Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
vii
List of Abbreviations
ix
Introduction
Varieties of Anti-Nazi Resistance
Sources of Resistance: Jewish, Youth, Leftist Movements
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
1
4
6
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 would like to thank 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.
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
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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
Walter 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
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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
German-Jewish Youth Movements
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
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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
German-Jewish Youth Movements
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
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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
German-Jewish Youth Movements
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
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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-
German-Jewish Youth Movements
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
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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
German-Jewish Youth Movements
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.
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
24
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.
German-Jewish Youth Movements
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.
Schatzer, 160.
25
26
Gerhard Zadek, Hanni Meyer, and Lotte Rotholz, in addition to a few other
members of Baum’s network, were members; see Chapter Five.
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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
30
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
Resistance by Dissident Communists and Left-Wing Socialists
31
“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
32
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
Resistance by Dissident Communists and Left-Wing Socialists
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
34
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
Resistance by Dissident Communists and Left-Wing Socialists
35
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
36
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
Resistance by Dissident Communists and Left-Wing Socialists
37
…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
38
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
Resistance by Dissident Communists and Left-Wing Socialists
39
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
40
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
Resistance by Dissident Communists and Left-Wing Socialists
41
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
42
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
Resistance by Dissident Communists and Left-Wing Socialists
43
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
Resistance by Dissident Communists and Left-Wing Socialists
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
Resistance by Dissident Communists and Left-Wing Socialists
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
Lőwenthal, 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.
Resistance by Dissident Communists and Left-Wing Socialists
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
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
NOTES
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.
Rosa Luxemburg, “Zur russischen Revolution,” in Rosa Luxemburg, Gesammelte
Werke (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1990), Volume 4, 332-65; also see Paul Frölich,
9
Resistance by Dissident Communists and Left-Wing Socialists
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.
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
52
18
Richard Löwenthal, Die Widerstandsgruppe
Gedenkstätte deutscher Widerstand, 2001), 3.
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.
“Neu
Beginnen”
(Berlin:
Resistance by Dissident Communists and Left-Wing Socialists
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.
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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.
Resistance by Dissident Communists and Left-Wing Socialists
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.
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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
60
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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
62
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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
64
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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, his life and body of writings, in
66
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
toto, do 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
67
Jews in Berlin’s Communist-led Resistance
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
68
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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,
70
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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
72
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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 der 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
74
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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.
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
76
NOTES
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
77
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
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
78
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.
Berlin’s Communist-led Resistance
79
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
BA Zw, Z-C 3796, 12 December 1936 judgment against Attenberger and others.
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
BA Zw, Z-C 3796, 12 December 1936 judgment against Attenberger and others.
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
82
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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
83
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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Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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
The Herbert Baum Groups
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
86
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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 one exception—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
The Herbert Baum Groups
87
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
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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
Nonaggression 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—they married in 1938—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 ElmoWerke in 1940, and Wesse helped in developing contacts with the
The Herbert Baum Groups
89
Belgian and French 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
90
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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
The Herbert Baum Groups
91
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 Nonaggression 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.
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
92
NOTES
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:
<http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/paradise.htm> (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.
The Herbert Baum Groups
93
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
Brothers, “Wer war Herbert Baum?,” 85.
16
Brothers, “Wer war Herbert Baum?,” 85.
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:
94
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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
96
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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
Education and Other Subversive Activities
97
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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Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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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99
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
Tchaikovsky.
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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Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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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Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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 Tchaikovsky—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
religious struggles. The Baum groups’ members could have found
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103
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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Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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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Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
“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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107
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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Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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,
Education and Other Subversive Activities
111
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
112
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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.
Education and Other Subversive Activities
113
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
114
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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
Education and Other Subversive Activities
115
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
116
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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
Education and Other Subversive Activities
117
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.
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
118
NOTES
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
YVA, 03/4134, “Testimony of Rita Zocher.”
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
Education and Other Subversive Activities
119
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.
120
22
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.
Education and Other Subversive Activities
121
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
Browning, Origins, 173.
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
Brother, “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.”
122
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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.
Education and Other Subversive Activities
123
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
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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
Browning, Origins, 175.
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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Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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
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127
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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Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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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129
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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Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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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131
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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Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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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133
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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Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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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135
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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Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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
The “Soviet Paradise” and the Demise of the Baum Groups
137
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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Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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
The “Soviet Paradise” and the Demise of the Baum Groups
139
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.
140
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
NOTES
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
BA Zw, Z-C 12437, folder 5, 26 May 1942 Werner Steinbrinck interrogation
record.
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
BA Zw, Z-C 12460, folder 5, 26 May 1942 Werner Steinbrinck interrogation
record.
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.
The “Soviet Paradise” and the Demise of the Baum Groups
141
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
BA Zw, Z-C 12460, folder 5, 26 May 1942 Werner Steinbrinck interrogation
record.
18
YVA, 03/4134, “Testimony of Rita Zocher.”
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
BA Zw, Z-C 12460, folder 5, 22 May 1942 Werner Steinbrinck interrogation
record.
25
BA Zw, Z-C 12460, folder 5, 26 May 1942 Werner Steinbrinck interrogation
record.
142
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
26
Scheer, Im Schatten, 262.
27