of affairs, but rather tried to convince fellow socialists of Marx and Engels’ admonition that Marxists should not politically divide the working classes.25 The Org also criticized the ever-growing number of small splinter groups, which, according to Loewenheim, were “unable to realize the isolation and insignificance of their own sects” and succeeded only in “moving round in circles and in regarding their own unanimity as their ultimate objective.”26 The Org was distinguished, among other things, by its emphasis on conspiratorial methods and its preparation, a few years before the victory of Nazism, of elaborate methods for conducting underground activity. Loewenheim believed that the political atmosphere of late Weimar was roughly akin to that of Tsarist Russia in the first years of the century, and therefore took Lenin’s 1903 pamphlet What Is To Be Done? as an organizational guide.27 In his 1979 memoirs, former Org member Gerhard Bry gave some examples of the group’s imaginative efforts: We learned how to use concealed code in writing and in telephone conversations, shift meeting times and places by pre-arranged rotations that made them different from those agreed upon by phone, arrange for danger signals, avoid being followed, discover tails, shred carbon and other papers


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…and many other tricks of the trade.… We also had technical experts in micro-photography, chemists who developed quick burning paper which left little residuals and capsules in which undeveloped microfilm could be carried in the mouth and quickly destroyed, carpenters who built really hard-to-discover hiding places.28

And this was all before the Nazi takeover! While these subterfuges may have seemed overly elaborate at the time, Org leaders would be vindicated by subsequent events, which showed that they had a clearer view than the Communists or Social Democrats of the character of the future fascist dictatorship and the implications for socialist political work. In 1933 Walter Loewenheim wrote a pamphlet entitled Neu Beginnen, a name by which the group would often be known after the war. Neu Beginnen was subtitled “Fascism or Socialism: a Basis for Discussion among Germany’s Socialists,” and it succeeded in provoking debate, creating a stir among leftists beyond the Org’s periphery, as well as among exiled German socialists and communists, and even inspiring some socialists to form study groups to discuss the pamphlet.29 Loewenheim gave voice to the frustrations that many socialists of varied movements felt toward the traditional workers’ parties and also provided a sharper analysis of National Socialism than that peddled by the KPD or by orthodox Marxists since World War II. While Comintern hacks endlessly repeated Georgi Dimitrov’s formulation that fascism was the “open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinist and most imperialist elements of finance capital,” Loewenheim argued that Germany was in the grasp of a “fascist revolution.” In contrast to official Communist dogma, Loewenheim explicitly acknowledged fascism’s mass character and its appeal to “certain proletarian strata,” while agreeing with most analysts then and now that the “partially pauperized pettybourgeoisie” constituted the main base for the fascist movement.30 Neu Beginnen mercilessly lampooned the intellectual culture of the KPD, which taught its members to “hang with orthodox piety on every word of Marx and Lenin” as well as upon “its own and the Comintern’s theses and assertions, which are not critically tested … but worshipped dogmatically” and repeated in “parrot-like” fashion.31 Loewenheim concluded that the Communists had “abandoned

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Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany Marxist methodology, which is materialist,” in favor of subjectivity— “seeing the world not as it is but as they wish it to be”—and dogmatism.32 This critique was consistent with the Org’s emphasis on honest discussion and intellectual rigor; for Loewenheim and his comrades, “Marxism is a critical, not a dogmatic, body of ideas,” and in a final heresy he wrote that one should not be horrified at arriving at “results differing from those obtained by Marx and Engels.”33 The Org’s remedy for the deplorable division between the KPD and SPD, unfortunately, originated in the sectarianism and unrealistic dreams of other sections of the left. Loewenheim’s pamphlet argued forcefully against the folly of “continual splintering” of the workers’ movement and, despite its harsh criticisms of SPD policies in the recent past, hoped for a revival of the Social Democracy. Loewenheim implored leftists who had fled the party to return to the fold, as their desertions had facilitated the shifting of the “center of gravity of social democracy to the right.”34 Yet the Org simultaneously proposed that its own program be adopted—albeit only after “the freest and most critical discussion”—as the basis for this revival. Further, “Miles” concluded a treatise distinguished by its lucidity and realism with a strange proposal to convene a party conference with delegates elected through a complex process, an impossibility under the dictatorship. Like Herbert Baum’s groups and many of the other resistance circles, Org’s Berlin groups included a large proportion of talented and intelligent youths. Many of those fortunate enough to survive the Reich had successful careers in academia or politics after the war. Robert Havemann (1910-82), for example, became a professor of physical chemistry at Humboldt University in East Berlin and a leading politician until he incautiously suggested in a series of public addresses in 1963 and 1964 that, in the same sense that “critical debate was needed for scientific discoveries, so too was the democratization of the party for true socialism.”35 Havemann’s background in non-Communist resistance circles also cast him in a suspicious light in the politically intolerant atmosphere of 1960s East German society, and indeed he was only one of many former anti-Nazi resisters to run afoul of the Stalinist state. Even Havemann’s proven willingness to work with the Stasi did not prevent him from losing his job and eventually being subject to house arrest and other forms of


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persecution.36 Richard Löwenthal (1908-91) was one of Org’s founders and leading theorists, and after returning to West Berlin in the late 1950s enjoyed a successful career as a political scientist at the Free University’s Otto-Suhr-Institut. Löwenthal was also an important figure in the West German Social Democracy, and advised the party leadership on its relations with Communist parties. Ossip Flechtheim (1909-98) was also a renowned political scientist at the Otto-SuhrInstitut for many years; he had joined the Org in 1933, fled Germany two years later, and worked for a few years in New York with Franz Neumann and others at the Institute of Social Research before returning to Berlin in 1952.37 Fritz Erler (1913-1967) endured seven years in prison for his resistance activities, surviving in part because the camp authorities were unaware of his prominent role in the underground. After the war he was a member of the West German Bundestag for almost two decades and, toward the end of his career, the chairman of the SPD’s delegation in that body.38 The renowned historian Franz L. Carsten (1911-1998) was a member of a Berlin Org cell for two years until his emigration to Holland in 1935, and for a brief time thereafter helped to organize the group’s archives from exile, a precursor of sorts for his later career.39 And Gerhard Bry, whose memoirs provide a valuable as well as entertaining account of the Org, later gained some renown as an economic historian. What did the Org do to foment and organize resistance to the regime? As was the case with the other sections of the left-wing and working-class German resistance, the oppressive Nazi state prevented the group from achieving anything resembling mass action, much less armed struggle of any sort. As Bry lamented many years later, he and his comrades could only carry out “those tasks to which the victory of the regime had reduced the proud aspirations of the Org.”40 Those tasks included distribution of a newspaper, Sozialistische Aktion, which was printed by exiled members and smuggled into Germany through a complicated courier system. The group distributed 27,000 copies of the paper in 1935, and despite arrests that had decimated the Org, its remaining members managed to distribute more than 5,000 of the final edition of the paper in 1938.41 The Org also produced and distributed anti-Nazi leaflets. In his book, Bry described the method he and his comrades employed to distribute leaflets—a once-mundane

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Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany activity for this sort of group, now rendered highly dangerous by state terror: “Leaflets were placed on the street side of a plank overhanging a flat roof, balanced by a leaking can filled with water. The plank would tip and the leaflets would fly into the street when the can lost weight.” This process gave the perpetrators time to escape. Even this fairly uncomplicated operation carried far graver risks than can be conveyed here, as each step in and of itself could lead to detection or arrest: Org activists had to first print the leaflets and transport them to the point of distribution; “then, the leaflets, a fair-sized can, water, and a board must be transported to the roof…. If one was known in the neighborhood, one’s presence might be later remembered; if one was unknown, one’s presence was conspicuous.”42 The Org also raised funds to support political prisoners. And, like members of other oppositional networks, Org activists maintained their spirits by combining the personal and social with the political: “We sang, we drank, we flirted, we read, we debated, and we did political work” recalled Bry, who equated this essential part of the group’s experience with his youthful years in the Zionist Blau-Weiβ.43 Decline and Demise of the Org Following a lamentable but familiar pattern, the Org eventually found cause to divide its meager forces. Although Org activists seemed to be sincere in their desire to unify the left, the insular existence forced upon them by harsh repression exacerbated latent tendencies to over-emphasize minor theoretical points. Yet the immediate source of a decisive faction fight resulted from a relatively consequential disagreement, unlike the sort of doctrinaire hair-splitting that divided other small anti-Stalinist groups in the 1930s and beyond. A debate erupted in 1934-35 over the character and tasks of the group, with the old guard around Walter Loewenheim adopting, in the view of their opponents, a “defeatist” perspective, convinced that further illegal activity was “senseless” and that the time had arrived to leave Germany and continue the struggle from exile. A group around Karl Frank, Werner Peuke, and Richard Löwenthal argued that it was still possible under the dictatorship to carry out activities and even to build a revolutionary party.44 Loewenheim left Germany in 1935, and many of his adherents left the group or fled the country. The opposing


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faction retained the name Org, but arrests claimed about one-third of its members in late 1935 and early 1936. (The arrests of 1935-36 were not simply due to the well-practiced skills of the political police; the Gestapo also profited from its December 1933 seizure of KPD files on Trotskyists and others held in suspicion by the Communists.)45 Nonetheless, the Org had a brief revival in 1937 through its collaboration with a group called the Volks-Front-Gruppe (Popular Front Group). The latter group included several former SPD and trade union officials and was inspired by the short-lived victories of the Popular Fronts in France and Spain. By the end of 1938, though, arrests and attrition had taken their toll, and the Org was no longer able to sustain its operations in Berlin, which had always been the group’s nexus. The last Org cell, an isolated group in southern Bavaria, was wiped out in 1942.46 Once captured, Org members—like many other political prisoners—attempted to carry out resistance activities in the camps and prisons. Fritz Erler, for example, arranged classes among his fellow inmates at Dieburg labor camp.47 And like other anti-Nazi groups, the Org maintained a network in exile—with members in Paris, Prague, London, and New York—and only formally disbanded after the fall of Nazi Germany. The Left Opposition in Berlin In 1928 two former KPD leaders, Ruth Fischer and Hugo Urbahns, formed the Leninbund in 1928, which quickly became the largest of an ever-increasing number of left-Communist groups, recruiting at least 5,000 members within a few months.48 But like many Trotskyist groups, the Leninbund was subject to doctrinal disputes over issues that would seem, in retrospect, not to be the direst, particularly given the circumstances that faced German leftists in the last days of the Weimar Republic.49 There is some evidence that the Soviet secret police, through agents planted in the German Left Opposition (LO), played a role in the numerous splits. Rubin Sobolevicus, a Lithuanian agent of the Soviets, infiltrated the LO under the pseudonym “Roman Well” and succeeded in fanning the flames of factional discord. Sobolevicus/Well was so successful in his subterfuge that Trotsky himself took the side of the Lithuanian in a dispute with LO leader Kurt Landau in 1931.50

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Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany An acrimonious debate over the character of the Soviet Union— was it a “degenerated workers’ state,” Trotsky’s position, or a “state capitalist” society?—led to the first of several splits among the German Trotskyists. The more orthodox Trotskyist group announced the creation of the “United Opposition of the KPD (Bolshevik-Leninists),” which would soon further divide its forces through another split that produced two groups calling themselves the “Left Opposition of the KPD (Bolshevik-Leninists).” The larger of the two was led by Erwin Ackerknecht; the minority group included about one hundred members at its inception and was led by Landau. The Left Opposition groups drew from essentially the same milieu as the Org—veterans of the working-class movement, discontented with the woeful state of the workers’ parties and their inability to prevent Hitler’s victory. Erwin Ackerknecht (1906-88) is representative of those veterans, who constituted the leadership as well as the foundation of German Trotskyism in the early years of the Third Reich. In a 1971 interview, Ackerknecht said that he joined the KPD in 1924 but by the end of the decade had become thoroughly alienated from the party, which had become “like the Russian party… totalitarian” in its internal life.51 He joined the Trotskyists in 1929 but remained in the KPD as a “sleeper,” to use his term, in order to recruit to the Left Opposition. His tactic was eventually discovered and, after he was expelled, he led a relatively large LO group in Berlin that had about 1,000 members. He also served as editor of a Trotskyist newspaper, the “Permanent Revolution,” in close collaboration with Trotsky’s son, Lev Sedov. Ackerknecht left Germany within a few months of the Nazi takeover in order to establish a “foreign office” in Paris in collaboration with Sedov.52 The relative success of Ackerknecht’s group was short-lived, however, as a wave of arrests devastated the group in the two years after his departure. After its dispersal, like most other German groups from across the left spectrum, Ackerknecht’s wing of German Trotskyism settled into an undesirably passive existence in exile. Robert Springer (1908-?) said that he was “driven out” of the SPD in the late 1920s by his conclusion that it had “failed to represent the workers.” He attended a few KPD meetings, where he came in contact with Left Oppositionists, one of whom—“the Jew Grossman,” he told


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his Gestapo interrogators—met him in a café and gave him a Trotskyist newspaper. He met several other Jewish adherents of Trotskyism (he only gave the police their “Decknamen,” or pseudonyms) and constituted a group with some of them; Springer was designated the leader by a more senior figure in the underground.53 Kurt Landau (1903-1937), who came from a Jewish family in Vienna, had also spent most of his life in the socialist movements. He was a one-time leader of the Austrian CP who joined the opposition in the mid-1920s, was expelled, and became an important figure in European Trotskyism over the next decade. He came to Berlin in 1929, and led one of the LO splinter groups in Wedding, a district with a large working-class population. His cell recruited about two hundred workers before being broken up by the Gestapo in 1934. Landau escaped Germany, but, like so many other anti-Nazi fighters, fell victim to the forces of official Communism: He was arrested and murdered during the suppression of leftist antiStalinists in Spain in 1937.54 Hugo Urbahns, one of the founders of Germany’s Left Opposition, suffered a similar fate. He also fought in Spain, serving with the left-communist Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM), for which he was arrested and murdered in 1937 by police under the direction of the Spanish Communist Party. The LO groups also attracted a smaller number of youths like Hans Berger (b. 1916, disappeared after 1937) and his sister Hilde, Polish Jews who moved to Berlin after World War I. Hans had been a member of two sporting clubs for Jewish youths, but was tossed out because of his membership in a Communist club in 1932.55 Like many others of his age and interests, he participated in “debates in the street” between supporters of the various leftist parties, as he later recalled. He first came into contact with the Left Opposition through an “unemployed Jew” (Gustav Stern) in 1932. Two years later Berger ran into an old school friend, also a Polish-born Jew, who gave him a “treasonous leaflet,” the possession of which led to Berger’s arrest and a six-month stint in jail. Upon his release Berger became a leader of the Berlin branch of Springer’s group, called the “Leninist Organization,” and assumed leadership of the group’s nationwide network in 1935.56 Berger was arrested the following year while returning from Hamburg with illegal literature.

44

Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany Alfred Bakalejnyk, another young Polish-born Jew, became politicized at an early age through discussions with his friends in the Jewish youth organization “Brith Habonim,” where he said he was introduced to Marxist literature, probably through the influence of his future wife, Hilde Berger.57 (Some individuals like Hilde and Hans seem to have remained in Jewish youth groups primarily to recruit to the leftist groups that had become their primary allegiance—akin to the way that Ackerknecht and others remained as “sleepers” within the KPD, or that Org founder Loewenheim joined the SPD in order to bolster his own group.) For Bakalejnyk, it was a short step to greater involvement in the Trotskyist network, as he met more people. In some ways the informality of the gatherings, a tactical response to Nazi repression, made the Left Opposition groups more attractive, especially for those who had sat through long and tedious pre-1933 KPD meetings. Had the LO groups existed beyond the first five years of the Third Reich, they probably would have had a higher proportion of such youths relative to the “old-timers” like Ackerknecht and Springer; but alas the Nazi state allowed them scant time or political space. Clandestine Activities of the Left Oppositionists

The Left Opposition groups distributed newspapers, organized political discussions and debates, attempted to agitate within the factories, and occasionally undertook more public actions, such as leafleting or “graffiti-actions.” Most of these groups struggled not only against state repression but also against technological problems as they attempted to produce and distribute newspapers. They were trying to counter the full apparatus of the Nazi state with one typewriter and a dilapidated mimeograph machine, as one former resister recalled; another veteran remembered using stencils and an old duplicating machine.58 Robert Springer admitted under interrogation that his group produced and sold a newspaper called “Our Word” (Unser Wort), which had the format of a daily paper. They also published a lengthy brochure, “The Soviet Economy in Danger,” the title of which reflects a somewhat esoteric concern of Trotskyism in the mid-1930s.59 The indictment of Hans Berger


45

records several other types of literature that he possessed when arrested.60 Springer further reported that his group published about two dozen copies of a brochure entitled “Treatise on the Jewish Question” (Abhandlung über die Judenfrage), written by one of the few nonJewish members of his group, a young German who managed to escape the arrests that decimated the Trotskyists in the mid-1930s. This could be quite significant—very few Marxists of any stripe commented at length on the so-called Jewish question before World War II, and Marxism’s record since the war is not exemplary—but no copies of this “treatise” exist. Another group produced 80 to 100 copies of an “information-sheet” called “Der Vertrauensmann” (the term used in German factories for “shop steward”), as well as a paper called Funke (“Spark”). Some of the groups had full-time couriers assigned to the dangerous task of transporting literature from as far away as Hamburg or Magdeburg or even, in some cases, from Czechoslovakia, where a number of non-Stalinist as well as Stalinist organizations had foreign offices. The risks associated with producing, transporting, and distributing their literature obviously attests to the importance for the LO activists of this aspect of their work—just as the severity of the penalties for possession of such material indicates how seriously it was discouraged by the Nazi state. Extant copies of newspapers produced by all sorts of socialist groups demonstrate the severe limitations they faced; production values were primitive, as one would imagine, and the editors tried to fill every square centimeter of the page with text, usually in very small type. It is not easy to evaluate the groups’ ability to effectively convey their message through these means. Undoubtedly, despite the crudeness of the leaflets, many of the hundreds of thousands of old Social-Democratic and Communist workers must have been heartened to see that someone—anyone—was trying to carry out some form of struggle against the Nazi state. Several former Left Oppositionists testified to the centrality of organized, seminar-like discussions (Schulungsabende) within their political subculture once they had acknowledged, early in the dictatorship, the folly of attempting to organize a new mass party.61 In some of the groups, women, including Hans Berger’s sister Hilde,

46

Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany participated and occasionally played a leading role. Like many other anti-Nazi youth groups, the members would discuss “Marxist themes on philosophy, economics, the history of the workers’ movement, and general political questions.”62 It is difficult to piece together a “reading list” from the minimal records available to us, but it is clear that they read works considered to be the essential texts of Marxism, such as Capital and some of Marx’s other economic works. Max Laufer told his interrogators that he met in various apartments in Berlin with a half-dozen other young dissidents, mostly Jews, and kept contact with the broader network of LO groups through the participation of Robert Springer. Laufer’s group read Marx’s Value, Price and Profit and other classics such as the Communist Manifesto and Lenin’s State and Revolution; Laufer also mentioned one novel, Upton Sinclair’s Oil!.63 Some of the LO circles may have been more adventurous; a member of a group led by Walter Nettelbeck (1901-1975), a central figure in the Trotskyist underground, reported that she had read and discussed one of Wilhelm Reich’s works on “religion, sex and politics.”64 As arrests mounted, pre-1933 political relationships were shattered, and it became increasingly difficult to convene more than a few people in an apartment at any given time. Even such modest events as the Schulungsabende became difficult to maintain, and oftentimes three or four LO activists would meet “in the wild”—in a park for example, or in a rail station to hold political discussions. They used informal and even chance meetings to maintain their small, fragmented circles and to enlist acquaintances into the underground struggle. Personal friendships often provided bridges to other groups; for instance, Alfred Bakalejnyk said that one friendship led to discussions with members of the Sozialistische Arbeiter-Jugend about starting yet another group—perhaps not what was needed, but indicative of a constant search for new allies.65 As their numbers dwindled, many of these small groups began to collaborate with one another more often, sometimes even crossing the “StalinistTrotskyist” divide that would prove to be at least as bitter (and even more durable) than the KPD-SPD line. But more often the Left Oppositionists fostered relationships with groups like the Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei (SAP, Socialist Workers’ Party), a


47

relatively large group that originated in the left wing of the SPD. Erwin Ackerknecht married a leading “Milesin” (member of the “Miles-Group” or Org) member, and recalled that he knew many other Org members personally, as well as members of the anarchist Internationale Sozialistische Kampfbund (ISK) and the KPDOpposition (KPO), a dissenting group that originated in the Communist right wing.66 The Trotskyists organized themselves into smaller, more discrete units as their ranks dwindled under the pressure of state repression. Each group was led by a designated member, whose nom de guerre would give the unit its name (the “Kaufmann group” or the “Körting group,” for example). The deepening isolation and the disappearance of leaders and veterans could also give rise to some rather unusual and exotic groups: The “Charly group” in central Berlin, for example, was a group of six young Germans who apparently fancied themselves “proletarian psycho-analysts.”67 Jews in Socialism’s Left Wing Although not emphasized in most accounts of Berlin’s underground left, it becomes clear in reviewing police records and the memoirs of surviving veterans of the Org and the LO that a large proportion, perhaps even a majority, of the members of these various groups were Jewish. German-Jewish radicals, both young and middleaged, were more likely to join the anti-Stalinist circles than they were the underground KPD. In a small number of cases, the younger Jewish radicals were alienated by the KPD’s preaching that Jews were an integral part of the oppressor classes, and were further distanced by the unwillingness of the Communists to forcefully condemn Nazi antisemitism. But this alone does not adequately explain why young Jewish radicals tended to look beyond the KPD; after all, people like Berger and Bry evinced little interest in Judaism or the specific plight of German Jewry, as opposed to young Jewish socialists of later years in the Third Reich who were forced to confront such matters. There are other reasons for the greater appeal held by those groups that were to the left of the KPD. Jews were less likely to be among the Communists’ principal constituency and audience, the industrial workers and the unemployed. Young, well-educated Jews

48

Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany were more attracted to groups such as the Org and the myriad LO groups, which placed great value on intellectual development— certainly in comparison to the KPD, in which by the late 1920s there was little genuine debate. Indeed, most of the people discussed in this chapter were Jewish: Erwin Ackerknecht, Hans and Hilde Berger, Kurt Landau, Richard Löwenthal, Fritz Erler, Gerhard Bry, Max Laufer, and F.L. Carsten, as well as other central figures not discussed here, including Max Seydewitz and Erwin Wolf.68 The indictment of Robert Springer listed twenty-one members of his network, ten of whom were designated as Jews (a “D” for “German” or “J” for “Jew” was noted alongside each name).69 In another list extracted from Springer, thirteen people were listed, ten of whom were Jewish, including several who did not appear on the first list. Yet despite their substantial numbers of Jewish members, the LO groups rarely waged any sort of campaign to confront Nazi antisemitism (although Springer’s group produced the brochure entitled “Treatise on the Jewish Question”). There is some evidence of, at the least, ephemeral relationships with established Jewish institutions, such as when Trotskyists rescued “large numbers of Marxist and socialist books” by taking them to a Jewish synagogue in Eisenacher Straße” in the Schöneberg district of western Berlin.70 The Org also only rarely addressed concerns specific to Jews, despite the Jewish origins of its founders and central leaders. Loewenheim’s Neu Beginnen pamphlet conspicuously neglects to analyze or even mention antisemitism. The Org sometimes collaborated with Zionists, but they also fostered relationships with a large variety of groups, including Christian organizations. Despite the antisemitic campaigns of the early months of the Nazi state this apparent indifference of the anti-Stalinist left is not entirely surprising. The Jewish members were highly secularized, and their politics had been shaped more by their experiences in the KPD and/or SPD than by the experiences that some of them had had earlier in the Jewish youth movements. It was only in later years, especially after the infamous November 1938 pogrom, that these young radicals’ Jewish heritage influenced their political outlook. Consequently, it was only in the post-Kristallnacht period that resistance groups with Jewish members began to explicitly combat Nazi antisemitism.


49

Of course, these organizations were composed of distinct individuals, some of whom placed greater personal emphasis on Jewish issues, even if they were not moved to insist that their groups confront those matters. Furthermore, even if religious designations and traditions were not discussed openly, Org and LO members—like everyone else in German society—were indeed separated by them, especially as these designations became racialized under Nazism. Gerhard Bry recalled that Jewish and non-Jewish members were sharply divided over their attitudes toward German patriotism: “I did not talk often about this topic, but when I did I was under the impression that many of the non-Jewish members felt that socialist resistance against the Hitler regime was a noble patriotic duty. They were the real patriots, not the Nazis.” Bry added that, in contrast, the orientation of the Jewish members “lacked the component of patriotic fervor,” a “consequence of the antisemitic traditions existing in a large part of the public and of the anti-Jewish policies of the Nazis, which had led to a thorough alienation from specifically German values.”71 Bry’s remarks conform closely to those of other Jewish veterans of the underground struggle. While a few years earlier, a young Zionist activist like Henry Kellerman wanted to defend “his” country from the unpatriotic Nazi rabble, by 1934 or 1935 most young German Jews could not consider themselves to be part of the “national community.” While for the rightist nationalists this would serve as evidence of Jewish “rootlessness,” in truth many young Jews were simply disabused of any hopes or illusions about their place in German society.

50


1

David Morgan, The Socialist Left and the German Revolution: A History of the German Independent Social Democratic Party, 1917-1922 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1975), 19-52; see also Susanne Miller and Heinrich Potthoff, A History of German Social Democracy: From 1848 to the Present (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 38-54.

2

Thomas Meyer, Karl-Heinz Klär, Susanne Miller, Klaus Novy, and Heinz Timmermann, eds., Lexikon des Sozialismus (Cologne: Bund-Verlag, 1986), 690, and Gerald D. Feldman, The Great Disorder: Politics, Economics, and Society in the German Inflation, 1914-1924 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 213. The SPD also increased its membership substantially during this period, probably to more than one million by April 1919. Morgan, 179.

3

Heinrich August Winkler, Von der Revolution zur Stabilisierung (Berlin: J.H.W. Dietz, 1984), 114. Eric Weitz, Creating German Communism: From Popular Protests to Socialist State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 95-96.

4

The young party was further debilitated by the murder a few weeks later of Leo Jogiches, Luxemburg’s longtime confidant. The loss of the three veteran socialists was “a devastating blow” to the party, as noted by Eric Weitz. “Liebknecht and Luxemburg … were well known and effective leaders” and Jogiches was “a master of organizational detail. All three were solidly rooted in the traditions of the prewar labor movement. Their loss certainly made the party more susceptible to external influences.” Weitz, 95.

5

Morgan, 241-42.

6

Chris Harman, The Lost Revolution: Germany 1918-1923 (London: Bookmarks, 1997), 150.

7

Morgan, 293; see also Winkler, 263-64.

8

The Kapp-Lüttwitz putschists went unpunished. See Winkler, Revolution, 295309. Historian Eric Weitz noted that “the SPD’s actions aroused such bitterness among workers that a substantial segment began to move to the left, to the USPD and, subsequently, the KPD, while deep dissension within its own ranks marred the effectiveness” of the SPD. Eric Weitz, Creating German Communism: From Popular Protests to Socialist State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 97.

9

Rosa Luxemburg, “Zur russischen Revolution,” in Rosa Luxemburg, Gesammelte Werke (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1990), Volume 4, 332-65; also see Paul Frölich,


51

Rosa Luxemburg: Gedanke und Tat (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1967), 288-99. 10

“Theses on the Conditions for Admission to the Communist International,” in Kevin McDermott and Jeremy Agnew, The Comintern: A History of International Communism from Lenin to Stalin (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 226-28. Zinoviev was largely responsible for the sectarian and excessively rigid quality of the “Conditions.”

11

Ian Kershaw, Hitler: Nemesis (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1999), 390 and Richard Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (New York: Penguin), 238. For the Berlin vote: Allan Merson, Communist Resistance in Nazi Germany (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1985), 21.

12

Margaret Dewar, The Quiet Revolutionary (London: Bookmarks, 1989), 154.

13

The Communists did, however, find themselves in a joint strike action with the Nazi Party in late 1932, when KPD transport workers joined Nazi workers in a strike against the Berlin municipal transport company. David Clay Large, Berlin (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 250-51. Walter Ulbricht, future SED leader and East German head of state, organized the KPD strike team.

14

See Heinrich August Winkler, Der Weg in die Katastrophe: Arbeiter und Arbeiterbewegung in der Weimarer Republik 1930 bis 1933 (Berlin: J.H.W. Dietz, 1987), 148-57 for the KPD campaign against so-called social fascism; also Hermann Weber, “Die Ambivalenz der kommunistischen Widerstandsstrategie biz zur ‘Brüsseler’ Parteikonferenz,” in Jürgen Schmädeke and Peter Steinbach, Der Widerstand gegen den Nationalsozialismus: Die deutsche Gesellschaft und der Widerstand gegen Hitler (Munich: Piper, 1985), 73-85. Many historians have documented the Nazi destruction of the working-class organizations and the left; Eric Johnson offers a strong and concise account in Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 161-94.

15

Benz and Pehle, Lexikon, 309.

16

Hermann Weber, Die Wandlung des deutschen Kommunismus: Die Stalinisierung der KPD in der Weimarer Republik, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsantalt, 1969), 120-85.

17

Walter’s brother Ernst (1898-1984) was also among the founders of the Org, and had similar political experiences in his youth, participating in the Spartakusbund and joining and eventually leaving the KPD.

52


18

Richard Löwenthal, Die Widerstandsgruppe Gedenkstätte deutscher Widerstand, 2001), 3.

“Neu

Beginnen”

(Berlin:

19

Wolfgang Benz and Walter H. Pehle, Encyclopedia of German Resistance to the Nazi Movement (New York: Continuum, 1997), 215.

20

Jan Foitzik, Zwischen den Fronten: Zur Politik, Organisation und Funktion linker politischer Kleinorganisationen im Widerstand 1933 bis 1939/40 (Bonn: Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, 1986), 70.

21

Bry, Resistance, 6.

22

Hans-Rainer Sandvoβ, Widerstand in Kreuzberg (Berlin: Gedenkstätte deutscher Widerstand, 1997), 82. Loewenheim’s Deckname lent his group one of its sobriquets, the “Miles-Gruppe.”

23

Benz and Pehle, Lexikon, 271.

24

Walter Loewenheim [Miles, pseud.], Socialism’s New Start: A Secret German Manifesto (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1934), 75, 141. Loewenheim argued, somewhat heretically, that Marx and Engels themselves were at least partially to blame for the widespread belief among socialists (still prevalent today) that the demise of capitalism was pre-destined.

25

Löwenthal, 3. Marx and Engels wrote, “the communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties.” Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 6 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1984), 497. Loewenheim quoted the same passage from the Communist Manifesto in his 1933 pamphlet Neu Beginnen.

26

Loewenheim, 98-102, 124-126.

27

Hans-Joachim Reichhardt, “Resistance in the Labor Movement,” in Hermann Graml, Hans Mommsen, Hans-Joachim Reichhardt, and Ernst Wolf, The German Resistance to Hitler (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970), 181.

28

Bry, 53-54.

29

Reichhardt, 183.

30

Loewenheim, 36.

31

Loewenheim, 94.


53

32

Loewenheim, 94.

33

Loewenheim, 69-70.

34

Loewenheim, 100.

35

Catherine Epstein, The Last Revolutionaries: German Communists and Their Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 224.

36

Katja Havemann and Joachim Widmann, Robert Havemann: Oder Wie die DDR sich erledigte (Munich: Ullstein, 2003).

37

William David Jones, The Lost Debate: German Socialist Intellectuals and Totalitarianism (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 78. Among his other publications, Löwenthal co-edited a significant volume on antiNazi resistance: Walter Löwenthal and Patrik von zur Muhlen, eds., Widerstand und Verweigerung in Deutschland 1933 bis 1945 (Bonn: J.H.W. Dietz, 1984).

38

According to Gerhard Bry, the interrogators at Erler’s camp continuously demanded from him the identity of a “comrade Grau” whom they were anxious to apprehend. “Comrade Grau” was in fact Erler himself.

39

Foitzik, Zwischen den Fronten, 261. Carsten later adopted the first name Francis.

40

Bry, 76.

41

Bry, 145.

42

Bry, 67. Bry added that the leaflets would often be camouflaged: “Thus the headline[s] . . . might well be those of a religious tract, of a health food sermon, of an advertisement” or some other innocuous material.”

43

Bry, 32.

44

Hans-Rainer Sandvoβ, Widerstand in Mitte und Tiergarten (Berlin: Gedenkstätte deutscher Widerstand, 1999), 71, and Jan Foitzik, editor, Geschichte der Org (Neu Beginnen) 1929-1935 (Berlin: Gedenkstätte deutscher Widerstand, 1995), 18-19.

45

Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 668. It appears that the KPD, at least during the first two or three years of the Nazi dictatorship, often had better records on their Trotskyist opponents than did the Gestapo.

54


46

Hartmut Mehringer, “Sozialistischer Widerstand,” in Benz and Pehle, eds., Lexikon, 53.

47

Bry, 142.

48

BA, NJ 14425 folder 1, 28 May 1936 Indictment of Dagobert David Kleppel. For membership figures, Benz and Pehle, Lexikon, 309.

49

One small LO network comprising five groups of about a half-dozen members each was split into warring factions over a disagreement on Trotsky’s views on France’s political turmoil of June 1934. This tendency to elevate relatively minor theoretical disputes to the level of life-and-death principles sometimes afflicted veterans of the Trotskyist scene for many years afterward: Oskar Hippe, a veteran of various LO groups who survived the war, was moved forty years later to write a lengthy polemic in his memoirs against the doctrines of another underground Marxist group of the 1930s. Oskar Hippe, ...And Red Is the Colour of Our Flag (London: Index Books, 1991), 124-26. Undoubtedly the harsh polemical style of Trotsky and Lenin influenced their followers.

50

Hans Schafranek, Das kurze Leben des Kurt Landau: ein österreichischer Kommunist als Opfer der stalinistischen Geheimpolizei (Wien: Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik, 1988).

51

IfZ, ZS 2077, 29 March 1971 interview of Ackerknecht by Dr. Werner Röder. Ackerknecht was interned in France in 1940, but eventually fled Europe to the United States and was a professor of the History of Medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1947 to 1957.

52

IfZ, ZS 2077. Sedov lived in Germany from 1931-33, working under his father’s direction with Ackerknecht’s group. Sedov was murdered by agents of Stalin in 1938 in Paris.

53

BA Zw, Z-C 14566. Springer died in prison, date unknown.

54

Landau went to Spain in 1936 and was in the leadership of the POUM until his arrest and murder by police under the direction of the Communist Party of Spain in September 1937. Future East German leader Walter Ulbricht was probably complicit in the murder. See Schafranek, Das kurze Leben des Kurt Landau.

55

BA Zw, Z-C 14363, 13 March 1937 Indictment of Berger and others.

56

Ibid.


55

57

BA Zw, 14566. Statement by Bakalejnyk, 12 November 1936; the records do not give a date of birth, but indicate that he was “about twenty-three years old” at the time. Bakalejnyk died in police custody in 1936 or 1937.

58

Dewar, 164.

59

BA Zw, Z-C 16984, 5 February 1937 Robert Springer interrogation record.

60

BA Zw, Z-C 14363, Indictment of Berger and others. Berger was in possession of a couple dozen copies each of six editions of “Unser Wort,” twenty copies of a newspaper called “Das andere Deutschland,” and a small number of other papers and pamphlets.

61

BA Zw, Z-C 14566, 17 October 1937 Max Laufer interrogation record. They considered their chief task to be the creation of small, “closely limited schoolcircles” for the study of Marxist ideas.

62

BA Zw, Z-C 16984, 9 February 1937 Hans Berger interrogation record.

63

BA Zw, Z-C 14566, 27 October 1937 Max Laufer interrogation record. A “gripping tale of avarice, corruption, and class warfare,” according to the back cover of the most recent edition of Oil! (Penguin, 2007), Sinclair’s novel was adapted for the Oscar-winning 2007 film “There Will Be Blood.”

64

Dewar, 163-64. She did not record the book’s title.

65

BA Zw, Z-C 14566, Alfred Bakalejnyk interrogation record.

66

IfZ, ZS 2077, 29 March 1971 interview of Ackerknecht.

67

BA Zw, Z-C 14566, 25 October 1936 Robert Springer interrogation record. Springer referred in disparaging terms to the pretensions of the “Charly group,” which was based in the Moabit sub-district of Tiergarten (now Mitte, central Berlin).

68

Seydewitz (1892-1987) was in the left wing of the SPD in the 1920s, was a leader of the SAP in the early 1930s, and worked with the Org, as well as other left groups, after fleeing to Prague in 1933. Wolf (1902-1937?) was in Landau’s LO group and later in the leadership of the European Left Opposition. In 1937 he was arrested and probably murdered by the Stalinists while in Spain during the Civil War.

69

BA Zw, Z-C 14566.

56


70

Oskar Hippe, And Red Is the Colour of Our Flag (London: Index Books, 1991), 146.

71

Bry, 100-101.

Chapter Three

Repression and Revival: Contradictions of the Communist-led Resistance in Berlin The German Communist Party was caught politically unprepared for the Nazi onslaught of 1933, and was virtually wiped out within weeks. A party of hundreds of thousands of members, supported by a substantial portion of the electorate, was reduced to a shadow of its former self almost overnight. No working-class party could have survived for long once Hitler came to power, utterly ruthless as his movement was in pursuit of absolute power and the crushing of the left that this required. In Mein Kampf Hitler had proclaimed his belief that the “elimination of the Marxist poison from our body national” should be the “very first task of a truly nationalist government,” and his regime wasted little time achieving this goal.1 The burning of the Reichstag by a destitute, solitary young Dutch radical at the end of Hitler’s first month in power provided a handy pretext for the Nazis, who declared that the fire signaled the inception of a “Communist coup.”2 The repressive agencies of the Nazi state and party unleashed a fearsome terror on the working-class movements; thousands of Communists, including as many as 1,500 in Berlin alone, were arrested immediately.3 By the end of Hitler’s first year, tens of thousands of KPD members were under arrest, many of them subjected to that feature of Nazism that would come to define its rule throughout Europe: the concentration camp.4 Approximately half the KPD’s 1933 membership would be subjected to Hitler’s extensive, ghastly jail and camp system, and some 20,000 Communists perished under the Third Reich.5 Among them was Ernst Thälmann, leader of the KPD since 1925, who would die in Buchenwald in 1944. The KPD’s political degeneration in the years preceding 1933 made the Nazis’ work easier than it should have been, however. In its early days, the KPD tolerated dozens of factions and a diversity of opinions, but by the end of the 1920s the party had become a “strict,

58


centrally led organization” that “forcefully implemented the political directives of a leadership that ruled autocratically,” as one historian accurately noted.6 The party was also subordinate to officials in Moscow who were often unacquainted with the specific political conditions in Germany. These factors would have disastrous consequences for the underground existence forced upon the KPD after January 1933, as the membership had been trained not to take initiative and was utterly unprepared to react to the new conditions.7 This problem was compounded by the Comintern’s imposition since 1928 of its illconceived “third period” theory. According to this doctrine, capitalism had entered a third and terminal stage by the late 1920s, and the Communist parties should assume leadership of the coming revolution by attacking their “opponents” in the workers’ movement, primarily the Social Democrats. This was the basis for the extreme sectarianism of 1928 to 1935, after which this theory was quietly jettisoned.8 It should be emphasized, though, that—in contrast to the persisting image of a fully unified and monolithic party, an image promoted for different reasons by latter-day Communists as well as by critics of Communism—not all KPD members could accept their party’s incoherent positions, and many sensed that their own movement’s sectarianism was at least partly responsible for the debacle of 1933. Daniel Guerin, a young French radical who traveled widely in Germany in 1932 and 1933, wrote, “Throughout my entire trip I was unable to find a single Communist who, once feeling confident about me after a few moments of conversation, claimed to be really in agreement with the party’s tactics. The most orthodox repeated to themselves that ‘the line is correct,’ but they did so with the anxiety of a believer assailed by doubt. As for the most courageous, they barely hid their unease.”9 Initial Setbacks and Underground Organization The repression unleashed by the Nazis after taking power greatly weakened, but did not destroy, the KPD. Out of the morass of German Communism emerged the most tenacious resistance that the Nazi

Berlin’s Communist-led Resistance 59 state would encounter. Tens of thousands of German Communists— perhaps one-half of the pre-Hitler membership of 300,000—engaged in illegal political activities at some point during the Third Reich.10 About 5,000 KPD members remained active in the Berlin underground for at least the first two-and-a-half years of the Third Reich, according to a former member, who added that the party produced more than one hundred illegal periodicals during that time.11 The Communist-organized resistance continued throughout the 1930s despite—or at times because of—the diminishing ability of the KPD leadership to direct its affiliated cells and networks. Future East German president Wilhelm Pieck, who assumed leadership of the Central Committee after Thälmann’s arrest, and other central leaders fled Germany for Paris and set up a “Foreign Directorate” in May 1933. From this point onward, the exiled leadership had to run the German Communist underground from afar, which by the end of the decade resulted in considerable autonomy for most KPD groups. By 1935 slightly more than fifty percent of the 422 “leading cadre” of the party were imprisoned, thirty percent were in exile, and ten percent had resigned from the KPD. Twenty-four high-ranking Communists had been murdered, leaving merely thirteen to continue to work in the underground resistance.12 The Paris-based leadership was in contact with only about two-thirds of the party’s districts within Germany, with communications becoming increasingly tenuous. Beginning in 1935, the KPD initiated a belated, half-hearted attempt to restore working relations with the Social Democrats and other anti-Nazi forces. In October of that year exiled KPD leaders met near Moscow for a conference called, for security reasons, the “Brussels conference.” A few weeks earlier the Comintern had convened its seventh and last congress and announced a shift to a Popular Front strategy, signaling an end to its ultra-sectarian “third period” tactics. Applying this new orthodoxy, the KPD attempted to resurrect relations with Social Democrats and others, relations that had been greatly damaged by the KPD’s rhetoric and policies of the previous several years. These efforts were not without qualms, as the Communists had to overcome instincts that had been deeply ingrained, and needless to say many Social Democrats were wary

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about the sudden reversal. All told, the irresolute manner in which many KPD members pursued the “Popular Front,” the understandable distrust of many Social Democrats, and the relentless persecutions of the Gestapo ensured that no substantial progress was made in forging alliances.13 Communist resistance continued to be severely circumscribed by state repression. The party’s entire domestic leadership (Inlandsleitung) was arrested at a meeting in March 1935. After this, the KPD abandoned its hopes of rebuilding a centralized leadership, and increasingly relied on improvised organizational methods involving “frontier secretariats” or later “sector leaderships” that used informal methods, such as couriers, for communicating and attempting to maintain a uniform political line. Allan Merson, author of a comprehensive history of the Communist resistance, observed, “The tightly organized, disciplined army of revolution of past years was being replaced by small, scattered, loosely-structured groups, some of which had contacts with the émigré leadership, while others did not have, and perhaps in some cases did not even seek, such contact.”14 Many thousands of KPD members fortunate enough to be at liberty took the opportunity to leave the country. Roughly four thousand German Communists emigrated to the U.S.S.R., only to find that their chances of survival there were sometimes worse: Seventy percent were arrested at some point during the ever-widening purges of the 1930s, most of those losing their lives. By 1939 the exiled leadership had lost contact with most of the groups surviving inside the Third Reich. A KPD “instructor” ruefully noted that an underground functionary with whom he spoke knew “nothing of our present policy, absolutely nothing. He is still living in the year 1933.”15 The exiled KPD leadership was only able to maintain communication with its active membership in Germany via radio broadcasts from Moscow.16 The party had devised an intricate and rather daring system of infiltrating “contact-men” and “instructors” into Germany, but this became virtually impossible by 1939-40, as the outbreak of war further curtailed the party’s ability to smuggle such individuals into the country. At the time of the German invasion of Poland, Wilhelm Pieck and other long-time Communist leaders represented the KPD in Moscow, while a small secretariat in Paris

Berlin’s Communist-led Resistance 61 attempted to orchestrate work within Germany. The onset of war, though, virtually cut off domestic groups from their outside leadership. Stalin-Hitler Treaty: Disorientation and Accommodation The German Communist resistance was continually buffeted by the zigzags of Soviet diplomacy and politics; more than one local party leader lost his or her job by holding a newly out-of-favor position for a day too long. For rank-and-file German Communists, the August 1939 Non-Aggression Pact between Hitler and Stalin was especially disorienting. After at least six years of incessant Comintern denunciations of Nazism as the gravest menace to European peace, as well as the harshest expression of monopoly capitalism and the mortal enemy of the working class, a truce had been abruptly declared. Without the least bit of warning to the Communist parties’ memberships—who had devoted such energy to combating Hitler’s allies in the Spanish Civil War, which had barely come to an end— Communists were instructed that German fascism was now a partner in the “quest for peace.”17 The cynical, secretive manner in which the Pact was concluded also held great potential for embarrassment: “After the signing ceremony numerous toasts were drunk in vodka,” reported one historian, “and the gangsters swapped what passed for jokes in such circles. The sordid jollifications lasted until 2 a.m.”18 Stalin himself presided over the negotiations and the signing, and offered a touching toast to the German dictator: “I know how much the German people love their Führer.”19 Despite the suddenness of the Pact, the KPD leadership responded with alacrity, heartily promoting this treaty that had so dismayed much of the party’s membership. No longer was Communist criticism directed at Hitler. England, France, and the United States were now the “enemies of peace,” and KPD literature began speaking in vague terms about the responsibility of international imperialism for the world war. This represented yet another sharp political reversal, only four years after the popular-front tactic had replaced “third period” sectarianism. German Communists were now instructed to laud the pact with Hitler, thereby alienating any allies they may have

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established among non-Communist resisters. Compounding this, the KPD wasted little time renewing its tirades against the Social Democrats, this time dubbing them “agents in the pay of English and French imperialism.”20 Communist leaders foolishly believed that the non-aggression treaty would offer their members more political freedom within Germany—some even fantasized that perhaps Hitler would legalize their party.21 Despite Stalin’s overtures—draping the Kremlin in the swastika flag to welcome Nazi diplomats, for example—there was never any possibility that Hitler would mitigate his hatred of Communism, the unholy twin brother of Judaism in his fevered imagination. The KPD resumed a more energetic resistance following Germany’s June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, which rudely disabused Stalin of his misplaced faith in the pact with Hitler. Now almost completely cut off from their external leadership, Berlin Communists organized smaller and more isolated units, and in some cases collaborated with people of other political persuasions. The “Widerstandsgruppe Ernst,” for example, included eight Communists, four Social Democrats, and several people described as “liberal Democrats” by two survivors of the group after the war; it also included a Yugoslav veteran of Tito’s partisan war against the German occupation.22 The “Widerstandsgruppe Mannhart” included veterans of the two once-mighty workers’ parties as well as resisters who had never belonged to any party. In a report written after the war for the benefit of the SED, one of the members of this small cell wrote that their literature was “greeted . . . by hundreds of thousands of Berlin workers”—surely an exaggeration, but the group did produce an impressive array of leaflets aimed at various sectors of the population.23 The better-known Robert Uhrig network organized several hundred resisters in Berlin and had cells in several of the city’s factories, including as many as eighty members in one armaments plant alone.24 Uhrig was a toolmaker and Communist who, like many of the resisters in the network he started in 1940, had spent time in prison for his political activities in the 1930s. His network also attracted some Social Democrats as well as other youths who had never been in the orbit of the KPD. Uhrig expanded his operations substantially

Berlin’s Communist-led Resistance 63 after the German invasion of the Soviet Union and united his groups with those of Beppo Römer, whose background was quite different from Uhrig’s: A former captain in the German army, Römer had been a leader of the Nazi party in the 1920s, became attracted to the KPD’s “national-bolshevik” perspective, and eventually joined a group of leftist intellectuals, which led to his arrests in 1933 and 1934 and a five-year incarceration at Dachau.25 In short, the Uhrig network bore little resemblance, in organization and in social and political composition, to the Communist underground of the first years of the Third Reich. If the Uhrig network was broad and non-sectarian in contrast to earlier KPD-led groups, though, it was still unable to present much of a challenge to the dictatorship. The war-weary, terrorized population was less receptive than ever to appeals for even more sacrifice and danger than was already the lot of the German people. German Marxism and the “Jewish Question” While the German Communists’ views and policies on the “Jewish Question” repelled some radical Jews, they were not necessarily a matter of great concern for many of the secularized Jews who joined the KPD. The German Communist Party never recognized the centrality of antisemitism for National Socialism, and it was only after the November 1938 pogrom that the KPD strongly protested the persecution of Jews. KPD literature of the 1930s described Nazi antiJewish actions and legislation as merely a “functional tool, serving the dictatorial pragmatic needs of the Nazi regime” by creating diversions from domestic problems.26 This highly inadequate analysis was a natural product of the KPD’s simplistic, vulgar-Marxist theory of fascism. While more nimble theorists investigated fascism’s assortment of political and cultural influences and recognized its mass appeal, this new ideology and movement represented, in the view of orthodox Communists, nothing more nor less than “the open, terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.” The party’s woefully underdeveloped and sometimes reactionary positions on Jewish issues date to the KPD’s origins at the end of the First World War—although, in truth, the Communists’ approach to

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the “Jewish Question” borrowed much from German Marxist traditions, which held that modernization would bring about the end of a distinct Jewish presence and that “anti-Semitism and the Jewish question would automatically disappear with the advent of the classless society.”27 The Communists had a strange dalliance with the far right at various times in the 1920s, claiming common ground, for example, in the struggle against the Versailles Treaty. Karl Radek, the Germanborn Communist leader who became a central figure in the Russian Bolshevik party and the Comintern, concocted an unseemly amalgam of rightist and leftist politics called “National Bolshevism” in the early 1920s. Radek gave a famous speech in June 1923 honoring Leo Schlageter, a right-wing adventurer who was shot and killed by French troops while engaging in sabotage against the French occupation of the Ruhr in 1923. Schlageter, who had previously fought in various rightist paramilitary bands, immediately became a martyr of the far right. But this didn’t prevent Radek from eulogizing him as a hero of the German working class. Evidently unencumbered by “proletarian internationalism,” Radek also announced that the Communists were the most committed defenders of the German nation. The KPD occasionally attempted to match the rightists in antisemitic oratory and, more rarely, agitation. Communist leader Ruth Fischer—of Jewish origin herself—proclaimed in a July 1923 speech to a student gathering: “The German Reich will be saved only when you, together with the German nationalists, understand that you must fight hand in hand with the organized masses of the KPD; those who combat Jewish capital are already fighting in the class struggle, even if they are unaware of it. Stamp out Jewish capitalists! String them up from the lamp posts!”28 This highly provocative outburst notwithstanding, the KPD rarely trumpeted the “Jew as archcapitalist” line and did not place it at the center of its analysis, as did some far-right groups, most consistently the fledgling NSDAP. But the fact that a KPD leader could be capable of such a speech—and Fischer’s diatribe was not an entirely isolated incident—illustrates the party’s deficient understanding of antisemitism and its relation to the

Berlin’s Communist-led Resistance 65 reactionary nationalists who were gaining strength throughout the decade. Moscow’s influence on the KPD’s approach to the “Jewish Question” was unhelpful, but not decisive. The Bolsheviks initially took some measures to counter antisemitism, but ultimately the Russian Communists did more to perpetuate than to eliminate traditional Russian anti-Jewish prejudices. Stalin and his associates used antisemitism in their rise to power in the mid-1920s, for example, carrying out a “whispering campaign” about the Jewish origins of Trotsky, Bukharin, Kamenev, Radek, and others who were at the time in opposition.29 Certainly the KPD leadership, always quick to parrot its Russian masters, detected and acted upon these developments. But the KPD’s adaptations to antisemitism derived more from its own, national background.30 The ascension to power of the Nazis and the dictatorship’s first antisemitic campaigns were not enough to cause the party to reconsider or update its analysis. Instead, it maintained the supposedly orthodox Marxist position, which was based in part on the KPD leadership’s interpretation of the young Marx’s brief commentary on the “Jewish Question” in 1843.31 Karl Marx’s Zur Judenfrage (“On the Jewish Question”) identifies Judaism with capitalism and is in other ways a product of its era. Yet Marx’s article is often cited—by Marxists as well as nonMarxists—with little attention to its full argument or its historical and political context. In his biography of Marx, Francis Wheen pointed out that “in spite of the crude stereotyping” of Marx’s article, “the essay was actually written as a defense of the Jews” against fellow “Young Hegelian” philosopher Bruno Bauer.32 Marx argued elsewhere for political emancipation for the Jews; in a lesser-known sequel to Zur Judenfrage, a section of 1844’s The Holy Family, Marx scorned as “under-developed” those states that were incapable of emancipating the Jews.33 It should also be noted that Zur Judenfrage is actually preMarxist, in the sense that its author had yet to develop the historical and philosophical theories that would carry his name. But even if Marx was as capable of peddling anti-Jewish stereotypes as most European intellectuals of his time, the entirety of his life and work

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does not suggest that he was an antisemite. At any rate, the politics of the Soviet or German Communist parties of the 1930s did not represent a pure lineage with the writings of Marx and Engels, to say the least, whether on the “Jewish Question” or otherwise. The KPD said virtually nothing about the persecutions inflicted upon the Jews in the first years of the Nazi regime. On the rare occasion that the Communists undertook a commentary, they invariably peddled hoary rhetoric about “Jewish department stores,” at times even arguing that the Nazi state, as a regime of big business, protected “Jewish capital” as well as “Aryan.”34 To its credit, however, the KPD did release a strongly worded statement immediately after Kristallnacht, which read in part: The struggle against the Jewish pogrom is an inseparable part of the German struggle for freedom and peace against the National Socialist dictatorship. Hence, this struggle must be conducted with the most complete solidarity with our Jewish co-citizens…. The German working class stands at the forefront of the battle against the persecution of the Jews. 35

After this statement, however, the party reverted to its near-silence on the issue of Jewish persecution, a stance it maintained through the end of the war. At the same time, though, not all members of the KPD were completely convinced of their party’s line on this or other issues. Furthermore, as the 1930s advanced, it became increasingly difficult for the KPD’s leadership-in-exile to directly control its committed cadres, in particular the Communist youth, who were less inculcated in KPD dogmatism and proved to be more adept at forming alliances with non-Communists. This enforced separation between the leadership and the domestic Communists also allowed for greater distance from KPD politics on the “Jewish Question,” especially for groups like Herbert Baum’s that were composed of socialists of various stripes as well as KPD loyalists. At any rate traditional Communist attitudes toward the “Judenfrage” partially explain why even people like Baum, who tried in many ways to promote the line emanating from Moscow, would develop independent and, at times, heretical variants of Marxism.

Berlin’s Communist-led Resistance Jews in Berlin’s Communist-led Resistance

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In Berlin—the center of German Communism and left-wing socialism—young Jews were instrumental in building several Communist-led resistance circles in the 1930s. These groups included Jews as well as non-Jews and comprised people with varied political and social backgrounds. One example was a group in Berlin’s Neukölln district led principally by Lisa Attenberger.36 Attenberger was born in the northern German city of Kiel in 1908, and joined the Social Democratic youth in her mid-teens. In the early 1930s Attenberger was active in a Communist-led “agit-prop” theater group, and she moved to Berlin around the time of the Nazi takeover.37 Police reports indicate that she was in the process of joining the KPD, but that this was interrupted by the terrible events of early 1933; nevertheless, her subsequent activities demonstrate that she was a KPD loyalist and activist.38 The manner in which Attenberger built up her group offers some insight into underground functioning in Berlin’s dissident youth milieux during the Third Reich. She patched together her small group, consisting of about a dozen people at most times, primarily through personal contacts. Her employment as a sales clerk at Woolworth afforded her opportunities to meet people and to carefully cultivate potential recruits. Attenberger met Herbert Ansbach, an important figure in the mid-1930s Berlin radical scene, when he shopped at the Woolworth store; this began a collaboration that lasted several years.39 She also “won five sales clerks for illegal meetings,” according to one brief account of her activities.40 Attenberger met Hildegard Tegener, another young clerk, through a sporting club they both belonged to. Tegener in turn met Hertha Meyer through their mutual membership in the Communist-associated Fichte sporting club, and Meyer attended several of the Abende held by Attenberger’s circle. Attenberger’s friend Hilde Jadamowitz, who was active in several underground groups until her final arrest in 1942, invited a young man named Erwin Radelt to join the group’s informal meetings; by this time the group had grown to about ten people. Attenberger held a “house-warming” party in early 1935, at which a couple more individuals joined the expanding resistance circle. Alwine Neubacher, who was born in 1913 and had already served four months in prison

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for her membership in the underground KPD, was introduced to the circle through her friendship with an acquaintance of Attenberger. Neubacher began attending “communist school-evenings” at Tegener’s apartment in early 1936 and also served as a courier for the group.41 Hans Muhle, who in his mid-thirties was by far the oldest person in Attenberger’s group, had belonged to the liberal Democratic Party in the 1920s and joined the SPD in 1931. He later told police interrogators that his involvement with the Attenberger circle began when Neubacher came to his apartment to sell soap and they started talking about politics.42 Muhle also participated in a group of “Red Students” that included a well-known “religious socialist” and professor named Gerhard Fuchs, and that distributed leaflets and newspapers during 1934 and 1935—one more example of the numerous connections between the Attenberger circle and other resistance groups.43 The Attenberger circle was not completely informal, however, and although some of its members maintained a healthy skepticism toward KPD politics—Muhle would later refer disdainfully to “Stalinist literature”—the group received guidance from the party.44 A Communist “contact-man” who was known by the Deckname (pseudonym) “Fritz” apparently worked closely with the group. Several of Attenberger’s associates said that it was through his efforts that they became more active and accepted certain assignments, such as distributing periodicals and writing anti-Nazi graffiti. Attenberger’s small cadre included youths who were later active in other resistance circles, most notably the Herbert Baum groups. Hilde Jadamowitz, an activist in the Communist Youth who was designated a “half-Jew” by the state, was barely twenty years old at the time of her arrest for her association with Attenberger. She was eventually acquitted of “high treasonous undertakings” and subsequently worked in an illegal Communist-run “International Workers Aid” (Internationale Arbeiterhilfe) group that collected and distributed aid for families of imprisoned Communists. Through this endeavor she met her future fiancé, Werner Steinbrinck, who played an important role a few years later in Baum’s closest circle. Attenberger had also met Baum when she was given an order, presumably from a KPD leader, to collaborate with him on an assignment; she went to his

Berlin’s Communist-led Resistance 69 apartment and picked up leaflets to distribute in various locations, including subway stations and in cinemas after the lights were dimmed.45 Attenberger and seven of her colleagues were tried in October 1936 on the charge of “preparing a high-treasonous undertaking,” one that was routinely leveled at resisters. Three were acquitted, including Jadamowitz and Muhle, whose relationship with the Attenberger circle was tangential. Attenberger herself was sentenced to two-and-ahalf years’ imprisonment while the others received between twentyone months and three years.46 Attenberger remained in Berlin after her release in 1938, working again as a sales clerk and carrying out some assignments for the Communist underground. She was asked to collect information on the “treatment of the Jewish population,” for example. But, like most resistance figures who had spent time in prison, Attenberger was far less active after her release, whether out of a sense of self-preservation or because the KPD underground believed it better for its once-convicted members to maintain low profiles. She survived the war in Kiel and Berlin, and subsequently worked as a teacher and youth instructor, at times for the East German Communists, in Berlin and Eisenhüttenstadt. Attenberger was an unusually capable and personable organizer, and she had many contacts in Berlin’s radical subcultures. One such contact was Herbert Ansbach (1913-88), a young Jewish radical who also organized resistance circles on behalf of the Communist Youth. His groups, like those of Attenberger and of Ansbach’s friend Herbert Baum, attracted a diverse coterie of dissidents, some Jewish and Communist, and some neither. Ansbach and joined the Communist youth organization, the KJVD, as a teenager, and in the first years of the Third Reich he belonged to a Communist underground cell composed almost entirely of Jews. The cell included Heinz Birnbaum and Werner Steinbrinck, both of whom would be executed for their role in the Lustgarten action of 1942. In 1934, Ansbach was in contact with Kurt Siering, an occasional collaborator of Baum's. Siering belonged to two groups at the time, a Jewish group and a group that included former members of the Fichte sport and hiking club, a very large pre-1933 youth movement. In addition, Ansbach was allied with Martin Kochmann at the time; Kochmann and his future wife, Sala,

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organized a circle of Jewish radicals under Baum's direction a few years later.47 Ansbach met with the party’s district leadership in Baum’s apartment several times during 1934, where they would coordinate their activities for the next week and pick up copies of leaflets and newspapers. Baum often gave lectures on a selected aspect of Marxist theory or literature at their weekly meetings, Ansbach later recalled. Ansbach also knew Alwine Neubacher, an activist in Attenberger’s group, through her capacity as a courier for the KJVD, and was familiar with Gustav Kitowsky, the son-in-law of a Professor Fuchs, who had several acquaintances active in the underground resistance. Like Attenberger, Ansbach was always attuned to opportunities to make valuable political contacts. In 1936, Ansbach met some theater workers at the city opera in Charlottenburg, a relatively wealthy neighborhood in western Berlin. In a set of memoirs he wrote in 1964, Ansbach recalled that he had been given a ticket to the theater from a neighbor, met some people at the play, and, as “we had relatively little to discuss about the play”—which was apparently unmemorable—they ended up in a political discussion. He organized these recruits into yet another circle, which met to discuss literature and sometimes engaged in “graffiti-actions,” in which, under cover of the night, they would daub anti-Hitler slogans on walls around the city. This is an example of how resistance circles often originated in informal contacts, or through the natural development of friendships.48 Ansbach’s activity brought him into contact with other figures who circulated in Berlin’s Jewish radical milieu. He met Heinz Joachim during this time; Joachim would later organize a group within the Elmo-Werke that brought him into Baum's orbit, as previously noted. Ansbach wrote that he worked for a brief time in 1938 with Siegbert Kahn (1909-76), another Jewish resister from the KPD. Kahn was a Jewish member of the Communist Youth who was arrested shortly after Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in 1933 and suffered severe torture in the Brandenburg concentration camp. Despite this, he continued his work to orchestrate an underground circle after his release in 1936. His group, which included young Socialists as well as Communists and others, engaged in political and theoretical discussions and collected money to help the families of political

Berlin’s Communist-led Resistance 71 prisoners. With his wife, Kahn left Germany for Czechoslovakia in 1938; he returned to East Berlin after the war and had a successful career as co-founder and leader of the Deutsche Wirtschaftsinstitut (German Institute of Economics).49 Yet, like many anti-Nazi resisters—especially those who happened to be Jewish—he would later fall under suspicion in the “antifascist state” of East Germany for his slightly unorthodox activities in the 1930s. Ansbach’s political work was not solely in these leftist circles: He also participated in an effort to raise funds for indigent Jewish families through “Jewish Winter-Help,” a cause that primarily involved more “respectable” elements of the Jewish community. Ansbach’s group was more audacious than many others. Several of its members organized a “leaflet-action” at an armaments factory where they worked, and on another occasion Ansbach and some colleagues “carried out a demonstration” in which they “shouted slogans and threw leaflets” along a street in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district. This was the last such action for them, though, as it was deemed excessively dangerous by the group’s party-appointed “director.”50 In 1936 Ansbach was indicted with Lisa Attenberger and six others for “conspiring to commit high treason.” This charge of Vorbereitung eines hochverräterischen Unternehmens was customarily leveled at anyone arrested for the distribution of subversive literature, speaking openly against Hitler, and so on, which formed the basis of the indictment in this case as well. Ansbach was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison, and left Germany following his release, returning to East Berlin in 1947. Although Ansbach was unusually energetic in his dissident activities, his story resembles those of dozens of other young Jews and non-Jewish resisters. Walter Sack was another such organizer. Growing up in Kreuzberg, Sack led a very active life in Jewish and Communist radical circles. Although his parents were non-religious, Sack was deeply influenced by his education in a Jewish children’s home and, as an adolescent, became active in a Zionist youth organization. He later joined the Deutsch-Jüdische Jugend Gemeinschaft (DJJG), as well as the Werkleute, a left-Zionist splinter group that was inspired by Martin Buber’s teachings. But, as he told an interviewer many years later, his participation in those groups

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accompanied a drift away from Judaism. Sack remembered most fondly the prolonged discussions with his friends, discussing “god and the world” or, more precisely, socialist literature as well as novels by Upton Sinclair, Jack London, and several contemporary Russian authors.51 Already a veteran of several groups, Sack joined the SPD Youth at the age of seventeen but abandoned them for the Communist Youth in 1934. For the next five years Sack was active in various Communist-associated underground circles, including some that Herbert Baum organized.52 Sack also maintained a presence in the Jewish youth scene and organized a “proletarian” group within the Bund Deutsch-Jüdischen Jugend.53 Five members of this group, the “Third Platoon,” were active later in Baum's network. Sack’s efforts to convince his comrades of the superiority of Communism over Zionism eventually got him ejected from the group. By that time his politics were so well-known among his district’s Jewish groups that he wasn’t allowed to join the left-Zionist Haschomer Hazair, whose leaders were concerned with the infiltration of their group by Communist activists. Instead Sack worked in a group led directly by Baum and eventually left Germany for Sweden, returning to Germany and settling in East Berlin after the war. As the KPD became virtually defunct and German society itself disintegrated, alliances that had previously been unlikely became more commonplace. An intriguing but little-known group that called itself the Gemeinschaft für Frieden und Aufbau (Community for Peace and Reconstruction) coalesced in 1944 through highly unusual circumstances. The resistance activities of a Berlin Jew named Werner Scharff, an electrician born in Poland in 1912, began in 1941 when he was ordered to install lighting at a deportation assembly point located in a synagogue. He obtained work with the administration of the deportation center in order to help the targets of the initial round-ups of German Jews, who were to be sent to the Lodz Ghetto. Scharff aided some in relatively small ways—returning property stolen by the German guards, for example—and others in much larger ways, enabling some of the Jews to avoid being transported eastward by recording their names as “deported” rather than “to be deported.”54

Berlin’s Communist-led Resistance 73 Scharff went into hiding when the last members of the Reichsvereinigung (the “Reich Association of Jews in Germany”) were deported in June 1943, but was soon arrested and deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto in August 1943.55 While in transit to Theresienstadt, Scharff learned about a non-Jewish Berliner, Hans Winkler, who helped Jews. Scharff escaped and returned to Berlin, where he located Winkler. The two started the Gemeinschaft and rapidly attracted approximately thirty people, including Communists and Social Democrats.56 One Communist wrote after the war that he met with Winkler to discuss “how to support the Jews,” and helped the group distribute leaflets and other publications.57 The differentiation within the group is expressed in its few pieces of extant literature. Its leaflets were concise and direct, in comparison to the often wordy tracts produced by the leftist underground. They spoke to “all Germans” in patriotic tones, similar to KPD literature of the time, but with a stronger moral tone. Also distinct from typical Communist tracts, the Gemeinschaft proposed clear and realistic actions. “We call you to passive resistance!,” proclaimed an April 1944 leaflet. “We ask no more of you than you think you can do,” this brief exhortation continued, but to refuse to speak the “nonsense bandied about by the government and a few [Nazi] party comrades,” which only “prolongs the war” and the “guilt” as well as “misery of our people.”58 Some of their literature emphasized the destruction wrought upon Germany by Hitler’s war, while other leaflets publicized, for example, the atrocities that the German army had visited upon Poland and other countries overrun by the Wehrmacht. A wave of arrests disbanded the Gemeinschaft in October and December 1944. Although Scharff perished in the Sachsenhausen camp, most of the other Jewish members survived the war, saved by the advancing Red Army: Their trial, scheduled for April 23, 1945, never took place.59 Communist Politics: Weapon or Obstacle? In 1930s Germany, as elsewhere, there was a disparity between the sincere dedication to a humane and egalitarian society held by many Communists and the steady erosion of any noble ideals, along with downright cynicism and careerism, of most of the leaders. Of course there were many motives and impulses between these

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extremes, and with hindsight, we can argue that rank-and-file Communists who remained devoted to the party should have been more critical. Although their knowledge of life in the USSR was limited, the trampling of democracy within their own party, the elevation of Moscow-appointed stooges to leadership in the KPD, and similar developments should have alerted them that something was terribly amiss. And, after all, a minority of Communists was able to perceive that things had gone irrevocably awry in the “homeland of the workers” and they left the KPD, in many cases finding alternative ways to advance their vision of a socialist society. Some historians and others have argued that only with the strictest centralization could the KPD have had any chance of surviving for long under the extraordinary conditions introduced in 1933; in other words, the KPD and its membership was actually wellserved by the party’s authoritarian and non-democratic character. A stronger argument can be made that the party’s suffocating discipline prevented the sort of initiative that would have given the KPD a flexibility and creativity that would have better equipped the Communists to survive and build stronger resistance organizations. As it was, the party’s internal culture left its members constantly worried about their ability to absorb and adapt to every turn in policy; any slowness or lack of enthusiasm in extolling each sudden political shift would stamp one as a potential oppositionist. By 1933 obedience and loyalty to the party leadership and its Soviet overseers had long since displaced the revolutionary spirit and intellectual fearlessness that could have fostered a more vibrant and resourceful underground resistance. Tellingly, the logistical inability, by the late 1930s, of the KPD-in-exile to lend guidance to like-minded individuals and circles had a positive effect, allowing some Marxist-oriented groups to develop a different style of socialist politics—one that was less dogmatic and that was not dictated by the diplomatic and political zigzags of Moscow. While German Jews constituted a disproportionate percentage of the Weimar-era left and also of the anti-Nazi underground scene, the KPD’s Jewish membership was never very large. By some estimates there were approximately one thousand Jewish Communists in 1927 in a party of 140,000.60 There were few Jews within the KPD who

Berlin’s Communist-led Resistance 75 could have exercised some influence on its approach to Jewish issues, and a smaller number who would have been inclined to challenge that approach. It is instructive, though, that KPD members exiled in Mexico City—approximately half of whom were Jewish—confronted antisemitism and the “Jewish Question” with considerably greater insight and courage than German Communists were able to muster anywhere else.61 While the KPD was not an antisemitic organization, it adapted itself partially to societal antisemitism, remaining silent about a heated issue that it believed would alienate potential supporters and recruits. Yet Jews, especially young ones—in a pattern repeated throughout Europe—played a prominent role in the KPD-associated underground, as they did within the anti-Stalinist left. Numbering about 55,000 in 1933, the Communist youth organization was small in comparison to those of the SPD and of other organizations. But the KPD youth gave early Communist resistance an élan missing from its parent organization: KJVD activists, for example, carried out “instantaneous demonstrations in public squares and threw flyers from the upper floors of department stores.”62 Many Jewish radicals like Herbert Ansbach and Herbert Baum had no trouble accepting the KPD’s indifference to Jewish life, which they largely shared. Other young Communists of Jewish origin, including Walter Sack, kept one foot in the Jewish youth scene, but less out of a genuine attraction to that subculture than a desire to win people to another movement. Other young Jews like Hilde Jadamowitz and Siegbert Kahn created their own space within the internal culture of the KPD, maintaining much of their Jewish upbringing and reconciling it with their nascent political ideas. In this they were not unusual; young people from many different backgrounds did more or less the same thing. The experience of the people around Lisa Attenberger and Herbert Baum suggests that, even as it shrunk, the environment of the KPD youth was less stifling and monolithic than is often assumed—and in fact the internal life of many Communist-led groups became more open over time as they became more autonomous from the party’s leadership, as the next chapters illustrate.

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1

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1939), 984-85.

2

Hans Mommsen, “Van der Lubbes Weg in den Reichstag—der Ablauf der Ereignisse,” in Uwe Backes, et al., Reichstagsbrand: Aufklärung einer historischen Legende (Munich: Piper, 1986), 33-57.

3

Hermann Weber, Kommunistischer Widerstand gegen die Hitler-Diktatur 19331939 (Berlin: Gedenkstätte deutscher Widerstand, 2001), 7.

4

Horst Duhnke, Die KPD von 1933 bis 1945 (Cologne: Kiepenheur and Witsch, 1972), 104.

5

Duhnke, 525.

6

Beatrix Herlemann, “Communist Resistance Between Comintern Directives and Nazi Terror,” in David E. Barkley and Eric D. Weitz, Between Reform and Revolution: German Socialism and Communism from 1840 to 1990 (New York: Berghahn Books, 1998), 357.

7

Herlemann, 358.

8

For a closer analysis of the theories of the “Third Period,” see Nicholas N. Kozlov and Eric D. Weitz, “Reflections on the Origins of the ‘Third Period’: Bukharin, the Comintern and the Political Economy of Weimar Germany,” Journal of Contemporary History 24:3 (July 1989), 387-410.

9

Daniel Guerin, The Brown Plague: Travels in Late Weimar and Early Nazi Germany (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 70.

10

Merson, 89.

11

Merson, 89; see also Weber, Kommunistischer Widerstand, 6-13.

12

Herlemann, 362.

13

The KPD inaugurated but then tried to dominate a “People’s Front” in Paris, alienating would-be allies through such maneuvers as the appointment of Walter Ulbricht to the committee. The novelist Heinrich Mann, one of several nonCommunist intellectuals and political figures who briefly participated in the “Front,” said that he could not work with an untrustworthy person like Ulbricht

Berlin’s Communist-led Resistance

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who “suddenly claims that the table at which we are seated is not a table at all but a duck pond and expects me to agree with him.” Epstein, 62. 14

Merson, 184.

15

Detlev Peukert, Die KPD in Widerstand: Verfolgung und Untergrundarbeit an Rhein und Ruhr 1933 bis 1945 (Wuppertal: Peter Hammer Verlag, 1980), 288.

16

Duhnke, 457-58.

17

Communist party memberships would not have known that the German and Soviet governments had been sending out diplomatic feelers over the previous six months. Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 1933-1939 (New York: Penguin, 2005), 692.

18

Martin Kitchen, A History of Modern Germany, 1800-2000 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 298.

19

M.K. Dziewanowski, Russia in the Twentieth Century (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003), 233.

20

Weitz, 303.

21

Peukert, 330-31.

22

The group was led by a KPD member named Alex Vogel and included at least twenty-one people. BA, RY 1/I2/3/147, folder 2, undated reports written after the war for the SED by Wolfgang Harich and Rosemarie Volk of the “Widerstandsgruppe Ernst.”

23

BA, RY 1/I2/3/147, folder 2.

24

Benz and Pehle, Lexikon, 311. The most complete account of the Uhrig group is Luise Kraushaar's Berlin Kommunisten im Kampf gegen den Faschismus 1936 bis 1942: Robert Uhrig und Genessen (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1981).

25

Klaus Mammach, Widerstand 1939-1945: Geschichte der deutschen antifaschistischen Inland und In der Emigration (Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag), 47.

26

David Bankier, “The Communist Party and Nazi Antisemitism,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 32 (1987), 327. See also Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, vol. 5, Von Januar 1933 bis Mai 1945, published by the

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Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany Institute for Marxism-Leninism (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1966), which contains most statements published by the KPD during the Third Reich.

27

Robert Wistrich, Socialism and the Jews: The Dilemmas of Assimilation in Germany and Austria-Hungary (Toronto: Associated University Press, 1982), 350.

28

Bankier, 326.

29

For more on Russian Bolshevism and the “Jewish Question,” see Mario Kessler, “Stalinismus und Antisemitismus: Die ungelöste jüdische Frage in der Sowjetunion (1917-1953),” in Kessler, ed., Arbeiterbewegung und Antisemitismus (Bonn: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1993), 47-55; and Zvi Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).

30

See Wistrich, Socialism and the Jews, 15-140.

31

Karl Marx wrote “Zur Judenfrage” (“On the Jewish Question”) in 1843, and it was published in February 1844 in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher.

32

Francis Wheen, Karl Marx (London: Fourth Estate, 1999), 55-57. For other insightful analyses of “On the Jewish Question” see Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution: State and Bureaucracy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977), 591-608; Enzo Traverso, The Marxists and the Jewish Question: The History of a Debate 1843-1943 (Boston: Humanities Press International, 1994), 19-22; and Thomas Haury, Antisemitismus von links: Kommunistische Ideologie, Nationalismus und Antizionismus in der frühen DDR (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2002), 160-82.

33

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Holy Family or Critique of Critical Criticism: Against Bruno Bauer and Company, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 4, 110.

34

Bankier, 328.

35

“Gegen die Schmach der Judenpogrome,” November 1939, Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, vol. 5 (Berlin: Deitz Verlag, 1966), 509-10.

36

Attenberger was not Jewish, but approximately half the members of her group were.

37

BA Zw, Z-C 3796, 12 December 1936 judgment against Attenberger and others.

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38

BA Zw, Z-C 3796, 23 March 1936 Indictment of Attenberger and others.

39

BA Zw, Z-C 3796, 30 July 1936 police report.

40

Quoted in a brochure by Michael Kreutzer for a January 2001 seminar at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, Berlin.

41


42

BA Zw, Z-C 5870, 27 February 1936 police interview of Hans Muhle.

43

Hans-Rainer Sandvoβ, Widerstand in Mitte Gedenkstätte deutscher Widerstand, 1999), 108-10.

44

BA Zw, Z-C 5870, 21 March 1936 police interview of Hans Muhle.

45

Kreutzer pamphlet for Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.

46


47

BA-Lichterfelde, SgY 30/1224, 11 May 1963 Memoirs of Herbert Ansbach.

48

Ibid.

49

Hans-Rainer Sandvoβ, Widerstand in Mitte Gedenkstätte deutscher Widerstand, 1999), 168.

50

BA, SgY 30/1224, 11 May 1963 Memoirs of Herbert Ansbach.

51

Sack mentioned Nikolai Bogdanov (The First Gal), Nikolai Ognews (Diary of the Students of Kostja Rjabzew), and Fedor Gladkow (Cement). Michael Kreutzer, “Walter Sack und der ‘Dritte Zug’,” Christine Zahn, ed., Juden in Kreuzberg (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1991), 221.

52

Walter Sack, interview by John Cox, Berlin, September 22, 2001.

53

Kreutzer, “Walter Sack und der ‘Dritte Zug’,” 223.

54

Lucien Steinberg, Jews Against Hitler (London: Gordon & Cremonesi, 1978), 44.

55

The German state established the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland or Reich Association of Jews in Germany in 1939. Its principal function was to “further the emigration of the Jews,” and it was also responsible for administering social services to the Jewish population. The Reichsvereinigung

und

und

Tiergarten

Tiergarten

(Berlin:

(Berlin:

80

Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany replaced the Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden (Reich Representation of German Jews), which was created in 1933 at the initiative of leading Jewish organizations and had greater independence, initially, then the later Reichsvereinigung.

56

Barbara Schieb-Samizadeh, “Die Gemeinschaft für Frieden und Aufbau,” in Löhken and Vathke, eds., Juden im Widerstand, 37-81.

57

BA, RY 1/I2/3/147, folder 7, 1947 report by Eberhard Kosnowski.

58

GdW, Winkler Collection, 21 February 1945 Indictment of Winkler and others.

59

Benz and Pehle, Lexikon, 215. Winkler also survived.

60

This would be roughly proportionate to the Jewish population of Germany at the time. Edmund Silberner, Kommunismus zur Judenfrage: Zur Geschichte von Theorie und Praxis des Kommunismus (Opladen: Westdeustcher Verlag, 1983), 265-74.

61

See Fritz Pohle, Das mexikanische Exil: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der politischkulturellen Emigration aus Deutschland (1937-1946) (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1986); Herbert A. Strauss, Jews in German History: Persecution, Emigration, Acculturation,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 28 (1983), 11-26; and Herf, Divided Memory, 40-68.

62

Jürgen Zarusky, “Jugendopposition,” from Benz and Pehle, Lexikon, 99.

Chapter Four

“Thinking for Themselves”: The Herbert Baum Groups Nazi Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels unveiled an antiSoviet and antisemitic exhibition, the “Soviet Paradise” (Das Sowjetparadies), in Berlin’s central Lustgarten square on May 8, 1942. East German historian Margot Pikarski described the scene: “With great fanfare” the Soviet tank was “driven through the city and parked in front of the propaganda show. A model of the Byelorussian city Minsk was exhibited as was the ‘Farm House,’ a makeshift hut made of mud and straw. Photographs of SS men posing as Russian citizens and soldiers were displayed; they were depicted as frightening and brutish primitives” in order to illustrate the inferiority of the Slavic “Untermenschen.”1 “Words and pictures are not enough to make the tragedy of Bolshevist reality believable to Europeans,” began the exhibition’s accompanying pamphlet, so Goebbels’ team assembled a collection of dilapidated shacks and other run-down buildings to illustrate the “misery and hopelessness of the lives of the farmers and workers.”2 Rita Zocher, a friend of Herbert Baum’s since childhood, recalled that the “Soviet Paradise” was replete with “a great big pile of dung … old apartments, old farmers’ huts,” depicting a society in which “nothing [was] newly built” and “the people were all robbers and criminals.”3 The catalog accompanying the “Soviet Paradise” was explicit in its antisemitism and its identification of Judaism with Bolshevism. The reader was informed, “Early on, Jewry recognized unlimited possibilities for the Bolshevik mischief in the East. This is supported by two facts: 1. The inventor of Marxism was the Jew MarxMordochai; 2. The present Soviet state is nothing other than the realization of that Jewish invention.”4 The catalog’s authors feigned sympathy for Russia’s downtrodden workers, “forced after twenty-five years of Bolshevist culture to live gray and joyless lives,” while incessantly reminding their audience that the “Jewish world revolution” was responsible. Occasionally the text revealed other motives lurking beneath the Nazis’ ostensible concern for the victims

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of Bolshevism: “Our battle is to free the east, along with its vast and inexhaustible riches and agricultural resources.”5 This was not the first unveiling of Goebbels’ exhibition. It had first been presented in Vienna the previous December, and had also been mounted in Paris in March and April of 1942. The crude exhibit had stirred opposition in its two previous stops. Attempts were made to sabotage the “Soviet Paradise” in both places, and in Paris twenty-four French anti-Nazi fighters were arrested, tried, and executed.6 Berlin would be no different. On the evening of May 18, leftist activists firebombed the exhibit, burning down a small section of it. The Nazi army had faced determined resistance in most of its ever-expanding empire; but a semi-military attack carried out on German soil by German resisters was nearly unthinkable. The Gestapo was too efficient and methodical, however, to allow such an act to go unpunished. A “sabotage commission” was entrusted with the responsibility to “seize with all necessary determination … the previously unknown culprits.”7 Within days, the Gestapo had rounded up, tortured, and sentenced to death most of the members of two groups led by Herbert Baum, who had organized the attack. The German state, however, was not content with the murder of the perpetrators and their closest comrades. As The New York Times reported on the front page of its June 14 edition, “At the Groß Lichterfelde Barracks in the western suburbs of Berlin 258 Jews were put to death by the S.S. on May 28, and their families deported, in retaliation for an alleged Jewish plot to blow up the anti-Bolshevik “Soviet Paradise” exhibition at the Lustgarten.”8 An article four days later in the same newspaper, “Opposition Seen Within Germany,” noted that the 258 Jews “included twenty-five Communists.… That there are sufficient ‘Communists’ inside the Reich to furnish fodder for executions” on such a scale “is seen here as evidence … that the opposition has at last dared to raise its head on a fairly broad front.”9 While the spectacular assault on the “Soviet Paradise” brought increased attention in the outside world to the internal leftist opposition, the Baum groups had already earned a reputation within the German underground resistance. This chapter provides a brief overview of the history of the Baum-led groups. The next chapter discusses the internal life of the Baum groups in greater depth,

The Herbert Baum Groups

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examining the place of Jewish identity within the groups and concentrating on the complex relationship of Baum’s groups to broader communist and socialist ideologies and movements. The third chapter (Chapter Six) on Baum describes the final weeks of the groups—up to the sabotage of the Sowjetparadies and the subsequent arrests and trials—and analyzes the fateful decision to attack the exhibit. Chapter Seven is devoted to issues of memorialization and memory in the years since World War II. Herbert Baum: Origins and Influences Herbert Baum was born on February 10, 1912 in the Prussian city of Posen (now Poznán, part of territory returned by Germany to Poland after World War I). His father was a bookseller, while his mother worked as a school teacher.10 They were, like most German Jews of the time, not very religious, and Baum grew up in a secular environment. The family moved to Berlin after World War I, where Herbert attended the Realschule—vocational school, which corresponds roughly to grades 7-10 in the U.S. educational system— and trained as an electrician. He worked in his trade through the 1930s, and from 1940 was a forced laborer in the “Jewish Department” of Berlin’s large Siemens plant, the Elektromotorenwerk (known as the “Elmo-Werke”). Baum’s political activity commenced at an early age, which was not unusual for the time. Baum was a member of the SocialDemocratic youth movement, the Red Falcons, from 1925-28. From 1928 on he was a member of the Deutsch-Jüdische Jugendgemeinschaft (the DJJG, the German-Jewish Youth Society), where he met his future wife, Marianne Cohn.11 Around the time that the DJJG splintered, in 1931, Baum joined the Communist Party youth organization, the KJVD (Kommunistischer Jugendverband Deutschlands, or German Communist Youth Organization). In each of these groups he assumed a leading role, and served as the “organization leader” of the Berlin Southeast district for the KJVD during the first few years of the Nazi dictatorship. Baum also participated in the Ring-Bund Jüdischer Jugend, which was founded in 1933 and attracted many former members of the DJJG and of other youth movements.12

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A fellow activist in the Jewish youth movements, Gerhard Zadek worked with Baum on and off for about ten years, until Zadek and his wife emigrated to England in 1939. The Zadeks returned to Germany, settling in East Berlin, following World War II.13 Zadek met Herbert Baum through their mutual membership in the DJJG in the late 1920s. Every Wednesday evening, Zadek, Baum, and a few others would gather for evening meetings (“Heimabende”), which usually revolved around organized discussions on politics, literature, and sometimes music. The meetings were held in a youth center in Prenzlauer Berg, a neighborhood in eastern Berlin that, in those days, had a large Jewish population. “‘Hebbi’ [Baum’s nickname] always had interesting ideas for our Heimabende,” Zadek wrote, “so that we always looked forward to the next get-together.” Gerhard—who was born in 1919 and was only ten when he met Baum and began participating in the Heimabende—recalled reading and discussing Erich Kästner’s popular children’s book, Emil and the Detectives, and ruminating over questions his older friend posed regarding personal responsibility, dealings with the police, and other matters.14 Zadek was particularly impressed with Baum’s efforts to educate him on various topics. For example, in preparation for a group discussion of the “gender question,” Baum “must have lumbered through many books,” Zadek surmised, as “Hebbi” quoted from works by doctors and researchers as well as by Marxist theoreticians. Another pre-Third Reich acquaintance of Baum’s, Rudi Barta, shed light on other aspects of Baum’s personality. Barta, who first met Baum in 1926, emphasized that Baum's leadership roles derived from his charisma and from talents that the others “instinctively” recognized. “In his calm style he always pleaded for justice.… [He spoke] in such a persuasive and simple manner, that everyone not only understood him, but also agreed with him. He had everything that a natural-born leader” would possess.15 Max Abraham, another associate from the DJJG period, also attested to these qualities, adding, “We all tried to outdo ourselves when ‘Hebbi’ participated.”16 In an 1981 interview, Ernst Feulner, who knew Baum from their time in a youth sports club, testified to Baum’s “combative nature,” which he cited as the reason he “refused, when I proposed it, to go abroad” in


85

the late 1930s. “He saw himself as head of a group with special responsibilities and believed in the imminent defeat of fascism.”17 Some of Baum’s acquaintances from the 1930s remembered more negative aspects of his personality. Georg Manasse, who met Baum in 1933, asserted many years later Baum was “a fanatic” who rarely found others’ opinions valid. Rita Meyer, who also knew him at that time, added that he was sometimes “bad-tempered,” yet “he was our natural leader. He was always asked for advice.”18 While some of Baum’s old acquaintances share this ambivalence, almost all, in contrast to Manasse, remember him as being tolerant toward, and even soliciting, dissenting views. Inge Gongula, who knew Baum from their time together in a Jewish youth group in the mid-1930s, said that while he was a “convinced Communist,” he was “very human” in his conversations and was at no time doctrinaire. He was also “very friendly” and “very personal” with everyone, according to Gongula. Ilse Held, another member of the Ring-Bund, the major non-Zionist Jewish youth group of the 1930s, described him as “intelligent and calm,” adding that the atmosphere of the meetings was “supportive and warm.”19 In my conversations with Gerhard Zadek in 2001, he employed those same adjectives—“friendly, intelligent, calm”—in characterizing his old friend. Zadek also stressed the fervor of Baum’s “hatred of injustice” and “solidarity with the oppressed.”20 In his first book, Zadek described Baum’s identification in his teenage years with Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. To commemorate the second anniversary of the 1927 executions of the Italian-born anarchists Baum organized an event in the Jewish youth center that included readings from Boston, Upton Sinclair’s long historical novel on the Sacco-Vanzetti affair.21 The force of Baum’s personality and the depth of his political commitment, which emerges from these recollections of his former comrades, helps explain his central role in Jewish resistance networks in Berlin during the Third Reich. Yet the “Baum groups” could well have been the “Herbert Ansbach groups” or the “Walter Sack groups”—two other Communist organizers of the mid-1930s who traveled in the same milieu—if not for the convergence of certain factors, especially the imprisonment or emigration of key

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underground leaders. Baum was clearly a strong and influential figure, but the existence of these networks was not predicated upon his role. Nazi repression was largely responsible for driving young Jews and other young dissidents into various forms of action; it was Baum who had the motivation, and the contacts, to seize the initiative. Baum and the Structure of His Groups, 1933-1942 Historians and other chroniclers of the Baum groups have, with only the rare exception—such as German sociologist Michael Kreutzer—written of the “Baum Group.” It is more accurate to use the designation “Herbert Baum groups,” as Baum organized or indirectly guided a succession of groups from the beginning of the Nazi dictatorship through May 1942. Furthermore, many previous writers on Baum have concentrated almost exclusively on the last year of his life and the Lustgarten attack, overlooking the years 1933-41, a rich and complex period that holds relevance for our understanding of anti-Nazi resistance and of German dissident youth subculture. The Baum-coordinated groups were usually constituted on an informal basis, with no explicit standards of membership; indeed, the “members” of most of these circles did not always think of themselves as members of a specific organization, as is apparent in many of their post-war interviews and memoirs. Thus survivors or former friends of the groups often remember them by such names as the “Siegbert Rotholz’s friend-circle” or the “Werner Schaumann school-circle.” It is therefore not easy to delineate the various small groups and “friendship circles,” but the history and constituency of these groups becomes more clear if we distinguish between three periods: 1) 19331937, when Baum worked within the still-legal Jewish youth groups as well as in the Communist underground; 2) 1937/38 to 1941, after the banning of the Jewish groups; and 3) the last year of Baum's activity, mid-1941 to May 1942, when he allied with groups headed by Joachim Franke, Heinz Joachim, and Werner Steinbrinck. In the first four years of the Hitler regime, from January 1933 to January 1937, Baum was active in both the Communist underground—the KPD had been banned almost immediately upon Hitler's ascension to power—and the Ring-Bund Jüdischer Jugend, which, like other Jewish youth groups, maintained a legal existence


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for the first four or five years of the Third Reich, providing some political space for Baum and dozens of other young Jewish activists. The Nazi state was content to permit the legal existence of some Jewish groups, especially Zionist groups that would aid in removing the “alien presence” from Germany. The Ring-Bund was banned at the beginning of 1937, while the Zionist Haschomer Hazair and all other Jewish youth organizations were banned after the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938.22 Over the following decade Baum would continue to cross paths with a number of people who were active in the KPD underground in those early years, including the very young Heinz Birnbaum, Werner Steinbrinck, Hilde Jadamowitz, and Herbert Ansbach, among others. Baum was also in contact with dozens of Jewish dissidents who were participants in the Jewish youth movements. The main groups associated with Baum between 1933-1937/38 were a collection of Ring-Bund activists, usually numbering about a dozen, that included Inge Gongula, Ilse Held, Hella and Alice Hirsch, and Herbert Budzislawski; a group in the Haschomer Hazair that included Alice and Gerhard Zadek, and at times the Hirsch sisters; a group of young Communists including, at various times, Lisa Attenberger, Hilde Jadamowitz, Werner Steinbrinck, Heinz Birnbaum, and Herbert Attenberger; and Baum’s closest circle, which included his wife Marianne (they had known each other since 1928, and married in 1936), Walter Sack, Martin and Sala Kochmann, and Felix Heymann. Other individuals drifted in and out of this network: Ellen Compart, for example, participated in the Jewish youth movements of the early 1930s, when she was in contact with the Hirsch sisters and other future Baum comrades, and Compart participated in some of the Heimabende that held together many of these circles. There is no evidence that she was politically active after the banning of the Ring-Bund in 1937. In late 1940, however, she resurfaced in another Baum-affiliated group; when most of its members were rounded up by the Gestapo in 1942, she avoided arrest and emigrated to the United States. Baum’s groups coordinated political discussions and carried out some clandestine leafleting; their flyers would usually contain brief slogans or exhortations (“Be a good citizen—think for yourself,” “Love

88


your country, think for yourself. A good German is not afraid to say ‘no.’”).23 By the end of the decade, Baum and his comrades had also begun to produce longer statements and pamphlets, which they distributed through the mail as well as by more imaginative (and dangerous) means. The banning of the Ring-Bund in January 1937, followed late the next year by the banning of the other Jewish youth groups, compelled Baum and his comrades to go even deeper underground. These bans were, of course, related to a broader problem: the heightened antiJewish persecutions organized by the Nazi state and organizations. This persecution also had the effect of driving more young Jews— Baum's constituency—into exile, or simply into despair. Added to these problems was the crumbling of the extensive network of underground Communist cells under a wave of arrests in 1938-39; the loss of contact with the KPD-in-exile, which had provided Baum with guidance during the first half-decade of the dictatorship; and the political disorientation resulting from the August 1939 German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, after which Communist-led groups throughout Europe reined in their resistance to the German occupation. Within Germany the underground KPD conspicuously toned down its rhetoric and restricted its illegal operations. The principal enemy of the German workers was no longer the Nazi regime—now allied with the Soviet Union—but the “Anglo-French warmongers.” During this period there were two groups that were most directly under Baum's influence: a circle (termed by surviving members a “school-circle”) around Werner Schaumann, which included Werner Steinbrinck and Hilde Jadamowitz and about seven or eight other young Jews as well as two or three non-Jews. Most were members at one time or another of the KJVD, and they confined themselves primarily to “school-evenings,” as their name indicated, and the occasional distribution of illegal literature. Baum also maintained his own circle, which grew to encompass more than fifteen people, including young Jews from the dispersed Ring-Bund and Haschomer Hazair, as well as two non-Jews, most notably the French émigré Suzanne Wesse. Baum began working at the Elmo-Werke in 1940, and Wesse helped in developing contacts with the Belgian and French


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forced laborers in the plant; she also helped procure fake work documents for members of Baum's group.24 The third period of Baum's groups began with the invasion of the Soviet Union by Germany in June 1941. The invasion had drastic consequences for Communist-organized or -inspired resistance throughout Europe, as it terminated the uneasy friendship between Berlin and Moscow. While many of Baum's colleagues were less loyal to Moscow than he, the invasion was nevertheless an important turning point for his groups, as we will see. By June 1941, most of Baum’s closest circle worked alongside him as forced laborers at the Elmo-Werke. Baum was elected representative of the Jewish workers in the plant, and drew a growing number of them into resistance activities, such as sabotaging production at the factory. He also collaborated with Dutch and French slave laborers in these endeavors.25 Baum’s group met in various apartments in Berlin: his and Marianne’s apartment in the Friedrichshain neighborhood, the apartment of Martin Kochmann in Berlin’s Mitte neighborhood, and Charlotte Paech's flat. Paech was born in 1909, and thus was, like the Baums, older than many of the other members of the groups. Her future husband, Richard Holzer, was also part of Baum’s closest circle, which met weekly and discussed various literary and political texts. Holzer, like several others who had drifted into Baum's orbit over the previous decade, had once been a member of the anarchist Schwarze Haufen; he had also joined the Communist Party a few years before the Nazi takeover of 1933. During this time Sala and Martin Kochmann, who were also relatively old—they were both born in 1912—organized another group under Baum’s loose supervision out of their apartment near the old Jewish synagogue in Mitte. The couple (they married in 1938) had known Baum since the early 1930s. Martin had been a member of the DJJG in his teenage years and had spent a few months in jail during the first year of the dictatorship for his participation in a “leaflet action.”26 It was also during this period that Baum began collaborating with the “Joachim Group,” which was organized by Heinz Joachim and included about a dozen young Jewish men and women, split almost evenly between the sexes. Born in 1919, Joachim played several

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instruments and studied clarinet at a private music school in Berlin. He was pressed into forced labor at the Siemens Elmo-Werke in 1941, where he organized an underground group independent of Baum's network in 1940 and early 1941. Joachim initiated contact with Baum in 1941, and, from that time on, they collaborated. Joachim held weekly meetings in his apartment in Prenzlauer Berg for a circle that included his wife, Marianne Prager, who was nearly three years younger than him, and about ten other young Jewish intellectuals and activists. Like her husband, Marianne was a talented musician and an intellectually adventurous youth. The couple, like most of the activists in Baum’s network in its final phase, were not old enough to have had more than a year or two of experience in the pre-1933 Jewish youth movements, although Marianne had joined a Jewish youth group in 1935. She was raised in a musical family, and played the piano; a voracious reader, she was particularly fond of Thomas Mann and Leo Tolstoy. “Marianne was so attached to literature and music,” according to one account, “that she told the family shortly after Kristallnacht: ‘If they ever come for my books or my piano, they will have to take me first!’”27 Baum worked closely with two other groups after the invasion of the U.S.S.R.: the Hans Fruck group, a small band of Communist youths, and a group led by Joachim Franke and Werner Steinbrinck. These two groups would be instrumental in initiating and carrying out the arson of the Sowjetparadies. Franke had been a member of the Communist Party in the late 1920s but, according to his testimony under interrogation, left the party in 1928 due to “my oppositional attitude.”28 Steinbrinck was a “committed Marxist,” as he would defiantly attest to Gestapo interrogators, and had been a member of the KJVD since 1933, when he was fifteen years old. Steinbrinck had participated in numerous underground KJVD cells and informal dissident circles. Through his employment as a chemical technician at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute he would procure the materials, as well as the technical expertise, for the fire-bombing of Goebbels’ exhibition.29


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Toward Anti-Nazi Action In the first years of the Nazi regime, Baum’s network was built and sustained largely through the infusion of members of Jewish youth groups as well as youths who had had brief tenures in the Communist party or smaller radical organizations. Many of those early members of Baum’s network disappeared from view by the end of the decade, having fled Germany, been arrested, or decided for whatever reason— often an instinct for self-preservation—to cease dangerous political or social activities. The Baum groups had to rebuild during the second and especially the third phases of their existence, weathering arrests, attrition, and the political confusion wrought by the 1939 GermanSoviet Non-Aggression Pact. The ability of the Baum groups to regenerate exemplifies the resilience of German-Jewish youths in the face of persistent setbacks. The somewhat dizzying litany of groups and intersections outlined here also helps illustrate the heterogeneity of the Herbert Baum groups. This heterogeneity was also expressed in the activities, Heimabend discussions, and politics of these circles, as we will see in the next chapter.

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1

Quoted in Eric Brothers, “Profile of a German-Jewish Resistance Fighter,” Jewish Quarterly 34:1 (1987): 31.

2

“Das Sowjet-Paradies: Ausstellung der Reichspropagandaleitung der NSDAP. Ein Bericht in Wort und Bild” (Berlin: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1942), quoted in the German Propaganda Archive: (2 November 2008)

3

YVA, 03/4134, “Testimony of Rita Zocher.”

4

From text of “Das Sowjet-Paradies. Ausstellung der Reichspropagandaleitung der NSDAP. Ein Bericht in Wort und Bild.” “Marx-Mordochai” is a typical Nazi construction; they delighted in emphasizing the Jewish origins, when possible, of their Marxist enemies (“Trotsky-Bronstein,” “Zinoviev-Appelbaum,” etc.). None of Marx’s close relatives were named “Mordochai” or Mordechai; his father changed his name from Levi a few years before his son’s birth. “Marx-Mordochai” seems to have been an invention of Dietrich Eckart, an intellectual leader of National Socialism in its very early years. Eckart, Der Bolschevismus von Moses bis Lenin (Munich: Hoheneichen-Verlag, 1925).

5

Ibid.

6

Scheer, “...Die Lösung von der Gruppe Baum war durchaus richtig,” 239.

7

From a secret report of the Berlin office of the Gestapo dated 19 May 1942. Schilde, 112.

8

George Axelsson, “258 Jews Reported Slain in Berlin for Bomb Plot at Anti-Red Exhibit,” The New York Times, 14 June 1942, A1. The actual number murdered immediately was 250; another 250 were killed later at Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

9

George Axelsson, “Opposition Seen Within Germany,” The New York Times, 18 June 1942, A4.

10

Brothers, “Wer war Herbert Baum?,” 97.

11

Margot Pikarski, Jugend im Berliner Widerstand: Herbert Baum und Kampfgefährten (Berlin: Militärverlag, 1978), 132. The Deutsch-Jüdische Jugendgemeinschaft, founded in 1922, was based in Berlin, where most of its 350 or so members resided.


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12

Chaim Schatzer, “The Jewish Youth Movement in Germany in the Holocaust Period (I): Youth in Confrontation with a New Reality,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 32 (1987), 160. The Ring-Bund was non-Zionist, and represented various leftist ideologies. It incorporated elements not only of the DJJG, but also of numerous Jewish youth movements and sports clubs, including the Kameraden and the Werkleute, radical groups that began during the First World War. Schatzer, 157-59.

13

The Zadeks provided several anecdotes about Baum in their two books of reminiscences, which were published in the 1990s, and I interviewed Gerhard Zadek in 2001. Alice and Gerhard Zadek, Mit dem letzten Zug nach England and Ihr seid wohl meschugge (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1998). Gerhard was a regular presence at seminars and other events commemorating Berlin’s anti-Nazi resistance until his death in October 2005. After several years of declining health, Alice passed away in April 2005.

14

Zadek and Zadek, Mit dem letzten Zug, 31.

15


16


17

Hans-Rainer Sandvoß, Widerstand in Mitte Gedenkstätte deutscher Widerstand, 1999), 169.

18

Brothers, “Wer war Herbert Baum?,” 86. Brothers opined that Manasse’s “conservative views” at the time of the 1985 interview may have influenced his assessment of Baum.

19

Ibid., 92.

20

Gerhard Zadek, interview by author, Berlin, 15 September 2001.

21

Zadek and Zadek, Mit dem letzten Zug, 38.

22

Jehuda Reinharz, “Hashomer Hazair in Germany (II): Under the Shadow of the Swastika, 1933-1938,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 32 (1987), 258.

23

BA, NJ 1403, Bd. 1; CDJC, CCCLXXXI-35.

24

YVA, 03/3096, February 1964 “Testimony of Charlotte Holzer”; Ber Mark, “The Herbert Baum Group,” in Yuri Suhl, ed., They Fought Back (New York: Crown Publishers, 1967), 65-66.

und

Tiergarten

(Berlin:

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25

Forced laborers, as opposed to slave laborers, were paid a small amount for their work, in this case approximately 60-90 marks per month, well below the minimum wage for non-Jewish Germans. They of course had no right to holidays, paid or unpaid, or any other benefits. See Wolf Gruner, Jewish Forced Labor Under the Nazis: Economic Needs and Racial Aims, 1938-1944 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Ulrich Herbert, Hitler's Foreign Workers: Enforced Foreign Labor in Germany Under the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Konrad Kwiet, “Forced Labor of German Jews in Nazi Germany,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 36 (1991): 389-407.

26

BA Zw, NJ 648, 11 September 1934 Indictment of Kochmann and others.

27

Eric Brothers, “Profile of a German-Jewish Resistance Fighter,” Jewish Quarterly 34 (1987), 33.

28

BA, NJ 1400, 22 May 1942 Joachim Franke interrogation record.

29

BA Zw, Z-C 12460, folder 5. 26 May 1942 Werner Steinbrinck interrogation record.

Chapter Five

“We Have Gone On the Offensive”: Education and Other Subversive Activities Under Dictatorship We’ve seen how the Baum groups coalesced in pre-Nazi society and weathered the early days of the dictatorship. Activities that, during Weimar democracy, were merely rebellious, were now—under conditions of a dictatorship that tolerated no political or even cultural opposition—tantamount to resistance. And indeed, the Baum groups came to see themselves not only as socialists or communists, but also as anti-Nazi resisters. But similar to groups such as the dissidentcommunist “the Org” that combined Jewish with socialist traditions, the Baum groups’ resistance activities were severely circumscribed by the suffocating repression of the terror state. Unable to wage an open struggle against Nazism, resisters in the Baum groups engaged in covert forms of resistance, surreptitiously dropping leaflets around the city, scrawling anti-Hitler graffiti on walls, and seeking allies among the forced laborers in the factories where they worked. But their main activities were semi-informal evenings that revolved around discussions of novels, political texts, and music. Some veterans of the Baum groups later declared that they would have liked nothing better than to have confronted the Nazi state more directly. Yet the evening meetings clearly served a purpose beyond their educational and social value. They imparted cohesiveness, helped the participants maintain morale, and attracted new members to Baum’s resistance network. Regular, albeit clandestine, discussions of literature and music were central to all Baum’s groups from the late 1920s up until 1942. Members of Baum’s network used various euphemisms to refer to these events—school-evenings, reading-evenings, home-evenings, Marxist school, or simply “get-togethers.” While such gatherings were not the monopoly of German-Jewish youth organizations, their centrality for the Baum groups clearly suggests a debt to the backgrounds of many of their members in the Kameraden, the

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Haschomer Hazair, and other Jewish movements. Gerhard Bry, the Weimar-era Jewish youth activist and later a member of the Org, remembered that he and his fellow Zionist youths in the Blau-Weiß “talked about everything that existed between heaven and earth.”1 Other veterans of the German-Jewish youth movements have similar recollections. The centrality of the Heimabende within the Baum network was also a function of the youthfulness of the Baum groups’ members—anyone whose teenage or college years included impassioned, late-night ruminations on theory, philosophy, and life can identify with the youths attracted to Baum’s niche within Berlin’s dissident sub-cultures. The study groups were not only integral to the Baum groups, but were also taken seriously by their enemies: When the Gestapo finally apprehended most of the groups’ members several years later, the court indictment’s first charge against the “Baum youth group” was the holding of “Communist school” sessions featuring “lectures on Lenin and Marxism, Engels, and Bebel literature.”2 Remarkably, the immediate catalyst for the arrests—the daring arson attack that Baum would organize on a Nazi propaganda exhibit—was listed third. While there may have been an administrative purpose for the order of the charges, it is clear that from an early date the Nazi state evinced its fear of the sort of intellectual inquiry in which the Baum youths indulged. Persecution and Perseverance In early 1933 Baum and many of his friends must have envisioned, especially after the almost daily street fights that pitted Communists and Nazis in the last years of the Weimar Republic, that they would be waging a more aggressive struggle against their enemies. But a brief synopsis of the situation facing Jews in the first months of the dictatorship will show why any plans for stronger action were precluded, and also why the Heimabende served as an essential component of resistance activity for young Jews—and a bridge to other political activity. Life for Germany’s Jews grew steadily more intolerable as Hitler consolidated his regime. The April 1, 1933 anti-Jewish boycott proclaimed by the government is often considered the beginning of

“We Have Gone on the Offensive”

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the institutionalized offensive against German Jewry; in the weeks preceding the boycott, however, Jews were victimized by Nazi militants in cities throughout the country, including Berlin, where storm troopers seized several dozen East European Jews to be shipped off to concentration camps.3 Thus began the process that would ultimately lead to the death camps, although the “final solution” was not yet imagined by either the perpetrators or the victims in those first days of the Hitler regime. The anti-Jewish persecutions of the 1930s were driven by a sinister logic, as supposed “Jewish experts” in most branches of the government worked full time formulating decrees and guidelines targeting German Jews. This bureaucratic momentum was further propelled by competition and careerism among the so-called experts.4 German Jews responded to these attacks in various ways. Initially, the majority of the country’s half-million Jews were not too alarmed, as they had become accustomed to political turmoil and antisemitic rabble-rousing, as well as rapid changes of government. But over time it became more difficult for Jews to harbor any illusions about retaining the place in German society they had attained over the previous two or three generations. Jewish cultural and educational institutions took on greater importance for many, and organizations like the League of Jewish Women aided greatly in the daily struggle to maintain social and communal ties and traditions, help the less fortunate Jews, and otherwise buoy the morale of the targeted people.5 The tightening of social and political life held particular ramifications for youth activists and radicals, especially for those such as Herbert Baum and many of his friends whose principal vehicles for political expression (the KPD and SPD) were now outlawed and whose political compatriots were arrested or dispersed. But Baum and others entering his network found ways to create space or semi-autonomous zones within a society that was being remade in accord with the Nazi drive toward Gleichschaltung: the forcible homogenization or “coordination” of social institutions, which entailed the destruction or radical re-shaping of pre-1933 cultural and political life. Initially the instincts and habits formed in their sub-culture led the Baum groups to carve out some room by maintaining and

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expanding the Heimabende or Leseabende, which became crucial to the groups’ survival and to raising the spirits of their members. They sought to re-create the sense of community and camaraderie, as well as the freedom, of the Jewish youth movements that most of them had grown up in. But they also sought ways to make their resistance to the dictatorship more effective, and as the repression intensified the Baum groups began to take more direct action against the hated regime. Heimabende: Underground Self-Education As we have seen, Herbert Baum organized many groups over the years. The earliest ones took shape around 1926, and included several people who he would collaborate with after the Nazi takeover. Those first circles encompassed members of various Jewish youth groups, young Communists, Social Democrats, and others who spent evenings together, sometimes studying Marxist literature, at other times listening to music and discussing fiction and poetry.6 By the end of the decade, these informal gatherings included members of the Schwarze Haufen, a radical Jewish group that originated in the late 1920s and disbanded soon after Hitler came to power. The Schwarze Haufen— the name was inspired by the German Peasants’ War of the 1520s, and does not translate well into English—organized discussions on modern art and avant-garde literature; advocated abstinence from alcohol and nicotine as well as a strict sexual morality; and considered themselves communists as well as anarchists.7 In the first four years of the Hitler regime, from January 1933 to January 1937, Baum was active in both the Communist underground—the KPD had been banned almost immediately upon Hitler's ascension to power—and the Ring-Bund Jüdischer Jugend, and while groups within his network were predominantly Jewish, they also included a substantial number of non-Jews. Over the next four or five years, from 1937 or 1938 to spring 1942, Baum’s groups had fewer non-Jews, the result of legal restrictions that made it more conspicuous and dangerous for Jews and Gentiles to socialize, and of decisions by the KPD to move its Jewish members into separate outfits. These later groups also had fewer members who had been in the Communist Party or its youth wing before 1933. Yet for the


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diversity of Baum’s groups over the years, there were striking similarities in how the groups functioned and in what they discussed. While it is not possible to reconstruct a comprehensive list of the novels and political books and pamphlets read by the Baum groups, several members later recorded some of the Heimabende topics. Rita Zocher was born in Kischinew, Russia (which is today Chişinău, the capital of Moldova) in 1915 and her German-Jewish mother brought her to Berlin after her father’s death in 1918. By the age of eleven she was a member of the “youth organization of bourgeois Jewish kids,” as she later described it, and she met Herbert Baum and his future wife Marianne Cohn within a year. Zocher became involved in other youth groups, including that of the KPD, and also joined a theater group.8 She was arrested for her association with the KPD in 1934 and again in 1936, and after spending two months in jail began working with Baum’s circle. Zocher hosted Heimabende in her apartment, where she and her comrades read both Heinrich Heine and more contemporary authors. They also discussed such Marxist literature as the Communist Manifesto and Engels’ Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State—an early Marxist attempt to analyze the source of women’s oppression, and a book not widely read in orthodox Communist circles. The group included several musicians, and they listened to and discussed works by various composers, including Beethoven and Tschaikovsky. Zocher and her colleagues chafed under the restrictions that prevented them from enjoying “theater or concerts, good music and literature.”9 She recalled that one of the group’s favorite plays was Goethe’s Egmont. Goethe’s tragedy—which was considered a radical, democratic statement in its time—is set in the early years of the sixteenth-century Dutch revolt against Spanish rule. The hero perishes knowing that his cause will not prevail until sometime after his death. Count Egmont sees the future in a dream-vision shortly before his execution: “She [the vision of Liberty] bids him be of good cheer, and, as she signifies to him that his death will achieve the liberation of the provinces, she hails him as victor.”10 The Dutch quest for freedom from the tyranny of Philip II also served as the backdrop for Friedrich Schiller’s play Don Carlos, written just a few years after

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Goethe completed Egmont. Inge Gerson, a childhood friend of Baum group member Marianne Joachim, recalled her friend’s attraction to Schiller’s play and to the character of the Marquis of Posa, who embodied the humanistic and idealistic message of Don Carlos.11 Posa, like Egmont, sacrifices himself in the pursuit of a better future society.12 Ellen Compart was in a group of Ring-Bund members who participated in Heimabende held by one of Walter Sack’s groups in the mid-1930s. Compart, who several years later was in the Heinz Joachim group, survived Nazi Germany and later described a typical meeting. The theme was “how to convince, relate to, influence and prepare younger members for the years ahead”: “Give me specifics,” demanded Walter Sack, “what do we have to free ourselves from?” … “Very good,” said Ari Steinbach [a “young philosopher”], “but do we have new values to replace them with?”.… Harry was the first to respond. “Birth control for everyone who wants and needs it.” Eva Rumjanek, a young singer-guitarist, said: “For happiness and fulfillment, stress the development and creativity in everyone.” [Three others continued this train of thought.] “Yes,” Ismar responded, “we have to take risks in our thinking and in relationships with other people and also learn to trust and be trustworthy.” Etta, who worked with children, volunteered: “From early on teach responsibility for actions and behavior.... Reinforce this and no punishment will be necessary. In time we may no longer need prisons. Cooperation over competition.…” Walter stopped everything right then and there: “Utopian fantasies—the opium of the masses.… We must learn and teach defiance. In spirit. In thought. In action. Today—not tomorrow.”13

While it is unlikely that Compart’s recollections were entirely precise, this passage nonetheless provides some clues about the composition of her particular group as well as its internal dynamics. Again we see that the group included a number of aspiring young artists and musicians alongside more single-minded leftists. One can sense tension between some of the newer members and the more experienced political leaders—who included Walter Sack in addition to Baum and, at various times, Richard Holzer, Heinz Joachim, Werner Steinbrinck, and one or two others. The leaders—who invariably had some background and training in the KPD or its youth section—often attempted to impose a more rigid “Marxist” orthodoxy on their comrades, judging from this and other sources. The preceding


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passage also gives a good indication of the spirit of inquiry and of almost limitless intellectual curiosity that characterized these gatherings, in which the dogma of a few relatively doctrinaire members competed with the more free-spirited explorations of others. Another member of Baum’s groups who survived and later wrote about her experiences was Charlotte Paech. She was born in Berlin to “very unorthodox” parents, became acquainted through her grandparents with “Jewish things” and in the early 1920s joined the left-wing Jewish youth group known as the Kameraden.14 Paech trained as a nurse, worked in a Jewish hospital, and married a member of the KPD, which she also joined in 1931. Her husband was arrested shortly after the Nazi victory and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. Paech divorced him after his release, although this deprived her of some protection conferred by his non-Jewish status. She was briefly acquainted with Herbert Baum through the Jewish youth movements of the 1920s, and met him again by coincidence in 1940 when he arrived at her hospital for treatment.15 Paech participated in two Baum-coordinated circles, primarily one that was led by Martin and Sala Kochmann in the early 1940s and that met in the Kochmanns’ apartment in Mitte, a few blocks east of Berlin’s major synagogue. Although Jews were forbidden to possess radios by this time, Paech’s group listened to and discussed music from the radio as well as records—at low volume.16 They also read a book by the anarchist and adventurer B. Traven as well as a work by Jack London.17 Paech emphasized that the purpose of these meetings was not only educational, but also to prevent the participants from “sinking into lethargy” and to reinforce one another’s courage.18 Several members reported that—similar to gatherings of pre-1933 German and GermanJewish youth organizations—these Heimabende included not only discussions of politics, literature, and music, but also lectures and debates on science and mathematics. And, as one would expect, the groups also delved into the politics of the day.19 The members of the circles in Baum’s network felt few if any restrictions on their reading. Although they often read texts that were safely within the Marxist canon (The Communist Manifesto, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Engels), they also read books

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that were less typical, such as Marxist analyses of the historic oppression of women (August Bebel’s Women and Socialism and Engels’ Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State).20 And Lenin’s Der “Linke Radikalismus”: die Kinderkrankheit im Kommunismus (published in English as Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder), a 1920 book that criticized some KPD policies of that time and called for union with the Independent Socialists (USPD), was read by at least two Baum-directed circles.21 Yet Baum was not indifferent to what was transpiring within the groups, and sometimes attempted to enforce a stricter discipline or adherence to KPD politics and goals: For example, it seems that Baum “planted” two females in one group to make it more “Communist.” But such restrictions notwithstanding, it is most surprising that some members of Baum’s circles recalled reading and discussing writings by Trotsky and Bukharin, apostates and even “agents of fascism” in the shrill denunciations of the Comintern. What was not read or discussed also gives us some insight into the intellectual life of these circles. Several former members recalled discussing Stefan George’s poetry, while the names of such literary figures as Rainer Maria Rilke—who had a huge following among Weimar youth—and the Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht do not appear.22 The composers most often invoked in reminiscences of former members were Bach, Chopin, Schubert, and Tschaikovsky— but, interestingly, no mention was made of such contemporary modernist figures as Stravinsky, Schönberg, Hindemith, or Berg. It seems that the late-Romantic spirit of George exerted a more profound influence on these youths than the politicized verses of Brecht or the radical visual statements of George Grosz or John Heartfield. The infatuation with Egmont and Schiller suggests an attempt to conjure up the spirits of long-past heroes to help the young Jews imagine a utopian future. They sensed the futility of building such a future, but could at least imagine it. They went far back beyond Rosa Luxemburg, the Paris Communards, or French revolutionaries Danton and Babeuf, and selected heroes who did not fit into the pantheon of Communist martyrs. Egmont and Posa predated the Enlightenment by almost two centuries and were related to progressive national and


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religious struggles. The Baum groups’ members could have found legions of more quintessentially “communist”—and German—heroes from earlier epochs from the pages of Engels’ history of the German Peasants’ Wars, had they wished.23 It is also significant that the one Marxist text that virtually all former members and friends remembered studying was Lenin’s 1916 pamphlet State and Revolution. Although its author would bristle at the suggestion, State and Revolution presents a somewhat utopian vision of the transition from socialism to communism and of a future classless society, elaborating on Engels’ concept of the “withering away of the state.” From what we can gather, however, the groups’ members did not read Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?, which may have been more applicable and relevant to their circumstances, but was not as forward-looking or idealistic. Nor did they seem to have read any of Stalin’s half-plagiarized tracts, such as Foundations of Leninism, which provided the intellectual sustenance for so many devotees of Soviet Communism—and, as noted earlier, they did read the works of two leading heretics, Trotsky and Bukharin.24 Most of the young people around Baum were committed to Marxism or communism as an ideal, but not necessarily to the party that presumably embodied that ideal. The reading lists of these groups were determined in large part by what was readily available to the members. From 1933 onward, radical literature was in short supply. While seemingly non-subversive literature, such as Goethe and Schiller, was easier to obtain, it was only at considerable peril that one possessed any explicitly left-wing reading materials. Even to discard dangerous literature entailed great risk. “There were various ways to dispose of such books. One way was to bury them,” related Gerhard Bry of the Org, and “one could also burn them.” He and a friend decided that the safest way to dispose of one of their collections of Marxist books was “to weight some sacks or suitcases down with stones, put them into a row boat at night, drop them overboard a half a mile downstream.… We rowed out and dumped the case over the stern. But an incredible thing happened: the package didn’t sink; it floated, only slightly submerged.” They retrieved the bag and returned home, “hid it in the tall grasses” while looking for more stones, and finally succeeded.25

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Bry courted disaster during another attempt to divest himself of some incriminating books: “I had many pages annotated in my rather characteristic handwriting,” recalled Bry, and therefore did not want to simply dump the books “somewhere in the countryside,” as some of his friends had done. So he packed them in a suitcase with sheet music that had his name on it, so that his friend who temporarily stored the books could say it was simply music. These sheets were supposed to be removed, but his accomplice neglected to remove the sheets with his name on them. Yet by luck “the Marxist material traveled with full identification of both of us through Europe into Palestine. The recipients saw the mess and must have wondered whether they had identified the biggest idiot among socialist underground workers!”26 While the Heimabende study groups were the principal, unifying activities of the Baum groups throughout their existence, the members also engaged in other acts of defiance and resistance. Baum and his associates knew better than to leave a “paper trail,” and did not write letters to one another, take records or minutes of their meetings, keep copies of leaflets they had produced, or even keep diaries. This makes it particularly difficult to chronicle the groups’ activities during the first six or seven years of the Third Reich. But there are some post-war accounts that provide more detail on the groups’ activities in the mid1930s. Baum and his colleagues devised imaginative ways to distribute leaflets on some occasions. This is how they managed this feat one Wednesday in the summer of 1934: “Explosives with detonators were contrived…and placed in eight cans. A metal plate covered the explosive material and on top of the plate leaflets were stuffed. These cans were placed on rooftops. An hour later they blew up and scattered the leaflets”—reading “Today the Red Army marches in Red Square—Tomorrow the workers’ battalions will march in Socialist Berlin!”27 The slogan was overly optimistic, but less than eighteen months after Hitler’s victory the memory of working-class and Communist power would have been fresh in the minds of Baum and his colleagues. The Impact of Kristallnacht and the Non-Aggression Pact Two momentous events altered the political and social landscape for Baum’s groups in 1938 and 1939: the Kristallnacht pogrom of


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November 1938 and Germany’s invasion of Poland, marking the start of the world war, the following September. The anti-Jewish riots of November 9-10, 1938 heralded a drastic escalation of anti-Jewish persecutions in Nazi Germany.28 Over the next two months the Nazi government implemented numerous laws and policy initiatives that harshly aggravated the plight of German Jewry: All Jewish business activity would be banned as of the end of the year, and Jews would have to “sell their enterprises, as well as any land, stocks, jewels, and art works”; they would be “forbidden public entertainments”; and Jewish children were expelled from German schools, just to highlight a handful of the more egregious decisions in the wake of Kristallnacht.29 When the war began the next fall, the anti-Jewish offensive proceeded on several fronts. Radios were banned in the first month of the war, public telephones were deemed off-limits to Jews the next year, and by 1942 German Jews were not even allowed to buy newspapers or magazines and were “ordered to surrender a variety of specific items, such as furs, electrical appliances, typewriters, calculators, duplicating machines, bicycles, cameras” and so on.30 Curfews became more restrictive; food rations were cut and the list of foods forbidden to Jews grew ever longer, by 1941 comprising all canned foods, poultry, fish, coffee, milk, and many vegetables; certain stores were declared off-limits, and by 1940 Jews were not even allowed to purchase shoes or clothing; and the Nazis began evicting many Jews from their homes on short notice, continually forcing them from place to place, reducing them to “refugees within their own country.”31 And for all Jews—but especially for those engaged in anything that could be deemed “subversive”—the danger of arrest and incarceration loomed ominously at all times. This debilitating fear was also exacerbated by the events of 1938 and 1939: A month after Germany’s invasion of Poland, Heinrich Himmler “ordered the immediate arrest and incarceration in a concentration camp of any Jew who failed to comply immediately with any instruction or who demonstrated antistate behavior in any other way.”32 The introduction of the “Judenstern” on September 19, 1941—all Jews over the age of six were forced to wear a yellow Star of David badge with the word

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“Jude,” written in black letters mimicking Hebrew script—made Jews all the more vulnerable. By that time the Nazis’ anti-Jewish offensives enjoyed greater public support. The widespread indifference and even opposition to the anti-Jewish boycott of April 1933 had evolved into grudging or conscious approval of antisemitic measures. Marion Kaplan’s research shows that “in the early years [of the Third Reich], Jews experienced mostly isolated local ostracism or attacks, often based on personal resentments or economic rivalries rather than on racism pure and simple,” and therefore they could “hope that the animosity might diminish.”33 By the end of the 1930s German Jews could no longer cling to such hopes. “During the war, popular attitudes increasingly hardened toward the Jews,” Kaplan pointed out. “Primed by antisemitic propaganda since 1933,” most of the population went along with Nazi rhetoric blaming the Jews for the wartime privations that were visited upon non-Jews. “None were Nazis, but all were poisoned” wrote the Berlin linguist Victor Klemperer in his diary.34 For the Baum groups and other leftist resisters, the start of the war held other ramifications. One week before invading Poland, the Nazi government had signed a “Non-Aggression Pact” with the Soviet Union, resulting immediately in a reversal of policy by Communist parties throughout Europe. No longer was Hitler the chief “enemy of peace,” but simply one in a list of imperialist warmongers, and not necessarily the most odious. KPD rhetoric and literature, as well as action, adapted accordingly, and the Communist underground resistance went virtually into abeyance inside Germany for the next twenty-two months. Baum had maintained irregular contact with the KPD’s exiled leadership for the first few years of the dictatorship. At the end of 1936 the KPD’s leadership-in-exile decided that its Jewish members should no longer participate directly in the party’s underground work within Germany, but should either emigrate or form distinctly Jewish groups.35 This did not drastically alter Baum’s tenuous relations with the KPD; his groups had already functioned autonomously from the KPD, under the direction of Baum and a small number of fellow Communists. From approximately 1936 to 1939 Baum employed several people working as couriers to Prague. For example, Alfred


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Eisenstädter went there in mid-1936 and met a “contact-man” in a park; the KPD representative instructed Eisenstädter that Baum shouldn’t undertake anything illegal, and that his people should work within legal Jewish groups.36 Following the outbreak of war in 1939, Baum and his colleagues had little contact with the party. Baum’s communications with the KPD had been primarily through Prague, but this contact was stretched further after the annexation of the Sudetenland in October 1938 and even more so after the occupation of the remainder of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. During their final three years, the Baum groups, like most other Communist or Communist-affiliated organizations, acted with almost complete autonomy.37 While they were probably not aware of it, this freedom created room for the groups to develop a political character that was less inhibited by Stalinism and was considerably more open than was the norm in the KPD-led underground. Despite the erratic communications, Herbert Baum and the other Communists in his groups tried to direct the membership along lines that they considered consistent with official policy. The groups’ literature echoed KPD and Comintern statements of 1940-42 in its themes and concerns, and in much of its language. Yet Baum’s network was less restrained by Communist policy than other domestic KPD-led groups, and was certainly not organized along “democratic centralist” lines. Alfred Eisenstädter recalled heated debates he held with Baum and two other members over the Moscow trials of 1936-38, which Eisenstädter considered farcical. He also argued against the Ribbentrop-Molotov treaty, yet his views apparently did not cause him problems with Baum or with other political leaders of the group; to the contrary, Eisenstädter was sometimes counted among the “political instructors.” According to several former members, the German-Soviet NonAggression Pact caused considerable controversy within the group. Richard Holzer later said that Baum believed the pact was necessary for the military defense of the Soviet Union, a view consistent with the official KPD interpretation.38 Holzer also commented unfavorably on the groups’ responses to the Non-Aggression Pact: “the active struggle of the group stagnated” as did “the resistance struggle generally,” only to become “intensified” again after the June 1941 invasion of the

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USSR.39 Yet Harry Cühn and other members argued that the agreement was the only option for Soviet foreign policy; again, this was in concert with the KPD line, but also a logical conclusion for those members who had been trained to reflexively support and justify Soviet diplomacy. As we have seen, Herbert Baum and a handful of others remained doctrinaire, while the remainder of the group felt no obligation to adhere to any firm “line,” whether from Moscow or elsewhere—yet there is little evidence of any effort by Baum to suppress criticism or quell dissent. New Opportunities, New Dangers Immediately following the German invasion and occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, Baum and about nine of his comrades, not waiting for any direction from the KPD’s exiled leadership, wrote and produced several hundred copies of a leaflet condemning the Nazis’ actions. They distributed the flyers by a technique similar to that employed on earlier occasions, building small catapults that would propel the leaflets into the air from window sills near Berlin’s central Alexanderplatz square after a crude “timer” went off (a tin can was filled with water and then punctured; as the “water level became lower, the weight of the paper would exert sufficient pressure on the catapults” to launch the leaflets “and scatter them on the street”).40 In the last two years of his life, Herbert Baum, along with several of his closest comrades, was a forced laborer at the Elmo-Werke. Baum was elected representative of the Jewish workers, and he coordinated a small circle of resisters within the plant and had some success in planning resistance activities—such as sabotaging production at the factory—in conjunction with Dutch and French slave laborers, who he hoped to “unite … in a single resistance group.”41 Baum also had indirect contact with the Robert Uhrig organization.42 In the autumn of 1940, Baum learned that Rudi Arndt (19091940), a Jewish Communist and leader of the underground resistance at Buchenwald, had been murdered in the camp. Arndt, who was one of the first prisoners at the notorious camp, “encouraged his fellow prisoners to write poems and songs,” according to one source, “and made the greatest efforts to combat the degradation of humanity” that characterized camp existence. He was permitted to assemble a string


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quartet that performed works by Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven. Arndt was also acknowledged by the Buchenwald authorities as a spokesperson for the prisoners, and was derisively termed the “king of the Jews.”43 Similar to many members of the Baum-organized groups of the previous decade, Arndt’s political history was rather unorthodox; he had been, for example, a member of the Schwarzer Haufen, the self-described “anarcho-communist” youth group. Baum and his colleagues, who by this time—a year into the restraint of the Non-Aggression period—were impatient for action, decided to hold a memorial gathering for Arndt in Berlin's large Jewish cemetery, the Weissensee. This was a particularly risky venture, as it involved a congregation of approximately fifty people at a time when any sort of a crowd would arouse the suspicion of the police. The memorial was held successfully, which bolstered the spirits of the participants and whetted the appetites of many for further action. Yet for the most part Baum’s groups were relatively subdued during this period. That would soon change. In the early morning of June 22, 1941, three million German soldiers, supported by 600,000 motorized vehicles, thousands of tanks, and 2,740 airplanes, stormed across the Soviet Union’s western border.44 Hitler’s abrogation of the Non-Aggression Pact freed Communist parties from the constraints imposed by the uneasy alliance, and almost immediately there was a general increase in Communist-organized resistance throughout Europe. As noted earlier the pact was the subject of debate within Baum’s groups, and even within his closest circle. The fact is that Baum’s groups were more active—conducting some modest leafleting actions, continuing to hold Heimabende, and most notably commemorating Arndt at the Weissensee—than were strictly Communist groups and cells. Nevertheless, they had indeed curtailed their activities over the previous two years, to the chagrin of some members. The German invasion of the Soviet Union, however, heralded a radically different era for the Baum groups, and for other Communist-associated resistance outfits.

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Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany “We Have Gone on the Offensive”

Within the first few months following the invasion, the Baum groups’ activities became more bold and open, and the members gained a confidence that bordered at times on the reckless. This audacity was inspired by more than simply an implicit duty to defend the Soviet Union; it was also spawned by a combination of hope and misplaced optimism. Early in 1942, Baum wrote a letter to Communist officials in exile in which he expressed his view that a “mass movement,” which the underground was on the verge of creating, could “transform” the imperialist war into a “civil war.”45 He added, “We have gone on the offensive.” Unrealistic as this perspective seems in retrospect, it was consistent with underground KPD literature and internal Communist correspondence of that time. Even at this late date, it was commonplace among KPD members to resurrect such long-outdated slogans as “transform the war into a civil war” and to believe in a much greater degree of working-class unity and power than had existed since the first weeks of the dictatorship. Also, there were some tangible causes for optimism: the slowing of the German offensive by the Soviets’ successful defense of Moscow in December 1941, aided by an unusually early and bitter winter; Hitler’s ill-advised December 11 declaration of war on the United States; and growing discontent on the home front. Baum’s coterie was reasonably well-attuned to public sentiment, at least in Berlin, as confirmed by the inclusion of numerous testimonies from civilians in their newspapers during those months. Baum, Heinz Joachim, and others working at the Siemens Elmo-Werke were also heartened by the ever-growing population of foreign laborers, whom they saw as natural enemies of Hitler. The increased assertiveness of the Baum-coordinated underground stemmed not only from this optimism, but also from a desperation fueled by the increasing tempo of deportations of German Jews to the East. The German government had begun deporting Jews from Berlin in October 1941, sending 1,000 Jews to the Lodz Ghetto. By January 1942, about 10,000 Jews had been deported from Berlin to ghettos in eastern Europe, mainly Lodz, Riga, Minsk, and Kovno. That March a new round of deportations was initiated, and 974 Jews were sent from Berlin to the Trawniki labor camp in eastern Poland,


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soon to be joined by another 719. “These were their [Baum members’] parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters, school friends,” pointed out German author Regina Scheer in a 2001 article.46 For the first time in years, toward the end of 1941 the Baum groups began producing or distributing newspapers and leaflets. The first of these, a newspaper called Der Weg zum Sieg and subtitled “Information service of the KPD,” was written by KPD members unaffiliated with Baum and signed “Central Committee of the Communist Party of Germany.” Like other illegal publications, it was produced with a minimum of production values, and a maximum of characters per page. The newspaper’s text implored its readers to join the anti-fascist “revolutionary” struggle, invoking Marx’s famous injunction to change rather than interpret the world. Der Weg returned often to pleas for revolutionary ardor, adopting a hectoring tone: “It is not difficult to be a revolutionary when the revolution has already broken out.” The paper offered very little substantive analysis of the war, the political situation inside Germany, the nature of German fascism, or the tasks and prospects for a broader resistance. Der Weg was notable for its failure to recognize, at this late date, the magnitude of the defeat suffered by the working class after 1933; its analysis and prescriptions assumed a much stronger working class, and more political space, than had existed for many years.47 The text conveys a sense of excessive optimism over the impending defeat of Hitler’s army and contains some farcical passages—for example, one issue reported that German soldiers were writing letters about their enthusiasm for the “Soviet Paradise” that they had seen. Der Weg vacillated between calls for a “proletarian revolution” and an “antifascist people’s front,” a reflection of the difficulty many German Communists had in translating the “popular front” line into action. At any rate, the newspaper consisted almost entirely of hackneyed KPD rhetoric and exhortations, with very little concrete advice, beyond its call for courage and patience in difficult times.48 Der Ausweg, signed by the “German Antifascist Action,” was written with more wit and verve than Der Weg. The Ausweg, which was published in November 1941, turned the Nazis’ oft-used term “subhuman” (Untermenschen) against them, referring to the 1933

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Reichstag fire as the “dreadful comedy of the National Socialist Untermenschen.” In this irreverent spirit, the newspaper also expressed glee over an attempt on Hitler’s life two years earlier.49 In comparison to other publications of the leftist underground, Der Ausweg provided a stronger and more concrete analysis of the war and the diplomacy among the various powers, discussing Rudolf Hess’s strange and futile journey to Scotland in May 1941 in hopes of reaching an accord with Britain. Der Ausweg saw this as evidence of a division within the Nazi elite between those “hard-core capitalists” (Schwerkapitalisten) bent on world domination such as Göring and a wing represented by Hess that still hoped for accommodation with the other imperial powers. The dominant Hitler-Göring wing’s plans for “world domination” were “disturbed” by the folly of Hess, who Hitler recognized as a potential danger inside the party—and in fact, according to a rather fanciful scenario described by Der Ausweg, Hitler and Göring had earlier attempted to physically eliminate Hess. The paper expressed the KPD’s long-held view that Hitler was simply a tool of finance capital.50 A second edition of Der Ausweg, produced in December 1941, includes several letters written by soldiers on the Eastern front. One man wrote that “I am ashamed to be a German!” after recounting stories of abuse and murder of Russian prisoners, and most of the letters reported in grisly detail the atrocities against Russian civilians and POWs that were commonplace. This second Der Ausweg also offered brief stories from Berlin and a few other cities around Germany that described the deepening impoverishment of the German people and growing discontent against the Nazi chieftains.51 Its articles continued to be more substantive and its appeal more broad-based, aimed less exclusively at the small number of “revolutionaries” to whom Der Weg appealed. Der Ausweg offered specific examples to punch home its points about the miserable lot of the German people resulting from Hitler’s domestic and foreign policies.52 Der Ausweg briefly ridiculed the Nazi obsession with the “Jewish-plutocratic-bolshevik presumptuousness,” its only reference to antisemitism. The paper concludes with the slogan long circulated by German Communists that “the best Germans” are the “deadly enemies” of Hitler.


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One of Baum’s groups also circulated among themselves a political analysis written by members of the Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei (SAP), a semi-Trotskyist group that had split off from the SPD. This further demonstrates the heterogeneity of the groups and tolerance for non-KPD viewpoints, even among the most loyal devotees of Soviet Communism. Indeed, it was Werner Steinbrinck, who alongside Baum was the longest-standing and most loyal KPD member within the groups, who received this paper from a member of the SAP and then distributed it to his comrades despite the paper’s lack of enthusiasm for Soviet Communism and a prose style that was much more vivid than standard KPD fare. In March 1942 Baum’s group distributed a letter entitled “To the German Medical Profession” (An die deutsche Ärzteschaft). They mailed four hundred copies of this two-page leaflet, which was probably written by Joachim Franke, through the post. Two members, Suzanne Wesse and Hans-Georg Vötter, did most of the production work, with Vötter procuring some ink from the plant in Neukölln where he worked. The leaflet stresses the miserable conditions on the home front, and appeals to its audience on a patriotic basis—which, in KPD parlance, was less a calculation than simply a manifestation of deeply ingrained instincts (“Germany will not live, when we die!/Germany will only live, when we live!”; “the best Germans are the deadly enemies of Adolf Hitler”).53 A few weeks later, in April 1942, ten youths, including several members of Baum’s closest circle, carried out a “graffiti action.” Under cover of night—and aided by black-outs in response to British bombing—they painted “No to Hitler's Suicidal Policies! No! No! No!” on walls around their neighborhood. They succeeded in avoiding capture, and, according to one source, “the next day the slogans were to be seen everywhere; householders, shopkeepers and street sweepers were busy cleaning up the mess. People either shook their heads or smiled when they saw the slogan.”54 It appears that few, if any, members sufficiently grasped the dangers inherent in such actions, epitomizing the groups’ inexperience. But there is no doubt that, cumulatively, these actions greatly fortified the morale of the groups. One member later argued that “its impact and value [could

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not] be measured,” as “every show of defiance brings us a step closer.”55 The Final Period of the Baum Groups In May 1942 Baum and a few colleagues hatched a scheme to conduct a series of “expropriations” (or “X's,” as they called them) of wealthy Jewish families. The group needed money in order to procure forged documents and produce literature. At the same time, the steadily decreasing food rations allotted Berlin’s Jews were taking their toll on Baum and his friends, as on others. The idea, as conceived initially by Baum, was to rob rich Jewish families in Charlottenburg, a relatively well-off neighborhood in western Berlin. On May 7, Baum, Heinz Birnbaum, and Werner Steinbrinck masqueraded as police officers (members of the Criminal Police, or “Kripo”) and visited the home of an elderly couple named Felix and Rosetta Freundlich. Baum and his associates confiscated several items, including a rug, a typewriter, two cameras, a watch, and two paintings. They were able to sell most items quickly, raising approximately 1,500 Reichsmarks.56 The decision to rob the wealthy couple shows that, at least for Herbert Baum and a few others, allegiance to class superseded any solidarity based on shared Jewishness. It seems that the action was motivated in part by class resentment: Why should upper-class Jews remain above the miserable conditions endured by working-class Jews? A creeping despair, and the immediate need for funds to sabotage the “Soviet Paradise” exhibit that had been announced a month earlier, also propelled Baum to take this action. While Baum and his friends had not had much contact, in many years, with the institutions of mainstream German Jewry, such an action was nevertheless unusual, and indeed unprecedented. And the “expropriation” was not uniformly agreed upon, as Marianne Baum spoke against it the previous evening.57 After nearly two long years of relative quiescence, Baum’s closest groups had sprung into action, undertaking a number of bold actions. Another factor driving this renewed assertiveness was the circulation and discussion of a pamphlet that Baum obtained toward the end of 1941, “Organize the Mass Revolutionary Struggle.” The “eighteen-page document,” as it became known, was probably authored by two


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German Communists who were not connected to Baum’s network.58 The text offered an analysis of the war and of the crisis of German imperialism that deviated little from long-time KPD and Comintern analysis, and the turgid prose, mingled with timeworn slogans, could not have appealed to a broad audience. It was produced, however, not for mass consumption but for circulation among German Communists—as a means of communicating the latest perspectives to an underground that had been effectively cut off from the KPD leadership. The document stressed that, for the Soviet Union, the war was defensive (a Verteidigungskrieg); it also emphasized repeatedly that Stalin had pursued a policy of peace (Friedenspolitik) for many years and that the current alliance with England and America was in harmony with this long-standing approach. The document therefore had to sidestep the now-embarrassing Non-Aggression Pact; it briefly referred to this episode as another attempt by the Soviet Union to preserve world peace. The document was optimistic about the course of the war and the impending “crushing of fascism.” Underground resisters would have found more useful the brief descriptions of the situations in specific parts of occupied Europe and the analysis that the document offered of the relation of certain social and national issues to the war and occupation. The document mentioned Nazi racism and religious-based oppression, but, in keeping with KPD practice, did not specifically cite Nazi antisemitism.59 And in a manner typical of Stalinist literature through much of the century, it bombarded the reader with economic and production statistics, in this case on Soviet military strength and armaments production. This secret “agitation-sheet,” as the Gestapo would label it, traveled a circuitous route through the Berlin underground, illustrating how individuals and groups met and exchanged literature at a time when any propaganda against the state was exceedingly dangerous. Although some of the chronology is unclear, the document passed between at least three of Baum’s underground circles, helping to tie them closer together. Richard Holzer reported that the document came from a Werner Seelenbinder from Sweden, and Holzer averred that it probably passed through the hands of the Gestapo.60 Heinz Birnbaum, who lived with Baum from late 1938 to late 1940 and was one of Baum’s closest confidants, said under

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interrogation that he received the document from a Jewish man named Leo Hopp sometime around Christmas 1941.61 Hopp may have been a liaison between Baum’s groups and the exiled KPD. The group made a small number of copies of the pamphlet with a hectograph purchased by Heinz Joachim, leader of one of the groups coordinated by Baum.62 At about this time, Joachim Franke, who ran his own group in loose coordination with Baum, received a copy of the “illegal Druckschrift” from Werner Steinbrinck.63 Steinbrinck told the police, perhaps evasively, that “a Jew whom I had known”—Baum—gave him the pamphlet when the two met by chance in an S-Bahn station. Other individuals who are not described at any length in any of the records, memoirs, or interviews surrounding the Baum groups also helped distribute this document. While its sloganeering and jargon-filled style reduced any chance that the “eighteen-page document” would fire the public imagination, the pamphlet did nevertheless lend some inspiration and cohesion to Baum's underground network. Upon receiving the pamphlet, Baum “called us [him and his wife and six others, including Joachim Franke] all together one day,” said Martin Kochmann, and made some organizational proposals after reading the document to the gathering.64 Baum advocated a tighter cell structure and a regroupment of the circle he personally led into two smaller groups, with a view toward undertaking more direct action. Baum and his comrades would soon be presented with an opportunity to fulfill their long-suppressed desire to strike at their Nazi tormentors. The Noose Tightens While exuding confidence, members of the Baum groups were not immune to the gloom and anxiety that gripped Berlin’s dwindling Jewish population. Unknown to Berlin’s Jews, if perhaps dimly perceived by a few like Baum who had access to outside reports, the destruction of European Jewry was well underway. At the moment when Baum and some of his comrades were discussing the “eighteenpage document,” the Nazis began their first gassing operation against Jews, at Chelmo; hundreds of thousands of Jews had already been massacred by the Einsatzgruppen. But even if it was impossible to imagine the intent and scale of the unfolding genocide, Berlin’s Jews


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were undergoing their own miseries. “The year 1942 was a particularly fertile one for the creative bureaucrats of persecution,” observed Christopher Browning. “Perhaps precisely because their victims were fast disappearing into death camps in the east and their years of accumulated expertise in Jewish affairs would soon be professionally irrelevant, they hastened to construct legislative monuments to their own zeal.”65 “Not a day without a new decree against Jews,” wrote the aging Jewish academic Victor Klemperer in his diary in mid-March.66 Time was running out on the Baum groups.

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1

Bry, Resistance, 18-19.

2

BA, RY 1/ I2 / 3 / 147, folder 2, 10 December 1942 “Trial of the Baum youth group” report. August Bebel was the leader of the SPD until his death in 1913.

3

Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 18. The Nazis began constructing their empire of camps immediately upon seizing power, and Dachau was inaugurated by Heinrich Himmler on the day of the April boycott.

4

Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, 11.

5

Marion Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 46-47. See also Friedländer, 167-73 for more on the complexity of Jewish responses in the mid-1930s, especially after the Nuremburg Laws. While those laws are now seen as the harbinger of worse things to come, many Jews actually greeted them with relief, hoping that the laws “established a permanent framework of discrimination,” ending the “reign of arbitrary terror.” David Bankier, “Jewish Society Through Nazi Eyes 1933-1936,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 6:2 (1991), 113-14, quoted in Friedländer, 167.

6

YVA 03/4134, “Testimony of Rita Zocher,” dictated by Zocher in 1979 in Tel Aviv.

7

They took their name from an episode in the German Peasants’ War of the mid1520s: Florian Geyer, a Franconian knight, led a revolutionary army, and his exploits were immortalized in a song entitled “Wir sind des Geyers schwarzer Haufen” (“We are Geyer’s black band.”)

8


9

Ibid.

10

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Egmont: A Tragedy in Five Acts, trans. and ed. Charles E. Passage (New York: Frederick Unger Publishing Co., 1984), act 5, sc. 3.

11

Gerson, who participated in a small all-female resistance group headed by Eva Mamlok, as imprisoned and sentenced to death in 1941. Gerson’s mother succeeded in bribing an official and freeing her daughter, who remained in a concentration camp in Riga until the end of the war. In a 1970 letter to historian Arnold Paucker, Inge Gerson wrote: “Of all my friends only one young man and Marianne Joachim wrote to me [while Gerson was awaiting execution]. To write


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to someone in prison on a charge of ‘Zersetzung der Wehrkraft des deutschen Volkes’ was a very courageous act, but Marianne knew no fear and she wrote openly quoting her beloved Schiller, especially the Marquis Posa.” The letter appears in Arnold Paucker, “Some Notes on Resistance,” in The Nazi Holocaust: Historical Articles on the Destruction of the European Jews, vol. 7, The Jewish Resistance to the Holocaust, ed. Michael Marrus (Westport, CT: Meckler Publishers, 1989), 435-36. 12

After resolving to die in order to Posa’s son, Don Carlos—who will presumably lead the Dutch against his father and the Duke of Alba—Posa says, “I have surrendered two short evening hours/To save the glory of a summer’s day.” Don Carlos was popular among German liberals during the 1848 revolution, and Posa’s plea for freedom of thought (the play is directed primarily against the Catholic Inquisition) drew loud applause when the play was performed in the early years of the Third Reich.

13

Brothers, “On the Anti-Fascist Resistance of German Jews,” 375-76.

14

BA, SgY 30/2014, folder 1, 15 July 1966 manuscript by Charlotte Holzer.

15

YVA, 03/3096, February 1964 “Testimony of Charlotte Holzer.”

16

Radios were banned in September 1939 (Browning, Origins, 173); records and phonograph players were not banned until June 1942.

17

BA Zw, Z-C 10905, folder 2, 9 October 1942 Charlotte Holzer interrogation record.

18

YVA, 01/297, 1958 report by Charlotte and Richard Holzer, “Jewish Resistance Fighters in Berlin: Baum Group.”

19

According to one police report, their discussions were conducted “in a treasonous spirit [staatsfeindlichen Sinne].” BA, NJ 1642, folder 22. In another example of Nazi police-prose, an indictment against a group including Hans Fruck, an associate of Baum in the early 1940s, accuses the suspects of “read[ing] out and criticiz[ing] in a Communist sense” articles from Nazi newspapers (the “Völkischer Beobachter” and “Das Reich”). BA, NJ 1404, 27 March Indictment of Hans Fruck and others.

20

CDJC, CCCLXXXI-35, undated police report on Siegbert Rotholz and eleven others.

21

BA Zw, Z-C 12437, folder 2, 8 June 1942 Werner Schaumann interrogation record.

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Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany Stefan George was very popular among all sorts of young Jewish radicals in the interwar period; his name appears often in reading lists of groups ranging from the Haschomer Hazair and the Schwarzer Haufen to the various circles of the Baum network. He also influenced some leaders of the military resistance to Hitler: Claus von Stauffenberg himself was a “disciple” of the poet. Robert Norton, Secret Germany: Stefan George and His Circle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 744. George’s ideas about a “New Order” of Germans and the necessity for dynamic leaders help explain his appeal to some conservatives. But the attraction to “the Master” of young radicals is more complex. Although George flirted briefly with anarchism in his youth, he ultimately settled upon a rather conservative political philosophy. George was not immune from the antisemitism of his time, occasionally uttering anti-Jewish comments and proclaiming that Jews would not be allowed in his rarified company. These attitudes did not distinguish George from other intellectuals and artists, just as his later desire to avoid conflict with the Nazis was sadly commonplace. George declined an offer to join the Prussian Academy of Arts, but allowed the Nazi government to state: “I do not at all deny being the forefather of the new national movement and also do not put aside my intellectual collaboration.” George promoted a cult of youth through his poems that was similar to that of fascism, although, in fairness, the fascists were not the only ones infatuated with romantic notions about youth. In June 1933, Walter Benjamin wrote to his friend Gershom Scholem, “if ever God has punished a prophet by fulfilling his prophecy, then that is the case with George.” Norton, 742. George’s popularity suggests an artistic and romantic self-image among his devotees in the Baum and other Jewish radical circles. It also appears that many of George’s young devotees easily separated his poetry from his politics, another sign of the lack of dogmatism that characterized the intellectual life of those groups.

23

Engels’ 1850 The Peasant War in Germany, considered by German Communists to be the most authoritative text on the subject, praises Thomas Müntzer, in particular, and memorably portrays several lesser-known radical figures of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

24

Baum took a dim view of Trotsky from an early date, again indicating that he was more constrained than many of his comrades to follow KPD and Comintern politics. Norbert Wolheim met Baum in a Jewish youth group in 1928 or 1929 and recalled that Baum was “not impressed with Trotsky,” whose politics he believed “represented a deviation from revolutionary thinking.” Kreutzer, “Die Suche nach einem Ausweg,” 85. Trotsky was officially out of favor from 1927, and was deported in 1929.


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25

Bry, 94-95.

26

Bry, 94-95.

27

Brothers, “On the Anti-Fascist Resistance of German Jews,” 372.

28

For a concise overview of Kristallnacht and its aftermath, see Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. 1, 269-305.

29

Friedländer, 281-82. Hitler and Göring—the Führer’s chief accomplice in devising these laws—also decided that German Jews should pay one billion marks for the damages of Kristallnacht.

30

Browning, Origins, 173.

31

Kaplan, 152-53.

32


33

Kaplan, 39.

34

Quoted in Kaplan, 160.

35

Konrad Kwiet and Helmut Eschwege, Selbstbehauptung und Widerstand: Deutsche Juden im Kampf um Existenz und Menschenwürde 1933-1945 (Hamburg: Hans Christian Verlag, 1984), 113-14.

36

Brothers, “Wer War Herbert Baum?,” 93. The instruction to “work within Jewish groups” was in accordance with a new KPD policy.

37

Baum was in contact with members of the Rote Kapelle as late as 1941, enabling him to receive some indirect “information and advice” from the exiled KPD leadership. YVA, 01/297, 1958 report by Charlotte and Richard Holzer, “Jewish Resistance Fighters in Berlin: Baum Group.”

38

Kreutzer, 104.

39

BA, DY/V287/105, undated report by Richard Holzer.

40

Brothers, “On the Anti-Fascist Resistance,” 372-73.

41

YVA, 01/297, 1958 report by Charlotte and Richard Holzer, “Jewish Resistance Fighters in Berlin: Baum Group.”

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42

BA Zw, NJ 1398, 19 March 1943 Judgment against Karl Kunger. Uhrig (19031944) organized the largest of Berlin’s Communist-led resistance networks until his arrest in February 1942; he had as many as eighty members in one factory alone, and had contacts with groups in Munich, Mannheim, Leipzig, Hamburg, and elsewhere. His group was broken up by a wave of arrests in early 1942 that netted more than 200 members, but many survived the crackdown and continued their activities in other groups. Benz and Pehle, eds., Lexikon, 311-12. See also Luise Kraushaar, Berliner Kommunisten im Kampf gegen den Faschismus 1936-1942: Robert Uhrig and Genossen (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1981).

43

Stephan Hermlin, Die erste Reihe (Dortmund: Weltkreis-Verlag, 1975), 37-43, and Lucien Steinberg, Not as a Lamb: The Jews Against Hitler (Glasgow: The University Press, 1970), 30-31.

44

Konrad Fischer, Nazi Germany: A New History (New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1997), 468; Gerhard Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 264-65.

45

Michael Kreutzer, transcript of lecture given at opening of “Juden im Widerstand” exhibition in Halle, Germany, 4 March 2000.

46

Regina Scheer, “… Die Lösung von der Gruppe Baum was durchaus richtig,” in Annette Leo and Peter Reif-Spirek, eds., Vielstimmiges Schweigen (Berlin: Metropol, 2001), 248. The final blow to Berlin’s Jewish community was administered during the first six months of 1943, when a wave of deportations depleted its population from 33,000 to fewer than 7,000, of whom only 238 were “full” Jews. There had been 160,564 Jews in the capital in May 1933. Leni Yahil, The Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 408.

47

BA, NJ 1403, folder 3.

48

BA, NJ 1403, folder 3, 36-42. “Der Weg zum Sieg: Informationsdienst der KPD,” November 1941.

49

On November 8, 1939, Georg Elser, an artisan and former Communist, nearly succeeded in killing Hitler with a bomb at the Nazis’ annual commemoration of the 1923 Munich putsch. Hitler was saved by his characteristic luck: He decided for some reason to begin his speech a half-hour earlier than expected, and left the hall ten minutes before the explosion, which killed nine people. Elser was arrested trying to leave the country, but was only executed several years later, in the last month of World War II.


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50

BA, NJ 1403, folder 3, “Der Ausweg,” 1 November 1941.

51

BA, NJ 1403, folder 3.

52

BA, NJ 1403, folder 3. Der Ausweg tells the story, for instance, of a woman in Halle who received a letter from her son, who was stationed on the Eastern front, describing the privations suffered by the soldiers; she then ran into the streets crying “I don’t want war, I want to have my son back,” whereupon she is arrested.

53

BA Zw, Z-C 12460, folder 5, “An die deutsche Ärzteschaft!,” from 26 May 1942 report on Werner Steinbrinck.

54

Brothers, “On the Anti-Fascist Resistance,” 381.

55

Brothers, “On the Anti-Fascist Resistance,” 382.

56

BA Zw, Z-C 12437, 6 November 1942 Werner Steinbrinck interrogation record; BA Zw, NJ 1642, 10 June 1942 Heinz Birnbaum interrogation record.

57

Kreutzer, 130.

58

The origins of the document are murky. According to one source, it was written by two KPD members named Wilhelm Guddorf and Bernard Bästlein. Kreutzer, 124. An East German historian asserted that it was prepared by Wilhelm Knöchel, a Communist who ran an underground group in Berlin. Regina Scheer, Im Schatten der Sterne: Eine jüdische Widerstandsgruppe (Berlin: AufbauVerlag, 2004), 159. The document circulated widely among Berlin’s Communistled groups. BA Zw, Z-C 6732, folder 1, 19 March 1943 Indictment of Kunger and others.

59

BA, NJ 1403, folder 3, 43-61, “Organisiert den revolutionären Massenkampf gegen Faschismus und imperialistischen Krieg.”

60

BA, DY 55/V287/105, undated report by Richard Holzer. Historian Margot Pikarski wrote that the document was called the “Seelenbinder-Material” by a group run a KPD member Bernhard Heymann. Seelenbinder was a member of the Robert Uhrig organization and was presumably in contact with the party leadership. Pikarski, Jugend im Berliner Widerstand (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1978), 112.

61

BA, NJ 1642, folder 2, 10 June 1942 Heinz Birnbaum interrogation record.

62

Mark, 61.

124


63

BA Zw, Z-C12460, folder 5, 9 June 1942 Werner Steinbrinck interrogation record.

64

BA Zw, Z-C 10905, folder 1, 10 October 1942 Martin Kochmann interrogation record.

65


66

Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years 1942-1945 (New York: Random House, 1999), 29. The Nazis had just “enacted a ban on Jews buying flowers,” Klemperer reported.

Chapter Six

The “Soviet Paradise” and the Demise of the Baum Groups The upcoming Berlin installation of the “Soviet Paradise,” Joseph Goebbels’ antisemitic and anticommunist exhibit, was announced in the Völkischer Beobachter, the leading Nazi daily newspaper, on April 9, 1942. “Original documents” would “tear the veil” from the “Soviet hell,” promised the Nazi press.1 Goebbels’ exhibit created something of a stir, but it also inadvertently served to unite a handful of groups and individuals around a common purpose. Baum convened a meeting to discuss the “Soviet Paradise” as soon as news of the exhibition was made public. This gathering included eight people— Herbert and Marianne Baum, Martin Kochmann and his wife, Sala, as well as Gerd Meyer, Heinz Joachim—who organized another circle in the Baum network—and two non-Jewish resisters affiliated with the Baum network, Irene Walther and Suzanne Wesse.2 This was the first of several meetings among Baum and his friends to discuss how to counter, by some means, the effrontery of the anti-Soviet exhibit. The Baum groups were not alone in their opposition to the Lustgarten exhibit. The two groups with which Baum had working most closely since the invasion of the Soviet Union the previous summer—a circle organized by Heinz Joachim and another circle led by Joachim Franke and Werner Steinbrinck, Communists of Jewish origin—were also determined to undermine Goebbels’ propaganda effort. Franke had been a member of the Communist Party in the late 1920s but, according to his testimony under interrogation, left the party in 1928 due to “my oppositional attitude.”3 Steinbrinck was a “committed Marxist,” to quote from his defiant statement to his Gestapo interrogators in June 1942, and had been a member of the KJVD since 1933, when he was fifteen years old. Steinbrinck had participated in numerous underground KJVD cells and informal dissident circles. Through his employment as a chemical technician at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute he would procure the materials, as well as the technical expertise, for the fire-bombing of the

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Sowjetparadies.4 And independent of the Baum and FrankeSteinbrinck groups, the Rote Kapelle, organized by Harro SchulzeBoysen and Arvid Harnack, printed and distributed leaflets denouncing the anti-Soviet exhibition.5 Countering Goebbels’ Exhibit: Debates and Motives Historians and others who have written on the Baum groups have given little, if any, attention to the motivations behind the Lustgarten attack. Some have assumed, not without justification, that the Baum members acted purely in response to the denigration of the Soviet Union. Undoubtedly many of the activists, led by Baum, were most offended by the anti-Soviet, rather than the antisemitic, character of the exhibit. They also believed that they had a duty to support Russian military efforts by thwarting the “Soviet Paradise,” which they perceived as an attempt to divert attention from the difficulties of the Wehrmacht on the Eastern front and to inspire anti-Soviet fervor in a populace that was becoming increasingly discontented. But several of Baum’s colleagues were provoked at least in equal part by the overt antisemitism that permeated Goebbels’ display. Under interrogation, Werner Steinbrinck emphasized to his interrogators that the “exhibit was antisemitic.”6 Another member later expressed her view that it was “the Jews, the ‘subhumans’” rather than the non-Jewish workers who had the strongest motivation to fight the Nazis.7 There is also evidence that the perpetrators hoped to strike the explicitly antisemitic portions of the exhibit in particular.8 It appears that Baum and his colleagues were driven by a variety of motives, reflecting the mixed politics and identities within the groups by this time; for Herbert Baum and the other KPD loyalists, the insult to the “socialist homeland” was paramount, while many younger members had been undergoing a growth of Jewish consciousness and were deeply outraged by yet another visible and egregious insult to their people. The plans to combat the exhibit evolved through a series of meetings over the next few days. Martin Kochmann told his interrogators that Baum initially proposed a “leaflet-action,” but after visiting the exhibition decided that it should be firebombed.9 In his interrogation four days after the attack, Werner Steinbrinck also stated that Baum first suggested a mass leafleting. Steinbrinck had

The “Soviet Paradise” and the Demise of the Baum Groups

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also been in regular contact with Joachim Franke, and added that Franke, in a separate meeting, “rejected” the leafleting proposal, arguing instead for an act of sabotage.10 This may have represented a shift in Franke’s thinking, as he had proposed, a few days earlier, to produce a leaflet to be smuggled into the exhibition.11 In memoirs written two decades after the war, Herbert Ansbach asserted that Baum had “a few qualms” about carrying out the sabotage. Ansbach argued that the “driving force” behind the decision was Franke, and secondarily Hilde Jadamowitz, a member of the Franke group.12 According to Richard Holzer, however, it was Baum who initiated the idea to launch an attack, with the goal of, “at the least, closing public transportation” to the exhibition for a few days, thereby bringing to the “attention of the populace” the fact that “other powers existed” that were prepared to carry out such actions.13 Holzer was working very closely with Baum in those months, and had participated in the robbery in Charlottenburg a few days earlier. Holzer stated further that he voiced his opposition to the plan, which he knew would bring “harsh reprisals against Jews and antifascists.” He added that he could not persuade more than one or two others, given Baum’s authority in the group, so he declined to participate.14 A friend of Siegbert Rotholz’s also wrote after the war that he “thought the action was politically incorrect” at the time, but that “unfortunately my warnings” were not heeded.15 Holzer was among the very few within the groups who may have had either the confidence or the authority to challenge Baum. Holzer, who was born to a working-class Jewish immigrant family in Berlin, was about a year older than Baum, and had as much experience in leftist and resistance organizations as anyone within Baum’s network. Like several other resisters in the Berlin KPD underground, he had been a member of the anarchist Schwarze Haufen in his teenage years. He then joined the KPD and worked for its newspaper, the Rote Fahne, and was active in an underground group led by Siegbert Kahn—also a Jewish former member of the Schwarze Haufen—in the 1930s. By the time of the Lustgarten attack Holzer was, like Baum and many others in their network, a forced laborer.16 His reports are more credible than the forced testimonies of the incarcerated members of

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the Baum groups, as Holzer escaped the post-Lustgarten arrests and was writing in safety after the war. All these sources have their limitations, however. Steinbrinck was testifying under extreme physical and psychological pressure, having been in the hands of the Gestapo for four days when he claimed that Franke, and not Baum, had initiated the attack. In other cases, though, Baum members named comrades who they knew had already been killed by the police. The post-war testimonies of Herbert Ansbach and Richard Holzer are more reliable, but each of them had political reasons to tailor their reports—especially Ansbach, who was a loyal citizen of East Germany and a lower-level functionary of its ruling Communist party (the SED) when writing his memoirs in 1964, and therefore his comments could be expected to conform to the official thinking on the wartime resistance. Despite the misgivings of a few members, Baum’s proposal to physically attack the “Soviet Paradise” was accepted by members of his closest group as well as by the Franke-Steinbrinck group.17 Although some members were cautious and fearful of the perceived consequences, the spirit of these gatherings was one of confidence and militancy: At long last, they would have a chance to strike directly at their Nazi enemies. One former colleague recalled that the group “believed that the destruction of the exhibition could serve as a sign to the workers, and awaken a spirit of resistance among the German people against fascism.”18 It is very likely that Baum, Steinbrinck, and Franke acted without guidance from other KPD leaders. Several authoritative figures in the post-war Communist party of East Germany later expressed their disapproval of the act—although, as the next chapter explores, this criticism would be suppressed in the interests of glorifying the Baum network in the 1960s and ‘70s. Hans Fruck, the leader of another KPD-affiliated group who sometimes served as a liaison between Baum and the Communist leadership, suggested in a 1964 letter that the Baum groups’ excessive confidence in the impending victory of the Red Army led to tactical recklessness. Fruck wrote that, from the perspective of the Baum groups, “The German communists … would visibly help the Soviet Union to triumphantly end the war against fascism as quickly as possible. From these motives the action in the Lustgarten also probably came about.”19 He further stated he was not


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informed of the plans for the “Soviet Paradise” sabotage, as he should have been: “They were afraid to discuss this with me, as they knew that I would have been against it.”20 The Baum groups “made a terrible misjudgment, and unfortunately became the victims themselves” stated Fruck, who also noted the groups’ “total misunderstanding” of illegal work of this nature.21 Some of the interrogation records support Fruck’s belief that many members misjudged the military and political situation and concluded that “the military situation for Germany was hopeless.… It was time to struggle more openly against National Socialism.”22 Paradoxically, though, there is also evidence that the deepening pessimism discussed earlier drove the Baum groups to mount the attack on Goebbels’ exhibition. “From the spring of 1941 onward the conditions of Jewish existence” in Germany “deteriorated steadily,” as Holocaust historian Leni Yahil noted, and all the Baum members had seen family and friends taken away in the deportations that had begun ravaging Berlin’s Jewish communities.23 Until then, Herbert Baum and most of his colleagues firmly believed that the duty of antifascists was to remain in Germany. But in the months before the Lustgarten action, Baum had begun encouraging and aiding some members of his network in their efforts to emigrate. The Attack on the “Soviet Paradise” The German press, radio, and cinema newsreels trumpeted the news of the opening of the “Soviet Paradise” on May 8, 1942, the day after Baum, Heinz Birnbaum, and Steinbrinck had masqueraded as Gestapo agents to rob the wealthy Jewish family in Charlottenburg. The time had arrived for Baum and his comrades to put their plan into action. Steinbrinck had been working as a lab technician for about two years at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in the Dahlem section of western Berlin. He was able to purloin a kilogram of explosive black powder, as well as a flammable solution, carbon disulfide.24 He also went to a library (the Staatsbibliothek, known to Berliners as the “Stabi”), by coincidence only a couple hundred meters west of the Lustgarten, and borrowed a book on fireworks.25 On Sunday, May 17, Steinbrinck brought the materials he had procured from his workplace to Joachim

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Franke’s apartment, and the two worked for several hours constructing a few rudimentary explosive devices, while Franke’s wife Erika attended to the couple’s eight-year-old son. Like Steinbrinck, Franke had an apprentice’s knowledge of explosives, having acquired some technical information from a course he took on air defense.26 Beginning at seven o’clock the next evening, eleven members of the Baum and Franke groups made their way to the “Soviet Paradise” in groups of one or two. Marianne Baum and Hilde Jadamowitz arrived first, mingling with a crowd that grew to number approximately two thousand visitors. With his co-worker and fellow Communist veteran, Walter Bernecker, Franke strolled down to the Lustgarten with a briefcase containing the explosives. His wife Erika, like some other members who would have liked to participate, could not avoid work that evening.27 Upon arriving at the exhibition, Hilde Jadamowitz inquired about the potential danger to other visitors, but Steinbrinck answered that he did not think the small bombs had the explosive power to endanger any lives.28 Herbert Baum, Sala Kochmann, Irene Walter, Suzanne Wesse, Gerd Meyer, and Heinz Joachim all proceeded to the Lustgarten. Most of these people were anxious to participate, and they all volunteered, which helps explain the large number of participants—a number that was probably excessive, evidence of the inexperience of the Baum members in organizing such a major action. Before going to the “Soviet Paradise,” Steinbrinck dropped by his mother’s flat a couple kilometers away in Neukölln for a belated Mother’s Day visit. After arriving at the exhibition at about eight o’clock, Steinbrinck handed Baum one of the explosive devices. Franke was to deposit another one in a cupboard in the so-called Speisehaus, or meal room, of the ersatz Soviet village. The conspirators were compelled to look for another location, however, upon finding that the Speisehaus was closed that day.29 Steinbrinck joined Franke, and they tossed one of the explosives into a shack that was part of the exhibit, and then fled the scene when another device, held by Steinbrinck in a briefcase, began to emit smoke; they tossed it into a sewer drain a few blocks away. When Herbert Baum’s small firebomb also malfunctioned and began incinerating the bag that contained it, he likewise left the exhibition, as did the other members


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in a disorderly retreat at about the same time, approximately an hour and a half after most of them had arrived. Despite these difficulties, they had succeeded in placing one firebomb, which burned the shack and a small part of the exhibit before fire-fighters arrived and a large police contingent cordoned off the area. And although the Baum and Steinbrinck-Franke groups had damaged a minor part of the “Soviet Paradise,” the exhibit opened as usual the next day. The German press would obviously not report the embarrassing incident, but the Gestapo set to work immediately, forming a special investigating committee. Heinrich Himmler, in his capacity as chief of the Gestapo and of all the German police, received a telex that afternoon informing him of the “sabotage attack on the anti-Bolshevik exhibition, the ‘Soviet Paradise’.”30 Arrests, Reprisals, Recriminations Steinbrinck had planned to meet Baum five days later, Saturday, the 23rd of May. But that meeting never took place, for at mid-day on May 22, Herbert and Marianne Baum, Gerd Meyer, and Heinz Rotholz were arrested at their workplace, the Elmo-Werke. Joachim Franke, Werner Steinbrinck, and all the members of their group—Hilde Jadamowitz, Erika Franke, Hans-Georg Mannaberg, and Georg and Charlotte Vötter—were arrested the same day. Another four dozen people—some of whom were only very tangentially linked to the Baum groups—were arrested in June and July. The interrogations of the arrested Baum members followed an alltoo-familiar pattern. In the first recorded interview, the suspect merely stated his or her name and a few personal facts, while repeating that they had no idea why they had been arrested. In the second interview, the arrestee may have offered that “I knew a Jew named Herbert Baum” and a few other vague hints at possible knowledge of subversive activity. The third interview invariably found the victim divulging detailed information about her or his involvement; it takes little imagination to deduce the tactics employed by the Gestapo. Yet even at this stage of the process the courage and spirit of defiance of many of the young resisters is evident from the transcripts. Heinz Rotholz stated “I wish to add that I knew about the

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preparations of the sabotage action against the ‘Soviet Paradise.’ Had the comrades not excluded me from the act because of my Jewish appearance, I would have gone on Monday to the exhibit and taken part in the act.”31 Lotte Rotholz told her inquisitors: “One must utilize every opportunity to fight against the present regime…. But one thing was clear to me: as a Jew I must not lag behind … my ties were and remain with Baum.”32 Herbert Budzislawski stated that he was compelled as a Jew to fight “injustice in Germany”—the only way, as he saw it, to find a way to “live in Germany as a human being.”33 The police dragged Baum into the Elmo-Werke plant, hoping that he might reveal some of his collaborators or that some of his friends would inadvertently expose themselves when they saw their badly beaten comrade. This effort failed.34 On June 11 the Gestapo informed the state prosecutor that Herbert Baum had been declared a suicide, although it is likely that he was tortured to death in the three weeks after his arrest—in either case, a victim of state terror. The Gestapo kept no interrogation records, and simply noted that he had “hung himself” without providing a coroner’s report or other evidence.35 At least three other members of Baum’s groups died in police custody, either murdered or by their own hand. All told, thirty-two members and supporters of Baum’s groups were executed or otherwise murdered by the German authorities over the next year and a half. Sixteen of those executed were no older than twenty-three years. Most were charged with “high treason” and tried before the Nazis’ “special courts” (Sondergericht), which prosecuted political crimes. Some of these same activists had been arrested in the 1930s and, despite being Jewish, had served one or two years and then been released. But the Nazi legal system became ever crueler following the attack on the Soviet Union. Two weeks after the invasion, the Justice Ministry, invoking the post-World War I “stab in the back” legend, wrote to all local prosecutors, “While the German soldier places his life out there on the line, the German administration of justice must unconditionally guarantee that undisciplined rabblerousers cannot endanger the peace, security, and working environment [on the home front] behind his back.”36 The treatment of the Baum groups’ members—and their subsequent punishments—was probably made harsher by news of the assassination of SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich in Czechoslovakia.37 He had


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been attacked by Czech resistance operatives outside Prague on May 27, and succumbed to his injuries on June 4. The first eight executions of the Baum conspirators were carried out on August 18 at Plötzensee, a large penitentiary in western Berlin that would later be the site of the executions of some of those who plotted the July 1944 attempt on Hitler’s life. Werner Steinbrinck was among this first group to be executed for direct or indirect involvement with the Baum groups, as were Marianne Baum, who had been with Herbert since their teen years in the late 1920s; the twentythree-year-old musician Heinz Joachim, who died four days short of the first wedding anniversary he would have shared with his young wife, Marianne, who was also condemned; and Sala Kochmann, who at thirty was one of the older members—she had joined the DeutschJüdische Jugendgemeinschaft at thirteen, met Herbert Baum and her future husband Martin in 1928, and worked in groups under Baum since the mid-1930s. She taught at a Jewish kindergarten in Berlin’s Mitte district until her arrest.38 Also in this group were Gerd Meyer, twenty-three, whose bride of eight months would face the executioner the next spring; Suzanne Wesse, a French-born non-Jew who had participated in at least two of the circles in Baum’s network over the previous four years; Hans-Georg Mannaberg, a member since the early 1930s of the KPD and its youth wing who had served a year and a half in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp a few years earlier; and Hilde Jadamowitz, a member of various left-wing circles over the years who was engaged to Steinbrinck at the time of their arrests. The next group of ill-fated Baum resisters to face the executioner included Heinz Birnbaum, a twenty-two-year-old lathe operator, former Jewish youth activist, and member of the KJVD who had lived with the Baums from 1938-40 in Berlin’s Friedrichshain neighborhood; Hella Hirsch, who had trained as a sales clerk before being pressed into duty as a forced laborer and who was executed two days before her twenty-second birthday; and Marianne Joachim, twenty-one, who had met some of her future comrades while a member of the Bund Deutsch-Jüdischer Jugend in the mid-1930s. Also executed in this second group was Hilde Loewy, twenty, who had studied commercial art and decoration and was a member of Haschomer Hazair until its 1938 ban; Hanni Meyer, who had just

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turned twenty-two and was a former member of the Ring-Bund jüdischer Jugend; Helmut Neumann, twenty-one; Heinz Rotholz, also twenty-one; and Siegbert Rotholz, twenty-three, a former member of a left-Zionist group (Habonim) and a forced laborer at the time he began working with Baum. Lothar Salinger, like Siegbert Rotholz a twenty-three-year-old former member of Habonim, was the oldest of this group to be executed—he was four months older than Siegbert Rotholz. Their deaths, like those of the first group to be executed, were announced in Berlin on large red placards posted by the police.39 A few of the condemned prisoners wrote letters to relatives. On the day of her execution, Marianne Joachim wrote her parents in an almost upbeat tone. “Think of the songs we all sang together, all is fine!” We cannot know if she had genuinely accepted her fate and was content in her last hours or if she was simply trying to buoy her parents’ spirits, although Rita Zocher—who was in Berlin-Moabit prison with Joachim and other condemned Baum members—later wrote that “they were very courageous…. For their last wish they requested that the doors [to their cells] be opened,” so that the other inmates could hear them, and they sang a Communist song.”40 “Live well, my beloved parents!” concluded Joachim’s letter of March 4, 1943.41 She could not have known that her mother was deported to Auschwitz that very day, or that her father would be sent to Theresienstadt in less than two weeks. Siegbert Rotholz also wrote a final letter a few hours before his execution on March 4, addressed to his sister-in-law. His letter was shorter and less emotional than Joachim’s; he wrote that he would be “leaving today at 6:30 forever,” and referred to other family members who were in his thoughts.42 Naturally, not everyone could face their death stoically, or comfort themselves with the hope that their sacrifice was worth the cost. Hilde Loewy’s lawyer—himself a Jew who had been baptized, and who survived the Third Reich—later wrote that she told him she had carved something into the wall in her cell. “‘What,’ I asked. ‘I am still so young and I would so much like to live!’”43 The grim conclusion of the Baum groups’ story does not end with the executions of the majority of the members. In typical fashion, the Nazi authorities punished family members and associates of the perpetrators—both actual and alleged—of the “Soviet Paradise” attack. Parents and other relatives were rounded up and deported to


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concentration camps or extermination centers, in particular Auschwitz, the final destination for many thousands of Berlin Jews. In some cases, these relatives were simply ensnared in the escalating deportations of that period. One member’s sister, for example, was deported to Auschwitz the day before he was arrested; Herbert Budzislawski’s mother, sister, and two-year-old niece were shipped to Auschwitz two months before his arrest. Yet other deportations seem to have been part of a policy of reprisals. Lothar Salinger’s parents were sent to Theresienstadt within a few days of his arrest in July 1942. As mentioned above, Marianne Joachim’s mother was sent to Auschwitz on the day of her daughter’s execution, and her father was deported to Theresienstadt two weeks later—also the destination of Hella Hirsh’s parents, transported there thirteen days after their daughter’s execution. But virtually all the family members of Baum associates who remained in Berlin suffered the fate of the other German Jews, regardless of a punitive policy; the quest for revenge and “examples” only accelerated the process in some cases. Others far beyond the periphery of the Baum groups would feel the wrath of the Nazi state in the aftermath of the “Soviet Paradise” attack. On May 29 the Gestapo rounded up Leo Baeck and a number of other prominent Jews, including officials of the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland—the National Association of Jews in Germany, established in 1939 and chaired by Baeck—in order to nonchalantly inform them of the attack, and the fact that 250 Jews had just been shot in response.44 Another 250 Jewish Berliners were arrested and sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, north of Berlin, where they were killed soon thereafter.45 It took little time for the worst fears of a few of Baum’s fellow conspirators to be realized: that their actions would be used to destroy other Jews. Were They Betrayed? The apparent ease with which the Gestapo broke the case and corralled Baum and his colleagues fueled speculation among surviving members about the possibility of a spy or informer within their ranks. A woman who knew some of Baum’s circle, and whose husband worked alongside Baum at the Siemens plant, later said, “There must have been a traitor in the group.”46 Richard Holzer, in a brief post-war

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report, explicitly accused Joachim Franke of working with the Gestapo, and of furnishing it with the names of the groups’ members. He also wrote that “the [Lustgarten] action had already been betrayed to the Gestapo by a spy,” i.e., Franke.47 Richard Holzer’s wife, Charlotte, also firmly believed that Franke was a spy who had “wormed his way” into the Steinbrinck group.48 In some other cases, veterans of the underground circles stopped short of labeling Franke a spy, but cast suspicion on his role in other ways. In a 1979 interview, Rita Zocher referred to Franke as the “provocateur of the group.” Although Franke was executed alongside the others, Zocher contended that Franke’s conduct while under interrogation—accepting a cigarette from the police, for example, while the other members made a point of refusing this offer—was “confirmation” of his guilt.49 Herbert Ansbach, who was involved with several resistance groups in the Communist orbit throughout the 1930s and the war, stated flatly in an unpublished manuscript in 1963 that Franke “betrayed” the group. Ansbach added, “I know he was executed. But it still seems to me that this was the same Franke who … we had already heard earlier did not play a very good role in the prison.”50 While some early accounts repeated the accusation against Franke, more recent historians and chroniclers of the Baum groups have generally agreed that there is not sufficient evidence that Franke or anyone else in the groups was an informer.51 No police records, for example, have been unearthed to implicate him as an infiltrator or resource for the Gestapo. And while the Nazis were quite capable of executing a spy or informant who was no longer useful, Franke’s fate can still be taken as evidence of his innocence of the post-war allegations. It seems most likely that Franke, inspired perhaps by an unrealistic political perspective—tinged by some adventurism—was reckless in his advocacy and planning of semi-military actions. He was, of course, not alone in exhibiting these tendencies. And while Franke was quick to speak once arrested, he was not the only Gestapo victim to succumb rapidly to the Gestapo’s brutal methods. Steinbrinck also spoke at great length in his first interrogation, and this did not tarnish his reputation among survivors of the groups, as it shouldn’t have. It may be that some veterans of the groups felt a


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psychological need to find an easy answer or scapegoat for the sad denouement of their resistance network. A closer examination of the Lustgarten action and some of the groups’ other activities provides other clues to their downfall. Ilse Stillman, a member of Hans Fruck’s group who was often in contact with Baum’s people and who survived the Third Reich, said after the war that many Baum members were “frequently unguarded in expressing [their] anti-Hitler opinions, a carelessness that made it easy for the Gestapo to spy on [them].”52 For better or worse the Baum groups had acquired some prestige among the Jewish forced-laborers at Siemens, and some of the members were known to police from prewar arrests. The planning and implementation of the plan to sabotage the “Soviet Paradise” gives further insight into how the police were able to round up the perpetrators and their colleagues so quickly. For such a dangerous action, the organizers were not very adept. It seems that rather than selecting the team for the Lustgarten on some sound criteria, almost anyone could volunteer; some of the meetings scheduled for earlier in the day of the action were not held; and upon finding that the Speisehaus, where the major explosive was to be placed, was closed for the day, Baum, Steinbrinck, and Franke hastily improvised an alternative plan rather than regrouping for a later attempt. Only with the utmost professionalism could such an audacious undertaking be carried out successfully in the heart of the Nazi police state. As for the wisdom of attempting to sabotage the “Soviet Paradise” in the first place, it is best not to judge in hindsight. While some would regard the effort as foolhardy, these young people had little future anyway, a fact they were painfully aware of. If there was no chance their action would awaken and activate the German working classes, they at least set a rare example of domestic, public resistance, which was visible to some even at the time.53 Epilogue: Escape and Reunion Charlotte Abraham was born in Berlin thirty-three years before the opening of the “Soviet Paradise,” and in late 1932 or early 1933 married a KPD member, Gustav Paech, who shortly thereafter was arrested and sentenced to two and a half years in jail. They split up soon after his release.54 Having met Herbert and Marianne Baum

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years earlier in one of the Jewish youth groups, Charlotte encountered him again in 1939 when he was a patient at the Jewish hospital where she worked as a nurse. She participated in one of his circles over the next couple years, attending “school lectures” and helping the group’s work with French and Belgian forced laborers. Charlotte Paech—she kept her former husband’s name—eluded the police for several months after the attack on the “Soviet Paradise,” although life on the run was so harrowing that at one point she resolved to commit suicide if captured. When she was arrested in October 1942 she was prevented from swallowing morphine by one of the arresting officers. She was incarcerated at Berlin-Alexanderplatz prison for the last few months of 1942, subjected to repeated interrogations, and held in a cell without heat or light. “Once a day I got a can of hot water, that was my heat.”55 Eventually she was transferred to another prison in Berlin, where, lacking even a pair of shoes, she was put to hard labor in mid-winter. She was sent to the Berlin-Moabit prison at the time of the executions of several of her friends in March 1943. Paech was tried on charges of high treason along with Martin Kochmann and two others—all three of whom were executed—but she received a sentence of only a year and a half. She knew that this was no guarantee of survival, and indeed several other members of the Baum groups received similar, relatively lenient sentences, but were killed in prison or sent to Auschwitz nonetheless. Paech’s fate seemed to be sealed when she was informed in June that she had been sentenced to death, and was tossed into a cell with three non-Jewish Polish women who were also awaiting their deaths. As they were each “taken away, I remained and waited for my execution.”56 One day Paech was summoned from her cell “by a drunken man” who led her out to the street in front of the jail, where she was put into a wagon. An older Jewish man “gave me a piece of bread and told me that I was going to the Groβe Hamburgerstraβe jail … where my grandparents had died.” Paech used her medical training to help victims of typhus there, and, strengthened by the camaraderie of some of her fellow inmates and a slightly less brutal regimen, decided to escape if and when the opportunity arose. “To my help came a bombing raid … I used the confusion to flee,” in June 1944. She survived the next eleven months and the downfall of Nazi Germany


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hiding out in the homes of various people whose addresses had been given her by inmates at Groβe Hamburgerstaβe. At times she passed herself off as a French foreign worker, and eventually fled both the police and the Allied bombing raids, heading for a village east of Berlin until the war finally ended. Richard Holzer was the only surviving member of Herbert Baum’s inner circle. Like Charlotte Paech and many other Europeans, especially Jews, who were fortunate enough to survive those years, his wartime experiences could have defied the imagination of a Hollywood screenwriter. He fled to Hungary in the late summer of 1942, while his comrades were being rounded up; his parents were Hungarian, and, though born in Berlin, Holzer also had citizenship there. He was deported by the Hungarian regime of Miklos Horthy as a Jewish forced laborer to the Ukraine and ended up in a Soviet camp for POWs. He passed his time there editing a prisoners’ newspaper, and after the war joined the Hungarian Communist party. While sick in the hospital in 1946, someone brought him a newspaper that had an announcement from a Charlotte Paech: She was an old friend of Holzer’s from their time in the Baum groups, and she was looking for him. Holzer made his way back to Berlin—Paech had returned to the capital after the war—and the two married within a few weeks. Richard and Charlotte had endured the conflagration that claimed many of their friends and family. They somehow survived, returned to a new Germany, and found each other. But they would discover that their struggle to live in peace and dignity was not over.

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1

Quoted in Margot Pikarski, Jugend im Berliner Widerstand: Herbert Baum und Kampfgefährten. (Berlin: Militärverlag, 1978), 120. Needless to say, the exhibit offered no such “original documents.”

2

BA Zw, Z-C 10905, folder 2, 10 October 1942 Martin Kochmann interrogation record.

3

BA, NJ 1400, 22 May 1942 Joachim Franke interrogation record.

4

BA Zw, Z-C 12460, folder 5, 26 May 1942 Werner Steinbrinck interrogation record.

5

Karl-Hainz Biernat and Luise Kraushaar, Die Schulze-Boysen-Harnack Organization im antifaschistischen Kampf (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1970), 20.

6


7

BA, SgY 30/2014, folder 1, 8 August 1982 “Remarks on the Memoirs of Charlotte Holzer,” by Kurt Gossweiler.

8

Arnold Paucker, Jewish Resistance in Germany: The Facts and Problems (Berlin: Gedenkstätte deutscher Widerstand, 1991), 17.

9

BA Zw, Z-C 10905 folder 1, 10 October 1942 Martin Kochmann interrogation record. Kochmann added that “I did not agree with this terror action [and] looked for a way not to participate,” but this comment, and his use of the term “terror action,” may well have been for the benefit of his interrogators.

10


11

BA Zw, Z-C 12437, folder 5, 8 December 1942 Indictment of Georg Vötter and others.

12

Born in 1916, Jadamowitz began her political activity at an early age, working with the Communist-led Rote Hilfe from 1931 and participating in an underground group led by Herbert Ansbach in the mid-1930s.

13

BA, DY 55/V287/105, 60-61, undated report written by Richard Holzer.


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14

In a 1972 letter Holzer asserted that Felix Heymann was also opposed to the attack. Michael Kreutzer, “Die Suche nach einem Ausweg, der es ermöglicht, in Deutschland als Mensch zu leben: Zur Geschichte der Widerstandgruppen um Herbert Baum.” In Löhken and Vathke, eds., Juden im Widerstand, 135.

15

Rotholz’s friend was Kurt Siering; he did not indicate with whom he raised his objections. BA, DY 55 / V287 / 105, 24 August 1948 report by Siering, 63-64. Harry Cühn, who occasionally participated in meetings of one of Baum’s groups, also opposed the decision to attack the exhibit, saying fifty years later that it was “a time in which lives should [have been] preserved, rather than endangered.” Herbert Lindenberger, Heroic Or Foolish? The 1942 Bombing of a Nazi Anti-Soviet Exhibit, Telos 135 (Summer 2006), 135.

16

Scheer, Im Schatten, 252.

17


18


19

Kreutzer, 128.

20

Kreutzer, 128.

21

Scheer, Im Schatten, 246, 44.

22

BA, NJ 1403 folder 1, Judgment against Vötter and others. Germany’s prospects in the war were actually far from “hopeless” at that time, more than eight months before its defeat at Stalingrad. The German army had made some gains in the previous month, due in large part to a tactical error by the Soviet command, which led to a defeat at Kharkov (Ukraine). Rommel’s defeat at the Second Battle of El Alamein, another major turning point, was nearly six months in the future. At any rate, the German resistance groups were usually several weeks behind in digesting news from the Eastern front, and sometimes received reports in mixed chronological order.

23

Leni Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 295.

24


25


142


26


27


28

Kreutzer, 137.

29


30


31

Konrad Kwiet and Helmut Eschwege, Selbstbehauptung und Widerstand: Deutsche Juden im Kampf um Existenz und Menschenwürde 1933-1945 (Hamburg: Hans Christians Verlag, 1984), 131.

32

Kwiet and Eschwege, 131.

33

BA Zw, Z-C 10905, folder 1, 13 November 1942 Herbert Budzislawski interrogation record.

34

Helmut Eschwege, “Resistance of German Jews Against the Nazi Regime,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 15 (1970), 176.

35


36

Eric Johnson, Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 313. While pointing out that there was some inconsistency in punishments—there were judges who were still capable of showing mercy on occasion—Johnson cites the case of a “retired and disabled Lithuanian man” who was sentenced to death for “pilfering three tin bowls with a total worth of about three marks from a partially destroyed local store after a heavy bombing raid” in Essen. Johnson, 312.

37

Heydrich was already in charge of the security police (Sipo) and the secret state police (Gestapo) when, in 1939, he was appointed head of the RSHA (Reich Main Security Office), which combined all state police and SS branches. At the time of his assassination he was also the “deputy Reich protector” of occupied Bohemia and Moravia. Fischer, Nazi Germany, 645.

38

Simone Erpel, “Jewish Women in the Anti-Fascist Resistance,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 32 (1992), 404. According to one account, she attempted suicide after her arrest by throwing herself out of a window. She was not killed, but “broke her spine and was taken to the Jewish hospital…. To the court trial and later to the place of execution she was brought on a stretcher.” Mark, 66.


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39

Following a practice the Nazis had begun a few years earlier, the men were listed with the name “Israel” and the women the name “Sara”—for example, “Helmut Israel Neumann” and “Marianne Sara Joachim.”

40

YVA 03/4134, “Testimony of Rita Zocher.”

41

4 March 1943 Letter by Marianne Joachim, in Marrus, ed., The Nazi Holocaust, vol. 7, Jewish Resistance to the Holocaust, 442.

42

Pikarski, 150.

43

Heinrich F. Liebrecht, “Nicht mitzuhassen, mitzulieben bin ich da”: Mein Weg durch die Hölle des Dritten Reiches, (Freiburg: 1990), quoted in Scheer, Im Schatten, 340.

44

Leonard Baker, Days of Sorrow and Pain: Leo Baeck and the Berlin Jews (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 274.

45

Kwiet and Eschwege, 128.

46

Hans-Rainer Sandvoß, Widerstand in Mitte und Tiergarten (Berlin: Gedenkstätte deutscher Widerstand, 1999), 171.

47

BA, DY 55/V287/105, undated report by Richard Holzer.

48

BA, SgY 30/2014, folder 1, 15 July 1966 report by Charlotte Holzer.

49


50


51

Kreutzer, 138; Scheer, Im Schatten, 320-31. Wolfgang Wippermann, Die Berliner Gruppe Baum und die jüdische Widerstand (Berlin: Gedenkstätte deutscher Widerstand, 1981), 8. Pikarski did not confront the issue at all.

52

Mark, 65.

53

The New York Times prominently reported the attack a month later, seeing in it evidence of growing discontent and a reemerging leftist resistance to Hitler. George Axelsson, “Opposition Seen Within Germany,” The New York Times, 18 June 1942, A4.

54

YVA, 03/3096, February 1964 “Testimony of Charlotte Holzer.”

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55

Ibid.

56

Ibid.

Chapter Seven

The Baum Groups Remembered: Communist Martyrs or Jewish Resistance Fighters? Like many surviving anti-Nazi resisters, Charlotte and Richard Holzer opted to live in East rather than West Germany, which they believed was dominated by unrepentant accomplices of Hitler. And while the Holzers, as well as past associates of Baum such as Herbert Ansbach, Gerhard and Alice Zadek, and Walter Sack—all of whom emigrated before World War II, and also returned to live in East Germany—considered themselves Jews as well as socialists and antifascists, they were not at all inspired by the prospect of a difficult struggle to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. Better to help build a workers’ republic in their own land, they reasoned—a republic that would not necessarily afford them enhanced status because of their role in the anti-Nazi underground, but that would at least combat racism and honor the memory of their brave comrades and others who perished fighting Hitler. In subsequent years the Holzers and a few other Baum veterans organized memorial meetings in postwar East Germany to keep alive the memory of Berlin’s Jewish left-wing resistance. The Holzers and other surviving members of Baum’s groups were not alone in their desire to return to their homeland. Some twenty to forty thousand Jewish survivors stayed in Germany or returned soon after the defeat of the Nazi regime.1 Berlin had the largest Jewish population, with about five thousand Jews registered and another two thousand unregistered in 1945.2 Approximately half of those seven thousand Jews—many of them veteran antifascists—opted to live in the Soviet zone.3 “In contrast to an increasingly hostile political atmosphere for leftists in the West of Germany,” as Frank Stern noted in a 1996 article, eastern Berlin “seemed to offer new possibilities,” and even for non-Communist leftists “optimism about the prospects for democratic change prevailed.”4 Those prospects would dwindle steadily as the old KPD—renamed the Socialist Unity Party (SED)

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after a forced merger with the Social Democrats and smaller parties in April 1946—consolidated its rule. By the time of the founding of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in October 1949, it was abundantly clear that the “party of a new type,” as the SED fancied itself, would build “socialism” in the image—and under the close tutelage—of Moscow.5 How would this new state preserve the memory of the many German Jews who fought Nazism? And how deep was its commitment to the official ideology of “antifascism”? This chapter discusses how people like Richard and Charlotte Holzer came to recollect their experiences in Baum’s underground network, how their adopted state—as well as West Germany—remembered and memorialized the anti-Nazi resistance of Jews, and the tensions that arose between former antifascists and the state that presumably sanctified their struggle. Official Memory in the German Democratic Republic The writings of SED leaders and long-time Stalinists Walter Ulbricht and Wilhelm Pieck, published in the early years of the GDR, laid the foundation for the official history of Communist resistance. The SED’s politically expedient narrative of “historical vindication, success, and victory” could not accommodate the difficult story of the Holocaust, which was consistently ignored, even after it had emerged belatedly into the popular consciousness in much of the West by the late 1970s. 6 The tomes on resistance produced by the SED, and by Ulbricht in particular, were accompanied by an analysis of Nazism that perpetuated the KPD’s economic-determinist theories of the 1930s. A few months after the war concluded, Ulbricht published a book entitled Die Legende von deutschen Sozialismus (The Legend of German Socialism) that would serve as the definitive East German analysis of Nazism.7 Ulbricht took the well-worn formulation of Georgi Dimitrov—German fascism was “the open terroristic rule of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, most imperialist elements of German finance capital”—and updated it slightly by adding that Hitler was the “summation, development, intensification of all that is reactionary in German history.”8

The Baum Groups Remembered

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The book’s references to “gas chambers, death wagons, gallows, piles of corpses, mass graves, ovens for burning human beings” are conspicuously vague in describing exactly who constituted the majority of the victims. Furthermore, while Ulbricht made no specific mention of the Jews as victims, he stressed that the Soviet Union was Hitler’s principal target. Ulbricht pursued this theme in Zur Geschichte der Neuesten Zeit (On the History of the Recent Period)— another book that helped to lay the cornerstone of the GDR’s statesponsored history and memory—excoriating the Western powers for making deals that left the Soviet Union alone to face the brunt of Hitler’s force.9 Ulbricht and other party leaders and myth-makers also over-emphasized the victimization of KPD members, to the detriment of Jews in particular. “The ownership of the legacy” of the crimes of Nazism “soon gained tremendous importance in the Communists’ worldview and self-identity,” as explained by Jay Geller in his 2005 book Jews in Post-Holocaust Germany. “They would not let another group stake a claim to this heritage more prominent than theirs.”10 According to this narrative, the Communists were not only the principal targets of Nazism but also Hitler’s most tireless and determined adversaries. Not content to chronicle the genuinely impressive record of the numerous KPD underground groups that existed throughout the Third Reich, the SED and its compromised historians exaggerated the extent, strength, political wisdom, and farsightedness of the Communist resistance. Just as the narrative of victimhood diminished the suffering of others, the narrative of resistance obscured or falsified the struggle of non-Communist resisters.11 The SED established a distinction between those victims who had combated fascism—the Communists—and those who presumably had not—the Jews. Although this dubious categorization was useful for the SED, it was false on historical as well as moral grounds: Many German Jews did indeed fight Nazism, as demonstrated in the previous chapters and elsewhere, while many leading Communists—Ulbricht and Pieck included—had sojourned safely in Moscow during the Hitler years.12 This demarcation between those victims who were “fighters” and those who were allegedly passive was codified in the organization founded in February 1947 to represent the Third Reich’s victims in

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eastern Germany, the Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes (Association of Those Persecuted by the Nazi Regime, or VVN). While ostensibly independent, VVN boards in each eastern zone were soon dominated by the Communists. From the founding congress of the VVN—which was controlled by SED members in each of the Sovietoccupied zones—the group paid little attention to the systematic victimization of the Jewish people, while former KPD members or “political resisters” had “Kämpfer” (fighter) stamped on their identity cards. Jewish leaders such as Heinz Galinski despaired of changing the group’s orientation and resigned from the VVN in the late 1940s.13 Significantly, the VVN was renamed the Committee of Anti-Fascist Combatants at the beginning of 1953, amplifying the SED’s specious distinction between “political resisters” and passive victims.14 Further, the East German government claimed to have no obligations for the crimes of Nazism, and certainly no responsibility for providing reparations or any other form of atonement. This approach was a cornerstone of the East German state mythology: The GDR represented Germany’s progressive traditions, while West Germany was the heir to the Third Reich and its Wilhelmine predecessors. As historian Enzo Traverso observed, “Detaching the crime from the history of the nation and attributing it solely to the misdeeds of the imperialist system, of which the Federal Republic was the continuation, anti-Fascist Germany was thus able to dissociate itself from this crime.”15 In reality, neither East nor West Germany could truly separate itself from the recent past. For propaganda and legitimizing purposes the East German government gleefully seized upon examples of former Nazis who had remained in leading positions in the Federal Republic.16 The SED set up a special office, headed by Albert Norden, to carry out a public-relations campaign from 1957 to 1963 on this issue. Norden’s committee issued pamphlets with such titles as “We Accuse: Eight Hundred Bloodstained Nazi Judges Uphold the Adenauer Regime.” There was of course a genuine problem of Nazi holdovers within West Germany’s judiciary, industry, and government, but justice would not be served by the exaggerations and dubious tactics of Norden’s “Committee for German Unity”—which were especially hypocritical in light of East Germany’s elevation of


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some former Nazis into state and party positions.17 Soon after the founding of the GDR, its Stalinist rulers developed a set of criteria for membership in the “socialist vanguard.” As articulated by Walter Ulbricht in a 1949 speech: Are you against the Atlantic Alliance? Are you for the unity of Germany? Are you for the withdrawal of occupation troops [from West Germany] … or are you for a forty-year occupation and colonization of West Germany? Today, under these conditions, anyone who raises the question ‘Is this person a former member of the Nazi party or not’ works against the formation of the National Front.18

The East German government was defenseless when in 1958 the Federal Republic (FRG) countered Norden’s exploits with its own report exposing dozens of former Nazis in “important posts in East German politics, administration, journalism, and scholarship,” including twenty-nine members of parliament.19 Throughout their history, East German government and party institutions proved incapable of confronting any lineage to pre-1945 Germany or any of their own continuity with the crimes of Nazism.20 Such issues were systematically suppressed, while the overheated rhetoric of the antiWest German propaganda, regardless of its factual basis, further impeded any honest historical inquiry.21 Beginning in the late 1950s East German historians reinforced the Communist resistance mythology by churning out a large number of books that glorified the KPD’s underground struggle and otherwise echoed the SED interpretation of the Hitler years.22 It should be remembered, though, that East Germany historiography uncovered some crucial issues and events that were largely overlooked in West German and Anglo-American historiography throughout the Cold War: specifically, the Communist resistance and the relation between capitalism and Nazism. But the “inherent oversimplification” practiced by most East German historians “gradually eroded their ethical force,” as historian Konrad Jarausch pointed out in a 1991 critique.23 Through its silence on the Holocaust, East German historiography was complicit in the widespread ignorance of and indifference toward Nazism’s millions of Jewish victims. A 1948 book by Siegbert Kahn, a Jewish veteran of leftist and Communist resistance circles, was East Germany’s only historic account of

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antisemitism until the early 1960s.24 From the official East German perspective, the Shoah was merely one of the Nazi regime’s many crimes, and it was not the Jews but the Communists—as the active antifascists—who were always designated the chief victims of the terrorist regime. A major 1960 East German study of the “concentration-camp state” went so far as to claim that “when the Führer talked about the peril posed by the Jews and the need to destroy them, what he meant” was the necessity for “the repression of the revolutionary workers’ movement and the destruction of the Soviet Union.”25 The inability of East German historians to recognize the “primacy of ideology over economics” in the Nazi Endlösung derives in part from a limitation within traditional Marxism to “take account of non-class forms of oppression: national, racial, religious or sexual,” as a historian sympathetic to Marxism observed [emphasis in the original].26 Antisemitic Campaigns in East Germany As the direct political descendant of the KPD, the SED inherited its forerunner’s theoretical baggage, including the KPD’s deficient understanding of modern Judeophobia.27 The German Communist Party had not only failed utterly to comprehend Nazi antisemitism, but had themselves promoted, albeit inconsistently, the image of the Jew as arch-capitalist and big banker. East German “Marxist” antisemitism was first expressed in a series of articles denouncing “cosmopolitanism” in the monthly Einheit (Unity) in 1948 and 1949. “Cosmopolitanism is the ideal of the ‘money man’ … a man without a country,” wrote Ernst Hoffmann, a member of the SED’s central committee.28 The cosmopolitan was “out to kill the working men of all peoples and transform them into abstract, schematic objects of exploitation, tear them out of their connection with their own people and class, and rob them of their national characteristics.”29 Within this inelegant prose lurk several coded themes that had been trumpeted not only by the Nazis, but also by other European antisemites of previous decades. East Germany, Romania, and Czechoslovakia—where purge trials targeted Jewish party officials—each had their own traditions of antiJewish prejudice. But two developments in 1951 and 1952 signaled a


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dramatic increase in antisemitic persecutions. The first of these was the infamous “doctors’ plot” case in the Soviet Union, initiated by the “plump and balding, stupid and vicious” thirty-eight-year-old Mikhail Riumin, also dubbed “the Midget.” 30 Riumin, a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet secret police, wrote a letter to Stalin in July 1951 alleging a Jewish medical conspiracy to murder Soviet leaders.31 This set Stalin in search of a “grand intelligence network of the U.S.A.” linked to “Zionists.” Several dozen Jewish doctors, including the dictator’s personal physician, were rounded up and tortured in an attempt to find or fabricate evidence of a diabolical anti-Soviet network. The case was revealed publicly in January 1953 in an article in Pravda replete with shrill language about “corrupt” and “filthy” Zionist nationalists.32 The ludicrous accusations—that Jewish doctors had conspired to assassinate Stalin and other Soviet leaders—were dutifully reported in East Germany’s official newspaper, the Neues Deutschland, two days later. The trial of Rudolf Slansky and thirteen others in Prague in November 1952 also represented an intensification of the anti-Jewish persecutions throughout Moscow’s sphere of influence. Alongside thirteen “accomplices,” Slansky, the Czech party’s general secretary and a committed Stalinist since the 1930s, was charged with the nowfamiliar litany of political crimes (“Titoism, Trotskyism, Zionism, bourgeois nationalism”) and with treason and espionage. The Slansky Trial ended quickly with the conviction of all fourteen “coconspirators,” eleven of whom were Jewish. Slansky and ten others were executed shortly after the trial concluded.33 At the conclusion of the Czech show trial, which featured explicitly antisemitic appeals by the prosecutors, the SED produced a document, “Lessons of the Trial Against the Slansky Conspiracy Center,” a watershed document on the “Jewish question” in East Germany’s brief history. The document employed such terms as “poison” and “contamination” without embarrassment.34 “Lessons,” penned by veteran Communist leader Hermann Matern and issued on December 20, 1952, instructed its audience that Zionism was “directed, guided, and commanded by USA-imperialism, [and] serves its interests and the interests of Jewish capitalists.”35 On the day of the Czech executions, the East German secret service (the MfS or “Stasi”)

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began an investigation of Paul Mercker, a leading SED member who had long advocated recognition and restitution for the Holocaust, causes that were now suspect.36 “The unpopularity of communist takeovers” in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere “could be overcome by targeting Jews in leading positions for removal,” pointed out historian Peter Monteath. But so soon after the Holocaust it would hardly buttress the antifascist credentials of the GDR to organize such an explicitly antisemitic show trial as had occurred in Prague. Therefore the chief defendant would be “not a Jew but rather a man who had long gained a reputation as a defender of Jewish interests.”37 This wave of Soviet-inspired anti-Jewish attacks provoked a mass exodus of Jews from East Germany. Having survived the Third Reich either in hiding or in exile, many hundreds of Jews now fled Germany forever. In early February 1953 the West German press reported that five hundred Jews had left the GDR, accompanied by hundreds of non-Jews who were leaving East Berlin every day in the midst of a broader economic and political crisis.38 Berlin was not the only city to lose much of its Jewish population: Erfurt’s Jewish community, for example, dwindled from two hundred seventeen to ninety-seven during this same period.39 Baum as East German Hero The complex identities of Herbert Baum and his comrades were flattened by GDR politicians and historians, who focused almost exclusively on Baum’s KPD background and Communist politics. In his important 1955 Zur Geschichte der Neuesten Zeit, Walter Ulbricht canonized Baum and his comrades as heroes of the Communist resistance. Mistakenly referring to Baum as a student—Ulbricht was never overly concerned with details—the Stalinist leader praised Baum for instructing “the members to see that the essence [Wesen] of fascism was not only in terror against the Jews, but rather was in the oppression of the whole German people, and that therefore they must fight actively for the overthrow of fascism.”40 Baum could never have attained the status in East German hagiography that was reserved for such KPD leaders as its martyred chairman, Ernst Thälmann, who was arrested in the first weeks of the Nazi regime and languished in various concentration camps until his


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execution at Buchenwald in August 1944. But Baum and his comrades were firmly ensconced in the broader hierarchy of KPD rank-and-file fighters and victims. Until 1988 an annual ceremony commemorated Baum as a Communist resister but never as a Jewish fighter.41 Baum was featured on a ten-pfennig stamp in 1961 and a street in the Jewish cemetery in Weissensee, in northeastern Berlin, was renamed in his honor; the former homes of some members of his groups were adorned with small placards citing their contribution to the underground struggle.42 Most significantly, in 1981 East Berlin’s city council erected a sizable memorial to the Baum groups on a corner of the Lustgarten square. The monument, designed by a sculptor named Jürgen Raue, was inscribed: “The courageous deeds and the steadfastness of the anti-fascist resistance group led by the young Communist Herbert Baum will never be forgotten.” On the other side of the memorial read the text, “Forever allied in friendship with the Soviet Union.”43 East German historians did their part to peddle this disingenuous and incomplete version of the Baum story. Margot Pikarski, who worked in the SED’s central party archive, wrote several articles as well as what was until 2004 the only book on the Baum groups. In her book’s foreword Pikarski warned against the attempts “especially in the Federal Republic of Germany and Israel” to promote a “legend of a particularly Jewish resistance movement.”44 In a fashion entirely consistent with other official GDR interpretations of Baum, Pikarski downplayed rather than denied the Jewish origins of Baum and his colleagues while vastly over-emphasizing and simplifying their Communist identity. Her book also glossed over the groups’ internal distinctions, presenting a homogenous cadre. Another East German historian—Helmut Eschwege, who was himself a Jew and considerably more independent than Pikarski— wrote about the Baum groups in a 1970 article and in a 1984 book, Selbstbehauptung und Widerstand (Self-Assertion and Resistance), co-written with the West German Konrad Kwiet.45 The authors availed themselves of a broader array of sources than had Pikarski and, at least as importantly, felt no obligation to promote SED mythology. Eschwege and Kwiet characterized the groups as “German-Jewish” rather than as Communist resisters, and presented a collection of very

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young people (they focused on the final two years of the groups) who came from eclectic backgrounds, some, but, not all whom, were committed Communists.46 Eschwege and Kwiet skillfully documented the dilemma of Baum and his comrades, whose political orientation and activism separated them “by an invisible ghetto wall” from the general population but also forced them to function outside of the Jewish community.47 The overview in Selbstbehauptung catalogs a range of activities the groups engaged in, including the study groups— which were of little interest to other East German historians—and concludes by summarizing a struggle over Baum’s memory between the GDR and surviving members of his groups. Eschwege was the only East German historian to even begin to render the Baum groups in their fullness and complexity; consequently, he had to find publishers outside his own country.48 Baum Veterans Remember Their Life in the Resistance How were the groups remembered by the handful of Baum veterans who later lived in East Germany? The contrast between their memories and the state’s version is not simple or stark. Most of the Baum group veterans living in East Berlin were committed to the SED and its stated socialist goals. Some of Baum’s old colleagues regarded the groups as having been principally Communist in nature. Herbert Ansbach, for example, argued vigorously against the notion that the Baum groups constituted “Jewish resistance.” Other former members of the Baum network were even able to rationalize the antisemitic campaigns of the early 1950s, or to relegate them to the distant past. In discussions fifty years later, neither Gerhard Zadek nor Walter Sack showed any emotion when discussing the events of the early 1950s, which seemed to them minor and almost harmless—even though Sack lost his job at the Chamber of Artisans (Handwerkskammer) in 1950, almost certainly because of his heritage. But he also recalled that someone was once prosecuted for calling him a “Jewish pig,” which, in Sack’s view, implied evidence of the sincerity of the antifascist state.49 Richard and Charlotte Holzer’s experiences and recollections were representative of the ambivalent memories of many Baum group veterans. Richard Holzer was the only member of the circle led directly by Herbert Baum to avoid the post-“Soviet Paradise” dragnet


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and survive the war. Shortly after returning to eastern Berlin and reuniting with Charlotte Paech in 1946, Holzer discovered that his former comrades were to be memorialized in the Friedrichsfelde cemetery alongside Communist fighters. Holzer began petitioning to have Baum moved from his temporary resting place in a cemetery for criminals to the large Jewish cemetery in Weissensee. Holzer consulted with some other survivors, who agreed that Baum should be interred in the Jewish cemetery. Holzer wrote letters and spoke with Heinz Galinski, leader of the newly founded Jüdische Gemeinde (Jewish Community), as well as Walter Bartel and Hans Schlesinger of the VVN. In mid-November 1948 Galinski signed a letter on behalf of the Jüdische Gemeinde expressing its enthusiasm over the project.50 Leaders of the VVN also endorsed Holzer’s efforts: “A survivor of the illegal Herbert Baum resistance group, our comrade Richard Holzer, ascertained that Herbert Baum’s grave is located in Marzahn [a district in the Soviet zone of Berlin]. He made the proposal to transport the corpse to the Jewish cemetery and to erect a memorial stone there. We propose a commission to carry this out.”51 Holzer’s campaign succeeded, apparently without controversy, and on September 11, 1949 a ceremony was held at Weissensee honoring the Baum members. A large memorial was unveiled bearing the names of twenty-eight members of the Baum groups and the inscription “They fell in the struggle for peace and freedom.” Among the speakers were Galinski, a survivor of Auschwitz who would lead the West German Jewish Community for more than forty years; Julius Meyer, a member of the East German parliament and of the Jewish Gemeinde who later fled the GDR; and an American rabbi, Steven Schwarzschild.52 The Stalinist authorities, having conceded to Richard Holzer that Baum should be buried at the Jewish cemetery, went to great lengths to control the proceedings, which had been organized by the Gemeinde. This was accomplished through “the most extraordinary tricks,” according to Schwarzschild, who addressed the gathering: The East German and Russian-controlled radio system had sent a transmission truck and reporter; he [the reporter] placed himself behind my right shoulder throughout the service—looked into the manuscript in front of me over my shoulder (my German was not so good that I could dispense

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Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany with manuscripts)—apparently always reading a sentence or two ahead of me, he pushed the microphone in front of my mouth whenever he saw something coming up that he liked, and took it away at other times. That evening, when I listened to the broadcast of the occasion, it turned out to be my voice and my words but (without anyone being able to accuse the sponsors of having spliced the tape), not my speech.53

There is nothing in the records to indicate that Holzer’s campaign to memorialize his comrades at Weissensee provoked the ire of the SED. Yet given the context, it is very difficult to imagine that it would not have. Holzer’s efforts directly challenged key aspects of the SED’s narrative of the resistance to Nazism by implying that resisters like Baum and his colleagues were Jews first and Communists second; by the time that the matter was resolved, the SED’s anti-Jewish animus was quite evident, and Holzer’s success could have only magnified any insult perceived by the Communists. And indeed, within a few short years Holzer and his wife would confront the authorities again, but this time on less favorable terms. In early 1952 the Holzers were subjected to an internal SED investigation. Although the purpose of the inquiry was vague, it is clear from the records that Charlotte had fallen under suspicion because of her daughter’s emigration to Palestine. The investigation soon assumed the character of a wide-ranging foray into any possible political sins in either of the Holzers’ pasts. The investigation was orchestrated by Anton Joos and Paul Laufer, two SED counterintelligence experts. Joos had been instrumental in an earlier party purge, the “Noel Field Affair,” which had explicitly anti-Jewish overtones.54 In their final report, Joos and Laufer accused Charlotte Holzer of lying about her past, alleging that she had never been sentenced to death.55 The investigators noted prominently in their final report that Richard was a “full Jew.” They slandered Holzer by including the assertion that he was ejected from Baum’s group because of “cowardice.” According to the report, this information came from another account, written by Hans Fruck—a one-time collaborator of Baum’s who rose high in the ranks of the Stasi. More ominously, the report concluded that Richard Holzer was “probably active as an agent for the Gestapo” and now “works for the American secret service.”


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Lesser accusations had led to lengthy imprisonments and even execution in those years, yet Richard and Charlotte Holzer were able to remain at liberty. They had the good fortune of enduring this investigation at the very time that the anti-“cosmopolitan” campaigns were concluding. Stalin’s sudden death in March 1953 put a halt to the “doctors’ plot” persecutions in Soviet Union, signaling a cessation of the accompanying antisemitic campaigns in the eastern European Communist states. The Holzers, like the doctors and many others, were thus spared from further measures by the demise of the Georgian tyrant. The false but damning conclusions of the Joos and Laufer report remained on the Holzers’ records, but otherwise the couple suffered no consequences. Richard was allowed to organize, at his initiative, the “Herbert Baum Team” (Arbeitsgruppe) from 1967 to his death in 1975. The group included Rita Zocher, Ilse Stillmann, Walter Sack, and Alice and Gerhard Zadek, all of whom had worked with Baum in the 1930s.56 The Herbert Baum Team—which was subordinate to the SED-led Committee of Antifascist Resistance Fighters (Komitee der Antifaschistischen Widerstandskämpfer)—held public meetings and memorial events; a member of the SED’s central committee spoke at an event organized by Holzer’s group commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Lustgarten attack in May 1967.57 Charlotte Holzer shared her husband’s interest in preserving the Baum groups in public memory as, at least in part, a form of Jewish resistance. Also like Richard, she had not been raised to think much about her religious and ethnic background, but her experiences under Nazism had shaped a stronger Jewish consciousness. In 1966-67 she wrote a three-hundred-page, unpublished autobiography in which she devoted considerable space to her relation to Judaism and the Jewish community—so much so that this would later prevent the manuscript from being published. Her memoirs indicate that she gravitated toward socialist ideals, but was not deeply political and certainly not an ideologue; her language and tone have little in common with SED treatments of resistance and history. The text covers her entire life, and she devoted only a few pages to her time in one of Baum’s circles and her subsequent arrest and escape. But this slim section contradicted much of the official mythology surrounding Baum, as she

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emphasized the Jewish rather than Communist character of her circle and suggests that she was not alone in being motivated into action principally by her “Jewish background” and opposition to the regime’s antisemitic measures. Also startling in her memoirs was her expression of remorse over the reprisals that claimed the lives of five hundred Berlin Jews in the aftermath of the Lustgarten action—a topic so sensitive and uncomfortable that it appears nowhere in the other memoirs and interviews of surviving Baum group members.58 In a 1979 interview with East German journalist Andreas Schmutz, Charlotte spoke much less about her relation to Judaism and gave an appraisal of the Baum groups that was in some ways consistent with the official narrative. “Actually, it is false to describe the Herbert Baum Group as a Jewish group. We were first and foremost a Communist group,” she told her interviewer.59 She immediately added, however, that because of the race laws the Communists decided to form a separate Jewish group, suggesting that from this point onward (1936-37) the character of the groups changed. And as the interview progressed, she returned repeatedly to the Jewish character of the group and of her experiences. She began to wax nostalgic about her time in a Zionist youth group, which had a “romantic Wandervogel ideology,” and said that she and many of her Jewish friends then joined the KJVD; “out of this Jewish circle of friends inside the KJVD originated the Herbert Baum Group.” She spoke strongly of her distaste for the antisemitic portions of Goebbels’ “Soviet Paradise” exhibit, implying that this was its most offensive feature. As she began to speak in a less scripted tone, she also asserted that her resistance group was only “indirectly” led by the KPD— further undermining standard GDR tales of the Baum groups.60 Schmutz asked Holzer if one could “compare the struggle of the Herbert Baum group to the activities of [West German] terrorist groups” that were in the news at that time. Holzer rejected any such comparison—the violence of the attack on the “Soviet Paradise” was “the only possibility for action under fascism,” while modern-day West Germany was not a fascist state. “We had a concrete goal, namely the downfall of the fascist regime. This goal corresponded to the wishes of a large part of the population,” as opposed to the West German terrorists, who have “vague [verschwommene] goals and


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have no base of support in the population.” Holzer added that “naturally I think that one must fight against the capitalist system,” but that the methods of the terrorists were “nonsensical” and “politically harmful.”61 In response to a question about her religious faith, she replied that she did not believe in God and was not a member of any temple or congregation, but that she nevertheless was a member of the Jewish Gemeinde. Holzer added that she had once been reminded by the SED, of which she was a member, that its members should not be active in any religious congregation. She assured her SED comrades that she was not religious, but nevertheless was drawn to the Gemeinde due to her “destiny,” the suffering she had shared with other Jews. “During the war [I] had seen so many Jews die in the Jewish hospital” where she worked and felt connected to them, “the religious as well as the non-religious.” She also noted that even in the antifascist republic “antisemitic or pro-fascist remarks” were occasionally heard, and swastika graffiti sometimes appeared. Holzer also reported that increasingly one heard “anti-Jewish clichés that the kids have adopted from their parents,” such as “the Jews were all rich—were you also rich?” Perhaps sensing she had strayed a bit too far into dangerous territory, Holzer added, “yet in the GDR such manifestations [of antisemitism] have so social basis,” an “important difference with the Federal Republic,” where the danger of a fascist resurgence was presumably always present. As if in atonement for her earlier candid remarks, she belabored this theme for several more sentences. Both Richard and Charlotte Holzer, as we have seen, had some loyalty to the East German state, but often resisted the SED’s semifictionalized accounts of the Baum groups’ resistance. The Holzers remained under suspicion for many more years. As late as 1982—two years after her death—the SED commissioned a lengthy report on Charlotte Holzer’s memoirs in order to evaluate their suitability for publication (“On the political character of the memoirs of Ch. H.”). Written by Kurt Gossweiler, the report closely examined her manuscript in order to discern any evidence of deviations from SED orthodoxy.62 “She did not in any way consider herself as a Communist, but as a Jewish opponent of Nazism,” Gossweiler reported, and she

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had “always” maintained a “very problematic relation to the party.”63 She had come to “reject fascism” not from a correct political perspective but because of her “Jewish origin and her rejection of antisemitism.” The report continued in this vein, eventually citing several particularly troubling passages from Holzer’s manuscript. After quoting a line asserting that Baum’s members had earlier belonged to a Jewish youth group he led, Gossweiler inserted: “Thus is the legend of the ‘Jewish Herbert Baum Group’ rekindled! [aufgewärmt]” The report concluded that the manuscript contains passages that are not only “not instructive, but are very upsetting [erschütternd].”64 This was far from the only time that the “antifascist state” used its resources to investigate genuine antifascists. Siegbert Kahn was a Jewish Berliner who was active in the Communist underground in the mid-1930s. He fled Germany in 1938 and after the war returned to East Berlin, where he served as the director of the German Institute of Economics. Kahn fell under suspicion for his allegedly ambivalent attitude toward the East German workers’ uprising of mid-June 1953, prompting an investigation. Kahn had stated in a letter to his colleagues on June 23, six days after Soviet tanks had crushed the rebellion, that “various circles of the working population” had a “justified discontent” against the regime—a discontent that was unfortunately “abused” by “criminal elements,” supported by foreign imperialist powers. Kahn was compelled to write to the control commission of the SED’s central committee asking forgiveness; whether out of conviction or an instinct for self-preservation, he wrote that he always believed that the USSR intervened in order to help the people of East Germany and that the uprising was indeed a “fascist provocation.”65 Kahn apparently did not suffer any punitive measures, although his police file also mentioned his alleged “pessimism” and his political relations with non-Communist resisters in the 1930s— another cause for suspicion, despite the fact that Kahn had simply been carrying out the KPD’s short-lived “Popular Front” policy at that time.


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Other Baum Veterans After living in England for a decade, Gerhard and Alice Zadek returned to their old neighborhood in eastern Berlin in 1947. After the oppression of Nazi Germany and the uncertainty and insecurity of exile, they looked optimistically to their future in a new Germany. “In the Third Reich we Jews were second class. In exile we were, as Germans, without a home. In the GDR for the first time we could live as Jews and as equal citizens.”66 The Zadeks were excited about the possibility of contributing to a society to be built in harmony with their socialist principles—and one that, as Gerhard recalled, also welcomed certain leading artists returning from exile, such as Bertolt Brecht, Arnold Zweig, Stefan Heym, and Walter Felsenstein.67 The Zadeks were in Berlin when the German Democratic Republic was proclaimed in October 1949, and remained there until and beyond the collapse of the SED regime four decades later. Much like the Holzers, their relationship with the authorities and their attitude toward the new society fluctuated over the years. Gerhard was a manager and also a party secretary at a large machine shop in the north Berlin district of Weissensee, not far from the final resting place of his childhood friend Herbert Baum. Alice worked in various enterprises and was active in several women’s organizations over the years. She also accepted some responsibilities in the SED, and attended a party college from 1961 to 1964, receiving a degree in social sciences.68 While she readily volunteered for positions where she thought she could advance the interests of women, she was often frustrated by the restrictive atmosphere within the SED-led commissions. “One never heard a critical word about Honecker,” she recalled in a book she co-wrote with her husband in the 1990s. Alice also commented on the fact that the East German women’s groups lacked revolutionary zeal. “We did not have a Clara Zetkin or Rosa Luxemburg in the GDR.”69 Like the Holzers, the Zadeks were non-observant Jews who underwent a revival of Jewish identity in response to the antisemitic oppression of the 1930s. Yet they were able to overlook much, but not all, of the antisemitism that often rose to the surface in the “antifascist state.” Gerhard commented on Stalin’s “doctors’ plot” and some of its consequences in the GDR. He recalled bitterly the ascension within

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the party of ruthless and unscrupulous people like Albert Norden and Gerhard Eisler, while Jewish journalist Bruno Goldhammer, an “always faithful and ingenious [geistreiche] comrade,” was arrested and spent several years in prison.70 These criticisms are among the few contained in the Zadeks’ memoirs; while they were not inclined to extol the virtues of the defunct workers’ state, they were certainly not among East Germany’s dissidents. Like many others, they could not escape the subservient relationship to authority that the party’s discipline had demanded from its adherents for so long. One issue that did provoke some disgust in both Zadeks, however, was the SED’s attitude toward Jews and Jewish history. Even if the policy was not explicit in the later years of the SED dictatorship, people like Gerhard and Alice Zadek felt they had to choose between party membership and membership in the Gemeinde, and their party’s insensitivity to Jewish history was often all too obvious. Gerhard wrote indignantly about a lengthy book produced by the SED’s youth organization that related the story of the Hitler period: “I searched for arguments toward an analysis of racism, chauvinism, and antisemitism. I found nothing!” He also noted that the book’s references to the Baum groups omitted the fact that most of their members were Jewish.71 Years later, in 1986, Gerhard proposed that the SED establish a Jewish cultural association that could have raised awareness of the struggle of Jews during the Nazi period. This proposal was ignored.72 Although the Zadeks did not express disagreement with the GDR’s hostility toward Israel, Gerhard criticized the state for failing to distinguish between “the strong, left-oriented, social-democratic Mapam movement and the policy of the Israeli state.”73 Like many socialists of varying stripes, Gerhard hoped that Labor Zionism would create a peaceful, progressive state in alliance with the Arab inhabitants of Palestine and he espoused the idea that Jews needed a homeland following the catastrophe of Nazism and the Holocaust. But he was also aware that Palestine was not “a land without people for a people without land,” as one oft-invoked Zionist legend asserted, but had been populated by Arabs for many centuries. Zadek expressed solidarity with the dispossessed Palestinians in a 2001 interview, shortly after the killing of several Palestinian children by Israeli


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soldiers.74 While the SED’s policy toward Israel was probably influenced in part by antisemitism—Soviet directives and the international politics of the Cold War were more decisive— Zadek did not confuse criticism of Israel with antisemitism. While the Holzers and the Zadeks had ambivalent relations with their own history, their identities as Jews as well as socialists, and the East German state, Herbert Ansbach (1913-88) was much less troubled by these issues. Ansbach worked at various times with Baum in the 1930s before leaving the country in 1938, settling in England in 1940, where he worked for the KPD in London. He was a leading member of the SED while living in Berlin after the war, and served as chief editor of publications for the Chamber of Foreign Trade. Ansbach wrote an eighty-four-page autobiography in 1963 in which he made no mention of any Jewish character of the Baum groups, or of anything else related to Judaism or antisemitism, either under Nazism or at any other time.75 After succeeding Richard Holzer as head of the Herbert Baum Arbeitsgruppe in 1975, Ansbach endeavored to minimize or avoid altogether any mention of the groups’ Jewish character. There are various political and personal sources of the distinctions between, on the one hand, Richard and Charlotte Holzer, who continued to think of themselves as Jews and to maintain some relation to the Gemeinde, the official institution of East German Jewry, and on the other Walter Sack and Herbert Ansbach, who in one case (Sack) downplayed and in the other (Ansbach) virtually ignored any Jewish identity. It was only in the last two years or so before the attempted sabotage of the “Soviet Paradise” that some members of the Baum groups, including Richard Holzer and his future wife Charlotte Paech, became more self-conscious in their Judaism. Sack and Ansbach had both left Germany a few years earlier, before Kristallnacht and such measures as the September 1941 introduction of the Judenstern forced even the most secular, loyally Communist Jew to acknowledge and come to terms with his or her heritage. Sack and Ansbach also demonstrated much more consistent and, frankly, naïve faith in SED politics throughout the duration of the GDR. Of course each individual’s identity was also shaped by other personal experiences that cannot be easily compressed or rationalized.

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As in Nazi Germany, people like Sack were not afforded the luxury of completely rejecting their Jewish heritage. While antisemitism in the GDR obviously never approached the allencompassing and murderous levels of the Third Reich, nonobservant Jews were reminded of their status by both official and societal antisemitism; and, as in Nazi Germany, some of these Jews responded by asserting a Jewish identity, if inconsistently. Replacing a Lost German Identity The official producers of memory and history in the GDR did not deny outright the Jewish origins of Baum and his comrades; their Jewishness was acknowledged in passing, while the contention that the groups’ principal identity was Communist was repeatedly amplified. In an early account of the Baum groups, a section of a speech on the “resistance struggle” by Anna Saefkow in 1952, the SED leader extolled the Baum network as “one of the bravest Jewish groups,” hastening to add that they “recognized that the liberation of the Jewish people is inseparable from the freedom struggle of the working class and of all upright (aufrechten) antifascists” and that they therefore had obediently followed the lead of the KPD.76 This pattern—cursory mention of the groups’ Jewish character, followed by lengthy expositions on their obedience to Moscow and its surrogates in the KPD leadership—defined the GDR narrative of the Baum groups until the end of the SED regime. In all honesty, Baum himself would probably not have protested the representations of his group by Saefkow, Pikarski, and other East German Communists. But the fact remains that his groups—despite his own efforts—accommodated a variety of leftist perspectives, including some that were critical of the Soviet and KPD version of Marxism. Undeniably, the character and activities of Baum’s groups, particularly in the last two years of their existence, were shaped heavily by the evolving Jewish consciousness of many of the members. For many years West Germany also had a more-or-less standard narrative of anti-Hitler resistance. By honoring the July 20, 1944 conspirators, the conservative governments of the 1950s and most of the 1960s could claim some lineage to the “other Germany” of liberty and democracy. This narrative also held a religious undercurrent of


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sin and redemption, made explicit in a speech by the president of West Berlin’s Free University on the tenth anniversary of the assassination attempt: “The blood of the martyred resisters has cleansed our German name of the shame which Hitler cast upon it.”77 West Germany’s homogenized public history was challenged by the radical youths of 1968, and its Cold War foundations were further undermined by Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik, which inspired more scholars and others to investigate the history of leftist resistance to Hitler.78 Given all this, it was perhaps inevitable that the Baum groups would eventually become the object of political and historical conflict on the other side of the Berlin Wall. Students at Berlin’s Technical Universität, or TU-Berlin, proposed in January 1984 that the university’s main building be renamed after Herbert Baum. In motivating the proposal, the Student Union (Allgemeiner Studentenausschuβ,or AStA) declared that the new name “shall be a reminder of the resistance against the daily inhumanity” of the Nazi years, and would symbolize “the invincible search for humane ideals.”79 It seems likely that the proposal was pushed by leftist students who wanted to inflict a defeat on the Christian Democrats’ student organization, which, for its part, vigorously fought the proposal, denouncing Baum as a servant of a system that was as “inhuman” as Hitler’s.80 Students allied with the Free Democratic Party meanwhile saw the AStA’s efforts as “political vandalism” in the name of an “unknown, alleged” resistance fighter.81 The name-change proposal was ultimately defeated, but not before it exposed some of the fault lines that had opened up in West Germany’s confrontation with Nazi-era history. As we have seen, the GDR’s public discussion of the Nazi past never became as robust as the debate in West Germany from 1968 onward. But while East Germany’s official memory of the Baum groups held little ambiguity, the memories of veterans of the groups were rife with complexity and contradiction stemming from all these layers of history and politics. The memories of such Baum veterans as Gerhard Zadek and Charlotte and Richard Holzer were also tinged by their aspirations for their new “socialist” homeland and their hopes that ethnicity would cease to be the defining, inescapable factor it had

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been in their youths. Rita Zocher was grateful to the Soviet Union, and with good cause: The Red Army liberated Ravensbrück concentration camp and probably saved her life at the end of the war. Her gratitude translated into general acceptance and contentment with the East German state, which she argued was free of antisemitism.82 In addition to some of the veterans of the Baum groups, most of the German-Jewish émigrés who returned to their homeland and decided to settle in the east did so out of political conviction. “They came to the GDR as Communists to build a socialist Germany in the Soviet-occupied Zone,” noted Thomas Eckert, a journalist whose great uncle was a close friend of Herbert Baum’s and was executed for his role in the 1942 Lustgarten attack.83 Many other Jews who were not socialists settled in the Soviet zone or the GDR because they wanted to live in Germany, but in a Germany that had broken completely from its Nazi past. A Jewish liberal like Victor Klemperer, the professor whose Nazi-era diaries were published to great acclaim in the 1990s, could even embrace the East German Communists in the ultimately misguided hope that they were truly forging a humane, progressive society. Klemperer was far from alone among prominent GermanJewish intellectuals who settled in the east: The writers Arnold Zweig, Walther Victor, and Max Zimmering; numerous theater directors and actors; and scholars like Siegbert Kahn, Stefan Heymann, and Helmut Eschwege all chose the GDR over the West. The large number of Jewish intellectuals present in the formative years of East Germany “reinforced the illusion among returnees that their vision of antifascism would become reality in this part of Germany.”84 For many, however, the reality of SED repression and antisemitism would soon intrude upon these hopes and illusions. In early 1953 Klemperer was scandalized by the public showing of a Nazi-era film on Rembrandt that included a scene depicting “a group of buyers [at an auction] like a caricature in the Stürmer. The film was made under Hitler. How could the film have been passed now— especially now!” Klemperer raged in his diary, vowing to raise his grievance “at the VVN”—which would soon be disbanded.85 A month earlier, Klemperer had noted in his diary that “in some newspapers there had already been printed ‘The Jew’ so and so—that’s how it had started in 1933, too.”86 The Zadeks, the Holzers, and other former


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resisters were similarly disillusioned by what they witnessed or, as in the case of the Holzers, experienced firsthand. As their hopes diminished, they were left with little to cling to except the belief that, at the very least, their new country would prevent a resurrection of Nazi-like antisemitic violence. Yet while the official ideology of antifascism was shorn quickly of any meaning by the cynical Stalinist party, many Jewish survivors who came to the GDR were serious in their own antifascism. Antifascism “overlapped with a Jewish identity” for many and “helped to replace the loss of a German identity,” as one historian observed.87 The Nazi years were in the recent past, and, as Thomas Eckert said, “For us, Jewishness, or a Jewish awareness, is perhaps first and foremost an emotional relation to the Nazi past.”88 “We’re proud of our contribution to Jewish self-assertion (Selbstbehauptung) and resistance,” Gerhard Zadek declared in an interview, emphasizing an aspect of that resistance that was never honored in his adopted state.89

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1

Frank Stern, “The Return to the Disowned Home—German Jews and the Other Germany,” New German Critique 67 (Winter 1996), 57.

2

Jay Howard Geller, Jews in Post-Holocaust Germany, 1945-1953 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 95.

3

Stern, 58.

4

Stern, 60. See Patrick Major, The Death of the KPD: Communism and AntiCommunism in West Germany, 1945-1956 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

5

See Henry Krisch, German Politics Under Soviet Occupation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974); Dietrich Staritz, Die Gründing der DDR (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1984); and Norman Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).

6

Herf, “German Communism, the Discourse of ‘Anti-Fascist Resistance,’ and the Jewish Catastrophe,” in Geyer and Boyer, 257.

7

Herf, in Geyer and Boyer, 287.

8

Quoted in Konrad Kwiet, “Historians of the German Democratic Republic on Antisemitism and Persecution,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 21 (1976), 175.

9

Walter Ulbricht, Zur Geschichte der Neuesten Zeit, vol. 1, Die Niederlage Hitlersdeutschland und die Schaffung der antifaschistisch-demokratisch Ordnung (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1955), 7-8.

10

Geller, 97.

11

Ulbricht, Zur Geschichte der Neuesten Zeit, vol. 1, 18-58. Ulbricht distributed a little credit beyond the KPD, writing in vague terms about the “heroism and steadfastness of the revolutionary German working class and its great tradition of struggle” (29)—a typically ham-fisted Ulbrichtian construction—and also gave some credit to those Social Democrats and other workers who joined the Communist-led resistance. He devoted several pages to a repudiation of the conservative military resistance, which in his view represented nothing more or less than the interests of a wing of German “monopoly capitalism” that saw Hitler leading the nation to ruin, threatening not only their profits but also their alliance with certain foreign capitalist interests. Ulbricht, 34-46.


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12

While Russia was safer than Nazi Germany for most top KPD leaders, many hundreds of German Communists exiled in the Soviet Union were killed during the purges of the late 1930s.

13

Geller, 105.

14

The VVN was disbanded a few months later.

15

Enzo Traverso, The Jews and Germany: From the “Judeo-German Symbiosis” to the Memory of Auschwitz (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 13839.

16

Herf, Divided Memory, 182.

17

For more on former Nazis in high places in West German state and society, see Norbert Frei, Vergangenheitspolitik: die Anfänge der Bundesrepublik und die NS-Vergangenheit (Munich: Beck, 1996).

18

Herf, Divided Memory, 110. This approach also had the advantage of allowing the citizens of the new state to avoid excessive reflection about their own recent pasts. As the novelist Christa Wolf once wrote, these “‘victors of history’ ceased to engage their real past as collaborators, dupes or believers during the Nazi period.” Quoted in Konrad H. Jarausch, “The Failure of East German Antifascism: Some Ironies of History as Politics,” German Studies Review 14:1 (February 1991), 85.

19


20

For more on the issue of East Germany and Holocaust restitution, see Angelika Timm, Jewish Claims Against East Germany: Moral Obligations and Pragmatic Policy (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1997).

21

It is therefore unsurprising that racist and neo-Nazi groups should have gained disproportionate strength in eastern Germany since unification. This phenomenon has been in part a response to the hypocrisy and cynicism of the “antifascist” authorities in the last years of the GDR. See, for example, Ingo Hasselbach’s Führer-Ex: Memoirs of a Former Neo Nazi (New York: Random House, 1996).

22

Kwiet, “Historians of the German Democratic Republic on Antisemitism and Persecution”; see also Georg Iggers, Konrad H. Jarausch, Matthias Middell, und Martin Sabrow, eds., Die DDR-Geschichtswissenschaft als Forschungsproblem (Munich: R. Ouldenburg, 1998). For a brief, incisive treatment of broader questions of GDR historiography, see Konrad H. Jarausch and Michael Geyer,

170

Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 67-76.

23

Jarausch, “The Failure of East German Antifascism,” 86.

24

Kwiet, 177. Kahn’s book was titled Antisemitismus und Rassenhetze (Antisemitism and Race-Baiting), published by East Berlin’s Dietz Verlag.

25

Heinz Kühnrich, Der KZ-Staat (Berlin: 1960), 38, quoted in Kwiet, 183.

26

Enzo Traverso, Understanding the Nazi Genocide: Marxism After Auschwitz (London: Pluto Press, 1999), 59-60. Traverso added, “Trapped in this dead end” of economic determinism, “East German historians—not always ideologues, sometimes genuine historians—failed to escape from the constraints of an approach that sought at all costs to enclose a complex reality inside preestablished categories.”

27

See Chapter Three. It is also true that the abandonment of internationalism and “the congruence of Marxism and Nationalism in the Stalinist concept of the building of ‘Socialism in one country’ created a climate less congenial to Judaism than that which had prevailed [within Marxism] throughout the preceding decades.” Georgi Verbreeck, “Marxism, Antisemitism and the Holocaust,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 35 (1990), 387.

28


29


30

Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 613.

31

Like his predecessors Nikolai Yeshov and Ginrikh Yagoda, Mikhail Riumin’s murderous career ended in his own execution, shortly after Stalin’s death.

32

“Vicious Spies and Killers Under the Mask of Academic Physicians,” Pravda, 13 January 1953. (20 May 2008)

33

All fourteen defendants were rehabilitated and their convictions officially but quietly overturned in 1963. For a gripping personal account written by the wife of one of the victims, see Heda Kovály, Under a Cruel Star (Teaneck, NJ: Holmes & Meier, 1997); see also Eugene Loebl, My Mind on Trial (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), written by one of the three defendants who avoided execution.


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34


35

Geller, 172. Antisemitism was not the principal feature of all the trials of this era, nor necessarily the most important factor even in such countries as Czechoslovakia and East Germany; in Poland and Hungary, some Jewish Stalinists came out on top. For a concise and perceptive account of the Eastern European purges of 1948-53 and their causes and dynamics, see Joseph Rothschild, Return to Diversity: A Political History of East Central Europe Since World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 125-46.

36


37

Peter Monteath, “The German Democratic Republic and the Jews,” German History 22:3 (August 2004), 455.

38

Geller, 175. According to another source, four hundred Jews left East Berlin on one night. Stern, 66.

39

Geller, 175.

40

Ulbricht, Zur Geschichte der Neuesten Zeit, vol. 1, 29.

41

Sonia Combe, “Des commémorations pour surmonter le passé nazi,” in Alain Brossat, ed., A l’Est la mémoire retrouvée (Paris: Découverte, 1990), 286.

42

The stamp simply bore a photo of Baum with his name and dates (1912-1943) but no further text.

43

This side of the memorial was changed in 2001 at a ceremony organized by the municipal government of Mitte. This sentence was covered with glass plates listing the names of the thirty-three members of the Baum groups who were executed or died in custody and reading, in part, “This memorial thus documents this brave act of resistance in 1942, the conception of history in 1981, and our continuous remembrance of resistance to the Nazis.”

44

Margot Pikarski, Jugend im Berliner Widerstand: Herbert Baum und Kampfgefährten (Berlin: Militärverlag, 1978), 7. Stephan Hermlin had written a brief portrait of the group in his 1951 book Die erste Reihe, published in East Berlin.

45

“Resistance of German Jews Against the Nazi Regime,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 15: 1970, 143-80. Konrad Kwiet and Helmut Eschwege, Selbstbehauptung und Widerstand: Deutsche Juden im Kampf um Existenz

172

Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany und Menschenwürde 1933-1945 (Hamburg: Hans Christian Verlag, 1984), 11439.

46

The authors pointed out that in 1941 the group was so youthful that the thirtytwo-year-old Charlotte Paech was called “grandmother” by her comrades. Kwiet and Eschwege, 118.

47

While creating portraits of several individual members that humanized them while showing their diversity, the authors nevertheless overstated a common attraction to Communist ideology, which in reality was not uniform. In one case Eschwege and Kwiet took too seriously an assertion by Charlotte Holzer (“there was no specific Jewish ideology,” but only a Communist one), which she contradicted elsewhere. Kwiet and Eschwege, 121.

48

The 1970 article was published in London, the 1984 book in Hamburg. See also an interview with Eschwege in Robin Ostow, Jews in Contemporary East Germany: The Children of Moses in the Land of Marx (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 127-40. Also of interest: an interview by Jeffrey Peck of East German historian Jürgen Kuczynski in Sojourners: The Return of German Jews and the Question of Identity (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 12134.

49

Walter Sack, interview by author, Berlin, 22 September 2000. Sack, whose parents died at Auschwitz, also served as mayor of his Berlin district (Treptow) in the early 1960s and was a member of the SED for most of its existence.

50

BA, DY 55/V287/105, 15 November 1948 letter from Galinski.

51

BA, DY/V/287/105, 11 October 1948 letter signed by Hans Schlesinger and Silberstein (no first name) to the board of the Jüdische Gemeinde zu Berlin.

52

Quoted in Steven S. Schwarzschild, “A Sequel to the Story of Herbert Baum,” Judaica Post 3: 3/4. 215-17, 1962.

53

Schwarzschild. He added that he “did not really know . . . what capital the Communists would try to make out of” Herbert Baum.

54

Scheer, Im Schatten, 419. Field, who was arrested in Budapest in 1949, was a leftist from the United States with whom some German Communists had had contact in Paris during the war. “In the espionage hysteria of 1950, the leftist Field became transformed in Communist accusations into an ‘American agent,’” and several SED leaders, most of whom were Jewish, were purged for having consorted earlier with him. Herf, Divided Memory, 114.


173

55

BA, RY 1/I2/3/162, 3 June 1952 report for SED, “Findings of the examination.”

56

Scheer, Im Schatten, 429-30

57

Neues Deutschland, 25 May 1967, quoted in Scheer, “….die Lösung,” 257. Franz Krahl, another friend of Baum’s from the pre-Nazi era, became chairman of the group after Richard Holzer’s death. Krahl was compromised in the eyes of the SED and its security apparatus, however, by his teenage son’s arrest at a 1968 demonstration in support of the Prague Spring; Krahl was replaced by the more reliable Herbert Ansbach within a few months. Ibid., 257.

58

BA, SgY 30/2014, folder 1, excerpt from her memoirs in 22 August 1982 report by Kurt Gossweiler, 86.

59

YVA, 01/4092, “Antifascist Education in the GDR: Discussion with a Former Resistance Fighter,” 23 March 1979 interview of Charlotte Holzer by Andreas Schmutz.

60

Margot Pikarski, for example, the principal GDR historian of Baum, entitled her dissertation “On the leading role of the KPD party organization in the Herbert Baum antifascist resistance group,” and this idea was at the center of all official GDR commemorations, articles, etc., about the Baum groups.

61

YVA 01/4092, “Antifascist Education in the GDR: Discussion with a Former Resistance Fighter,” 23 March 1979 interview of Charlotte Holzer by Andreas Schmutz.

62

Gossweiler (1917- ) worked with Baum colleague Werner Steinbrinck in an underground Communist Youth cell in the 1930s. He worked for the SED from the 1950s, and wrote an important article in 1953 on the Slansky “conspiracy circle” on behalf of the party. He later earned a degree at Humboldt University and became a leading East German academic expert on fascism. He still occasionally speaks at events commemorating the anti-Nazi resistance.

63

BA, SgY 30/2014 folder 1, 347, 22 August 1982 report by Gossweiler.

64

Ibid., 347-62. The East German publisher (Röderberg-Verlag) confirmed its agreement not to issue the memoirs.

65

BA, DY 30 IV 2/4/157, June 23, 1953 Kahn letter to colleagues, and 9 December 1953 Kahn letter to the SED control commission.

66

Alice and Gerhard Zadek, Mit dem letzten Zug, 276-77.

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67

Alice and Gerhard Zadek, Mit dem letzten Zug, 277.

68

Alice and Gerhard Zadek, Ihr seid wohl meschugge, 171-74.

69

Alice and Gerhard Zadek, Meschugge, 208.

70

Gerhard Eisler, brother of the composer Hans and erratic former KPD leader Ruth Fischer, served as head of East German radio, among other positions. For more on Eisler, see Catherine Epstein, The Last Revolutionaries: German Communists and Their Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).

71


72


73

Alice and Gerhard Zadek, Meschugge, 43. Mapam, or the United Workers Party, was originally a Stalinist-type party in Israel; after the Khrushchev revelations of 1956, it evolved into a social-democratic party, and has since been on the left wing of Labor Zionism.

74

Gerhard Zadek, interview by author, Berlin, 12 December 2001.

75


76

BA, NY 4049 16, text of 26 November 1952 lecture by Anna Saefkow, from SED records. Saefkow (1902-1962) was the widow of Anton Saefkow, an important figure in Berlin’s KPD underground who was executed in 1944. He spent the first six years of the Third Reich in prisons and concentration camps and resumed his activism for the KPD upon release, working first with the Robert Uhrig network until its dispersal by the Gestapo, and later with Franz Jacob. In 1943 and ’44 he and Jacob were in contact with some members of the military and conservative resistance, including Julius Leber. Saefkow, Jacob, and about five dozen members of their group were rounded up and murdered in the last year of the dictatorship. Benz and Pehle, Lexikon, 288-90.

77

Theodor Heuss, “Dank und Bekenntnis: Gedenkrede zum 20. Juli 1944” (Thübingen, 1954), quoted in David Clay Large, “‘A Beacon in the German Darkness’: The Anti-Nazi Resistance Legacy in West German Politics,” in Geyer and Boyer, 247.

78

Large, 252.

79

Allgemeiner Studentenausschuβ (AStA) of TU-Berlin, eds., Die Berliner Widerstandsgruppe um Herbert Baum: Informationen zur Diskussion um die


175

Benennung des Hauptgebäudes der TU Berlin (Berlin: AStA-Druckerei, 1984), 3. 80

AStA, 71.

81

AStA, 55.

82

YVA 03/4134, 1979 “Testimony of Rita Zocher.”

83

Ostow, 115-16. Born in 1953 in East Berlin, Eckert moved to West Berlin in 1982; his grandfather, whose brother worked with Baum, was Hermann Budzislawski, editor-in-chief of Die neue Weltbühne from 1933-38 after that important leftliberal journal was forced to operate from exile.

84

Stern, 64-5.

85

Victor Klemperer, The Lesser Evil: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer 1945-1959 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003), 409. This entry is dated 21 February 1953.

86

Klemperer, 408. From 22 January 1953.

87

Stern, 62.

88

Ostow, 118.

89

Gerhard Zadek, interview by author, Berlin, 15 September 2001.

Chapter Eight

Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Resistance in Its Time and Beyond In March 1937 two young Berlin Jews, Kurt Berkheim and Ernst Prager, were arrested for possession of illegal material. Unlike many others arrested on such charges by the Gestapo, they were carrying not a Communist newspaper, but a satirical poem lampooning Robert Ley, the head of the German Labor Front. Ley was a notorious alcoholic; even his Nazi colleagues referred to him as Reichstrunkenbold, the “drunkard of the Reich.”1 The incriminating poem referred to Dr. Ley as a lecher and a morphine addict as well as a drunk (Saufsack), concluding that it was “high time” for the “working class to be rid of these riff-raff (Gesindel).”2 Berkheim, who had never been a member of any political organization, copied the poem out of a Communist periodical given to him by someone he knew from a Jewish youth organization. Berkheim was sentenced to one year’s imprisonment and Prager received eighteen months; their culpability for possessing the scandalous material was compounded by their “declaring themselves ready to continue” engaging in such “high treasonous” activity, according to the judgment rendered against them. This episode is all we know of Berkheim and Prager. It is likely that they were released after serving their terms, so perhaps one or both of them survived the Third Reich. Two or three years later, incarceration would amount to a death sentence for a Jew, regardless of the sentence handed down, as the victim would either be held indefinitely or sent to a concentration or death camp. We know even less about other small circles or individual acts of resistance than we do about these two youths. Yet even the fairly mundane case of Berkheim and Prager illustrates the deep-seated fear that the Nazi state had for any sort of dissent, and gives some indication of the depth of scorn that young German Jews held for their tormentors. There were many others who, lacking the means to directly threaten

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the regime, did whatever they could to undermine it and puncture its aura of invincibility. For instance, a Berlin Jew named Peter Edel, who had connections to a Communist worker, “stuck news of the war or the simple message ‘End It!’ in factories, in streetcars, and on buildings in the center of Berlin.”3 German Jews learned quickly that there was no place for them in Hitler’s Germany. Antisemitic actions and persecutions commenced in the first days of the regime, both in an organized manner—the April 1933 boycott, for example—and through violent actions by Nazi mobs. The shock was greatest for older Jews, who were more likely than their children and grandchildren to believe they could preserve the social advances they had acquired as the result of emancipation and assimilation. Far less inculcated with German patriotism, the younger generations of German Jews held few such hopes. Historian Arnold Paucker, a member of the Haschomer Hazair in the 1930s, recalled that he and his friends mocked their parents’ mourning of President Hindenburg, who died in 1934: “young Jews felt no loss.”4 But pessimism for the future or even despair does not lead automatically to resistance, either organized or individual, and the dangers inherent in such endeavors were all too clear. Instead, most Jewish youths tried to maintain some sense of community and camaraderie with friends and acquaintances from their youth groups. They also struggled to preserve or expand the narrow space they had for social and political life, which by necessity was only among fellow Jews. But the more radical of them sought a means to fulfill their desire to resist the continual assaults on their rights and dignity. Many, like Berkheim, Prager, and Edel, functioned largely on their own. The left-wing parties had been crushed by the dictatorship and their remnants driven deep underground, and the Jewish youth groups were placed under the watchful eye of the state. The dispersal of the SPD, the KPD, and smaller left groups mirrored the overall disintegration of society, which posed fundamental obstacles for resistance. A group of Berlin Communists led by Wilhelm Knöchel recognized this as an inherent hindrance, writing in their newssheet in 1942: “Hitler turned the ‘people’ into a collection of individuals, who denounced each other and feared each other.… The people were split into countless castes and tribes, and the Hitler regime was always able

Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Resistance in Its Time and Beyond

179

to play off one ‘national comrade’ against another and one social group against another.”5 Social Democrats and Communists were able to find solace and protection—as well as a vehicle for resistance— within the social, cultural, and political milieux that their movements had fashioned over the previous decades.6 These often overlapping milieux helped to preserve alternative values and provided some social cohesion, enabling many workers to withstand the Nazis’ efforts at atomization. German-Jewish leftists, even those who were members of the KPD and SPD, were not completely integrated into this environment, however. Jews became increasingly estranged from German society during the 1920s, as a profound social and political crisis created fertile ground for antisemitic and rightist agitation. A post-World War I convergence of antisemitism and nationalism infused the former “with a striking sense of mission and activism,” which began to transform anti-Jewish prejudice into a far more dangerous problem than it had previously been.7 Many German Jews, and especially politically radical Jews, were caught in a no-man’s land—rejected by a society that their co-religionists had strived mightily to assimilate into, but unable to completely return to mainstream Jewry.8 This alienation, which was not entirely new, even extended to the left-wing parties—where, despite their prominent role, Jews had long had an “outsider” status. This was partly because their intellectualism, and in some cases their attachment to elements of Jewish humanism, led them to question dogmas; partly because of the inability of the working-class parties to completely transcend societal antisemitism; and partly because of the middle-class origins of most Jewish socialists, which distinguished them from the rank and file of the SPD and KPD.9 And to many of their fellow Jews, who were likely to belong to the moderate Centralverein, revolutionary socialists like Herbert Baum and Walter Loewenheim were reckless extremists who “endangered all that Jews had managed to accomplish in Germany.”10 It was therefore the social world of the Jewish youth movements— rather than the milieux of the Communists and Socialists—that provided a basis for solidarity and resistance. Herbert Baum’s first Nazi-era groups comprised individuals he had known in the Jewish youth organizations and in Jewish schools in his neighborhood. Until

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their sudden demise in 1942, it was informal social relations, rather than the loyalty or discipline required of the KPD or any other organization, that united and held together the varied circles of Baum’s dissident network. This was also true of most other leftist collectives, such as the Org, that contained large proportions of young German Jews.11 The loose, informal character of such underground networks as the Baum groups helped to keep alive an alternative culture and to maintain cohesive units of youths who were under siege. It also provided a familiar, welcoming environment for other young Jews, which helps explain the Baum groups’ relative success in recruitment. At various times over the course of their existence, as many as 150 people participated at least semi-regularly in the groups’ activities, and dozens of others were sympathetic. And while Baum himself and most of the leaders and “political instructors” in his network were committed Communists, an atmosphere of political tolerance prevailed in the groups’ internal life. This also promoted cohesion and loyalty, while preventing the disastrous factionalism and inevitable splits that plagued Trotskyist-oriented groups—even such groups as the Org that, it must be said, had a clearer understanding of fascism and of Marxism than did the political leaders of the Baum groups. But if the relative informality and flexibility of the Baum groups served them well in many respects, these characteristics were less beneficial for the planning and carrying out of direct action, as demonstrated most disastrously by the Lustgarten episode. Jewish Resistance and Memory Although the radical activism of some young Jews under the Third Reich does not represent the dominant strain of Jewish life during that dark time, it was nonetheless the experience for many thousands of people in their formative years. Yet their story has been obscured by the politics of the Cold War and also by mainstream public memory not only in the former GDR and West Germany but also in Israel and the United States. West German and American memory of the Third Reich was shaped by the conflict with Soviet and East German Communism; therefore little good could come from the recognition of leftist anti-Nazi resistance, Jewish or otherwise. East Germany


181

constructed a version that was more monolithic as well as dishonest, exaggerating the heroism and prominence of KPD fighters while minimizing or neglecting entirely the efforts of Jews—even those who were Communists—to combat Nazism. In Israel and the United States, related but more complex factors influenced the memory and historiography of Jewish resistance. Historian Martin Cohen indicated some causes of a “Jewish ambivalence and antipathy to the history of the resistance” and the reluctance of many Jewish institutions in United States to acknowledge left-wing Jewish activists: Jews in the United States have endured antisemitic charges of both dual loyalty and disloyalty. The excesses of Cold War politics no doubt heightened sensitivity to such accusations…. Jewish institutions may have a stake in downplaying the Jewish presence on the political left, either here or in Europe. While many American Jews trace their family histories back to prewar Poland, few realize that the Jewish Labor Bund was the largest Jewish institution in prewar Poland and quite probably a part of their heritage.12

Both the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance dropped the politically inexpedient reference to “Communists” from Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous admonition, which began “First they came for the Communists,” before listing the Social Democrats, the trade unionists, and finally the Jews.13 But if there are interests to be served by downplaying the radicalism of many young German Jews, there are also reasons to exaggerate the Jewish resistance, especially that embarked upon by Zionist organizations.14 Since 1945 there has always been a delicate balance between a narrative of suffering and one of heroism. In the United States in particular, claims to victimization can quickly lead to an unseemly competition, while on the other hand stories of Jewish bravery against all odds complement a Zionist narrative of the emergence of the strong Jew. Some of these problems continue to prevent a comprehensive accounting and analysis of Jewish radical youth sub-cultures in the Third Reich. The activism of German Jews in the Org, the Left Opposition, KPD-led circles like those of Attenberger or Sack, and the betterknown Baum groups has been treated by historians, if at all, as completely distinct. I argue that, despite the sharp differences that

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probably would have produced an impassioned debate had Herbert Baum ever met Walter Loewenheim or Gerhard Bry, these individuals actually had more in common with each other than with the nonJewish, political comrades in their respective organizations. This is shown by a common orientation: the centrality of reading and cultural groups for their common activities; a common alienation from the parties to which they felt closest (resulting in part from Nazi repression); and, needless to say, a common fate—not just the individuals’ ultimate fate, but the social death of German Jewry that Nazi policies had imposed by the mid-1930s. There is much evidence that young Jewish radicals of various stripes inhabited a more-or-less common milieu, or at least an interlocking set of milieux. Richard Holzer was romantically involved with a member of the Org before meeting Charlotte Paech, who worked in a hospital with other Org members while she was married to a KPD member.15 Erwin Ackerknecht, one of the central leaders of a Left Opposition group, married an Org activist and had social and political relations with people in various anarchist and other nonTrotskyist underground groups.16 Communist organizers such as Siegbert Kahn and Herbert Ansbach drew most of their recruits from among young Jews who had no previous contact with the KPD or its youth wing. A number of people who ended up in the KPD’s orbit, including Rudi Arndt and Richard Holzer, had once been members of the anarchist Schwarze Haufen, and Baum’s groups of the 1930s counted many members who had also belonged to that organization. By focusing on a few discrete examples of Jewish or leftist resistance— and often insisting on categorizing them as one or another—we have missed the connections and commonalities. Legacies There is often an understandable temptation toward hagiography in the treatment of Nazism’s victims and resisters. It is also natural that in their research most resistance historians settle upon subjects with which they sympathize to some degree. The political use or usurpation of resistance is less innocuous. East German historians glorified—as well as obscured—the Baum groups and vastly overstated the heroism and magnitude of the Communist-led resistance.


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But of course leftist resisters have also been reviled, when not ignored altogether. The young members of the Baum groups “lived in a fantasy world,” according to historian Walter Laqueur. Their actions were “utterly futile” and, perhaps most damningly, they were not “students of political philosophy.” Rather than earn degrees in political science, as Laqueur would have preferred, they “met in small study groups and read the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, even if they did not understand a single word of it,” an opinion that Laqueur neglected to substantiate.17 The allegiance of Herbert Baum and many of his comrades to Soviet Communism is sadly unremarkable. The misplaced loyalty and uncritical acceptance of Stalinism by honest and humane people occupies a central place in the history of twentieth-century Communism. But unlike Erich Honecker, Wilhelm Pieck, and Walter Ulbricht—whose veteran status in the Communist movement gave them power and privilege after the war—people like Werner Steinbrinck and Herbert Baum gained no personal reward for their service. And those who survived the Reich and chose to live in East Germany, such as Herbert Ansbach and Walter Sack, profited very little in any material sense from their dedication to Moscow’s brand of Communism, instead enduring periodic antisemitic discrimination or abuse. Other resisters chronicled in this book, like the intellectual leaders of the Org, formulated a more penetrating critique of traditional Marxism and also of capitalism and fascism than did the political leaders of the Baum groups. Yet certain members of the Org and the various Left Oppositions retained negative instincts from their time in the KPD, which were manifested in factionalism, theoretical hairsplitting, and the occasional tendency to turn their own heretical ideas into new dogmas. But as shown in this book, neither the Baum groups nor the left-communist organizations were homogeneous. Most of those who traveled in these circles displayed restless intellects that rebelled against stifling orthodoxies. At a time when fear and complacency ruled their society, the quest for effective action and for meaningful lives and relationships deserves some admiration. Were they successful? I argue against the smug judgment that the actions chronicled here were, in the final analysis, “utterly futile.” The

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success or failure of any form of resistance cannot be measured in an empirical, immediate sense. Seemingly humble and non-threatening actions—cultural activities and self-education, for example—thwarted the Nazi ambition to dehumanize and crush its victims. Collections for families of political prisoners, food-distribution operations, working in a Jewish hospital as Charlotte Paech did—such acts could not topple the Third Reich, but they prevented the dictatorship from its goal of corrupting its victims morally and spiritually. Leaflet and graffiti actions, and the rare spectacular act, alerted some portion of the public—both in Germany and elsewhere—that not everyone had submitted, that it was possible to resist.18 And perhaps most importantly, these acts of resistance and refusal have a lasting, residual effect. If the history of world civilization is replete with war and tyranny, it also shows that decent, honorable impulses and the instinct for human solidarity can never be fully suppressed.


1

185

NOTES Fischer, Nazi Germany, 280. Ley was not alone among the top Nazis in his addiction to various intoxicants and narcotics: Göring developed his massive girth despite his fondness for morphine; under the influence of his personal doctor, the unwholesome Theo Morrell, Hitler regularly ingested a toxic combination of stimulants, tranquilizers, and hypnotics. Fischer, 305, 531.

2

BA Zw, Z-C 4862, 23 March 1937 Indictment of Berkheim and Prager.

3

Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, 214.

4

Quoted in Kaplan, 111.

5

“Der Friedenskämpfer,” June 1942, reproduced by the Gedenkstätte deutscher Widerstand, Berlin.

6

Gerhard Paul and Klaus-Michael Mallmann, Milieus und Widerstand: Eine Verhaltensgeschichte der Gesellschaft im Nationalsozialismus (Bonn: J.H.W. Dietz, 1995).

7

Konrad H. Jarausch and Michael Geyer, Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 123.

8

Adam M. Weisberger, The Jewish Ethic and the Spirit of Socialism (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), 41.

9

George Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1985), 55-71. About a number of short-term occupations as a laborer and low-level office worker, Gerhard Bry, former Org activist, commented that his education and Jewish middle-class upbringing—or as he phrased it, “my face, language and mentality”—made it “impossible to ever really submerge myself into the working classes.” Bry, Resistance, in Monika Richarz, ed., Jewish Life in Germany: Memoirs from Three Centuries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 372.

10

Mosse, 68.

11

Lisa Attenberger’s group (see Chapter Three) provides an excellent example. Some people joined the group after meeting some of its members at the theater, at a gymnastics studio, or through an agit-prop group. And although Attenberger was a disciplined member of the KPD, only a minority of the members of her circle had any previous contact with the Communists.

12

Martin Cohen, “Culture and Remembrance: Jewish Ambivalence and Antipathy to the History of Resistance,” from Ruby Rohrlich, editor, Resisting the Holocaust (New York: Berg, 1998), 32.

13

Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 221. According to Novick, “There is no contemporary record of Niemöller's first (oral) delivery of this recital…but the list of those included, and the order—which

186

Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany corresponds to the order in which the Nazis rounded up its enemies—is well established. The version in [Novick’s] text, authorized by Niemöller’s widow,” is from an article by Ruth Zerner in Marvin Perry and Frederick M. Schweitzer, editors, Jewish-Christian Encounters Over the Centuries (New York: Peter Lang, 1994). Novick, 337.

14

Novick, 138-39; Henry Feingold, Bearing Witness: How America and Its Jews Responded to the Holocaust (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 54-58; and Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). While Zionist groups including the Haschomer Hazair and Habonim played a leading role in the resistance in Warsaw and in some other ghettos, the role of the Zionist leaderships in Palestine and Germany was often far less honorable, both during the Nazi years and in their manipulation of Holocaust survivors afterward. See Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (New York: Henry Holt, 1991); Yosef Grodzinsky, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Struggle Between Jews and Zionists in the Aftermath of World War II (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2004); and Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust.

15

YVA, 03/3096 February 1964 “Testimony of Charlotte Holzer.” None of this was overlooked by the Stasi inquisitors, who later noted the Holzers’ suspicious dalliances with the “social-democratic anticommunist” Org. BA, SgY 30/2014.

16

IfZ, ZS 2077, 29 March 1971 interview of Ackerknecht by Dr. Werner Röder.

17

Walter Laqueur, Generation Exodus: The Fate of Young Jewish Refugees from Nazi Germany (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2001), 66-70.

18

During the late 1930s Bernt Engelmann helped transport Jews to safety outside Germany. He was drafted into the Wehrmacht and sent to the Western front, but maintained contact with the rescue operation. One day in May 1941 while on leave in Paris, he had a meeting with three associates who were also involved in that effort. “I asked them if there was an active resistance movement now in Berlin. The man who spoke for them hesitated for a moment, then said, ‘Yes, there is…. If you ever want to link up with us, ask your Uncle Erich about ‘the Baum’.” Engelmann did not think much about this until a year later, when he heard about the sabotage of the “Soviet Paradise”: “The attack on the exhibition… caused quite a sensation. That brave deed strengthened the resistance in Berlin, and word of it spread throughout the Reich.” Bernt Engelmann, In Hitler’s Germany: Everyday Life in the Third Reich (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 238, 302.

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Index Ackerknecht, Erwin, 42, 44, 47, 48, 180 Arndt, Rudi, 20, 108–109, 182 Attenberger, Lisa, 8, 67–71, 75, 87, 179 Bakalejnyk, Alfred, 44, 46 Bauer, Bruno, 65 Bauer, Yehuda, 6 Baum groups, 1, 21, 23, 34, 38, 68, 86–91, 95–104, 106–117, 183; heterogeneity of, 2, 4, 66, 75, 95– 96, 98, 100–103, 107–108, 180; educational gatherings (Heimabende) of, 86–88, 89–90, 95–104, 109; attack upon “Soviet Paradise” by, 7, 69, 81–82, 125–131, 136, 137, 157, 158, 163, 166, 180; arrests and decimation of, 131–137; contested memory in post-war East Germany of, 1, 154–167 Baum, Herbert, 1, 2, 4, 18, 68, 69, 72, 75, 137–138, 145, 154, 155, 182; early biography and pre-1933 activism of, 21, 83–86, 179; personality of, 84–86; relation to Communism and KPD of, 66, 70, 72, 83, 98, 102, 106–108, 183; as organizer of resistance network, 1– 2, 70, 72, 86–91, 95–98, 104, 106– 117; planning of “Soviet Paradise” attack, 125–129; death of, 132 Baum, Marianne (Cohn), 83, 87, 89, 99, 114, 125, 130, 131, 133, 137 Berkheim, Kurt, 177 Bernstein, Eduard, 22 Berger, Hans, 43–45, 47, 48 Berger, Hilde, 46–47, 48 Birnbaum, Heinz, 69, 87, 114, 115, 129, 133

Blau-Weiβ (German Zionist organization), 17, 18, 20, 40 Brecht, Bertolt, 102, 161 Bry, Gerhard, 18, 23, 47, 48, 49, 96, 182; activism in the Org by, 36–40, 103–104 Buber, Martin, 18 Budzislawski, Herbert, 87, 132, 135 Bukharin, Nikolai, 32, 65, 102, 103 Bund Deutsch-Jüdischer Jugend (German-Jewish youth group), 20– 21, 72, 133; See also Ring-Bund Jüdischer Jugend Carsten, Franz, 39, 48 Centralverein (CV; German-Jewish organization), 13, 17, 21, 179 Communist International (“Comintern”), 30–33, 37, 58, 59, 61, 64, 102, 107, 115 Communist Party, East German. See Socialist Unity Party (SED), East German Communist Party, German (KPD), 2, 3, 8, 19, 20, 22–23, 35, 37, 38, 41, 42, 44, 46–48, 99, 100, 101, 102, 106, 125, 127, 128, 137, 150; origins of, 28–31; during Weimar Republic, 31–34, 102; anti-Nazi resistance activities of, 7, 57–75, 86–91, 98, 106–107, 108–109, 110–112, 115, 178–179, 181, 182, 183; on “Jewish Question” and antisemitism, 47– 48, 63–66, 74–75 Communist Party-Opposition, German (KPO), 47 Compart, Ellen, 87, 100 Cühn, Harry, 108

198


Deutsch-Jüdische Jugendgemeinschaft (the GermanJewish Youth Society), 71, 83, 133 Dimitrov, Georgi, 37, 146 Ebert, Freidrich 27, 28, 29 Edel, Peter, 178 “Edelweiβ Pirates” (German youth group), 7 Eisenstädter, Alfred, 107 Eisner, Kurt, 22 Engels, Friedrich, 23, 36, 38, 66, 96, 99, 101, 102, 103 Erler, Fritz, 39, 41, 48 Eschwege, Helmut, 153–154, 166 Fischer, Ruth, 41, 64 Flechtheim, Ossip, 39 Franke, Joachim, 86, 90, 113, 116, 125–128, 130, 131, 136, 137 Freundlich, Felix and Rosetta, 114 Fruck, Hans, 90, 128–129, 137, 156 Galinski, Heinz, 148, 155 Gemeinschaft für Frieden und Aufbau, 72–73 George, Stefan, 19, 102 Gestapo, 41, 43, 60, 82, 87, 90, 96, 115, 125, 128, 129, 131, 132, 135– 137, 156, 177 Goebbels, Joseph, 1, 81–82, 90, 125, 128, 129, 158 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 3, 14, 99–100, 103 Gossweiler, Kurt, 159–160 Guerin, Daniel, 58 Haschomer Hazair, 3, 18, 72, 87, 88, 96, 133, 178 Havemann, Robert, 38 Heine, Heinrich, 14, 15, 99 Heydrich, Reinhard, assassination of, 132–133 Heymann, Felix, 8, 87

Hilferding, Rudolf, 30 Hirsch, Alice, 87 Hirsch, Hella, 87, 133 Hitler, Adolf, 1, 7, 11, 15, 18, 19, 22, 39, 41, 42, 49, 61–62, 70, 71, 73, 86, 95, 104, 106, 109, 110–113, 145, 165, 166; antisemitic policies of, 12, 96– 98, 178; suppression of German left by, 57–59; conservative opposition to, 4–5, 133; in post-war East German official history, 147, 149, 162 Holzer, Charlotte (Paech), 89, 101, 145, 146, 163, 165, 166–167, 182, 184; escape from jail and survival, 136–139; conflicts with East German authorities, 154–160 Holzer, Richard, 89, 100, 107, 115, 127–128, 135–136, 139, 145, 146, 161, 163, 165, 166–167, 182; conflicts with East German authorities, 154–157, 159 Independent Social Democratic Party, German (USPD), 28–31, 102 Internationale Sozialitische Kampfbund (ISK), 47 Jadamowitz, Hilde, 67–69, 75, 87–88, 127, 130–131, 133 Joachim, Heinz, 2, 70, 86, 89–90, 100, 110, 125, 130, 133 Joachim, Marianne (Prager), 90, 100, 133, 134, 135 Joos, Anton, 156–157 Kahn, Siegbert, 70–71, 75, 127, 149, 166, 182; runs afoul of East German authorities, 160 Kameraden (German-Jewish youth group), 17, 95–96, 101 Kapp Putsch, 30 Kautsky, Karl, 27 Kellerman, Henry, 15, 20–22, 149

Index Klemperer, Victor, 106, 117, 166 Knöchel, Wilhelm, 178–179 Kochmann, Martin, 69–70, 87, 89, 101, 116, 125, 126, 138 Kochmann, Sala, 69–70, 87, 89, 101, 125, 130, 133 Kreutzer, Michael, 86 Kristallnacht, 15, 48, 66, 87, 90, 104– 105, 163 Kwiet, Konrad, 5, 153–154 Landau, Kurt, 41–42, 43, 48 Laufer, Max, 46, 48 Lauter, Paul, 156–157 Lebedour, Georg, 30 Left Opposition, German, 34, 41–47, 48–49, 181, 182, 183 Left Opposition, Russian, 31–32 Lenin, V.I., 36, 37, 46, 96, 102, 103 Levi, Paul, 29 Ley, Robert, 177 Liebknecht, Karl, 27, 29–30 Loewenheim, Walter, 23, 35–38, 40, 48, 179, 182 Loewy, Hilde, 133, 134 London, Jack, 21, 72, 101 Löwenthal, Richard, 36, 39, 40, 42 Luther, Martin, 13 Luxemburg, Rosa, 22, 27, 29–30, 102, 161 Mann, Thomas, 7, 90 Mannaberg, Hans-Georg, 131, 133 Marx, Karl, 22, 23, 36, 38, 65–66, 81, 111 Marxism, 8, 18, 20, 21, 23, 36, 37–38, 44, 45–46, 63–65, 74, 96, 99, 100, 101–102, 103, 150, 164, 180, 182 Meyer, Gerd, 125, 130, 131, 133 Meyer, Hanni, 133–134 Muhle, Hans, 68, 69 Nazi Party, German, 6–8, 20, 48–49, 57–58, 63, 65, 73, 81, 82, 83, 97,

199 105–106, 108, 111, 112, 116, 125– 126, 132, 134; rise to power by, 19, 33, 64; East German official interpretation of Nazism, 146–150 Niemöller, Martin, 181 “Noel Field Affair,” 156 Non-Aggression Pact (GermanSoviet), 61–62, 88, 91, 104, 106– 108, 109, 115 Norden, Albert, 148–149, 162 Noske, Gustav, 29–30 Org, The (German socialist organization), 34–41, 42, 44, 47, 48, 49, 95, 96, 103, 180, 181, 182, 183 Paech, Charlotte. See Holzer, Charlotte Paech, Gustav, 101, 137 Paucker, Arnold, 178 Peukert, Detlev, 5 Pieck, Wilhelm, 59, 60, 146, 147, 183 Pikarski, Margot, 81, 153, 164 Popular Front, 41, 59–60, 61, 111, 160 Prager, Ernst, 177 Radek, Karl, 64–65 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 18, 102 Ring-Bund Jüdischer Jugend (German-Jewish youth group), 21, 83, 86, 98, 134 Römer, Beppo, 63 Rote Kapelle (Red Orchestra), 126 Rotzholz, Heinz, 131–132, 134 Rotholz, Lotte, 132 Rotholz, Siegbert, 2, 86, 127, 134 Sack, Walter, 18, 21, 71–72, 75, 85, 87, 100, 145, 154, 157, 163, 164, 181, 183 Sacco and Vanzetti Trial, 85 Saefkow, Anna, 164 Salinger, Lothar, 134, 135 Scharff, Werner, 72–73

200


Schaumann, Werner, 2, 86, 88 Scheidemann, Philipp, 28 Schiller, Friedrich, 3, 14, 99–100, 102, 103 Schmutz, Andreas, 158–159 Schwarze Haufen (German anarchist group), 20, 89, 98, 109, 127, 182 Sedov, Lev, 42 Siemens Elmo-Werke factory, 70, 83, 88–89, 90, 108, 110, 131–132 Sinclair, Upton, 3, 21, 46, 72, 85 Slansky Trial, 151–152 Sobolevicus, Rubin, 41 Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), 3, 4, 23, 41; pre-Third Reich, 16, 22–23, 27–30, 33, 34, 35, 37, 42, 44, 46–47, 48, 58, 67, 83, 98; during Third Reich, 19, 59–60, 62, 73, 179, 181 Socialist Unity Party (SED), East German, 145–154, 155–157, 159, 160, 161–163; resistance mythology of, 1, 146–150, 153–154, 155, 164– 167 Socialist Workers Party of Germany (SAP), 46–47, 113 “Soviet Paradise” (Nazi exhibit), 1, 114; character of, 81–82, 158; attack by Baum groups upon, 7, 69, 81– 82, 125–131, 136, 137, 157, 158, 163, 166, 180; previous attacks upon, 82 Spartacist League, 29, 35 Springer, Robert, 42–46, 48 Stalin, Joseph, 32, 61–62, 65, 103, 115, 151, 157, 161 Stalinism, 107, 115, 183; Stalinization of KPD, 29–34; critique by German leftists of, 40, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48; in East Germany, 38, 146–152, 155, 167 Steinbrinck, Werner, 68–69, 86–87, 88, 90, 100, 113–114, 116, 183; and attack on the “Soviet Paradise” and

subsequent arrests, 125, 126, 129– 131, 133, 136, 137 Thälmann, Ernst, 57, 152–153 Traven, B., 3, 101 Trotsky, Leon, 19, 41–42, 65, 102, 103; critique of Stalinism, 31–32, 34–35; Trotskyist groups in Germany, 2, 19, 41–47, 48, 113, 180, 182; “Trotskyism” as political heresy under Stalinism, 151 Uhrig, Robert, 62–63, 108 Ulbricht, Walter, 146–147, 149, 152, 183 Urbahns, Hugo, 41, 43 Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes (VVN), 148, 155, 166 Wandervogel (German youth movement), 15–17, 35, 157 Werkleute (German-Jewish youth group), 18, 71 Wesse, Suzanne, 88, 113, 125, 130, 133 “White Rose,” The, 7 Winkler, Hans, 73 Zadek, Alice, 87, 145, 157, 161–162 Zadek, Gerhard, 23, 84, 85, 93, 151; in post-war East Germany, 154, 157, 161–163, 165, 166, 167 Zinoviev, Grigory, 30 Zocher, Rita, 81, 99, 134, 136, 157, 166

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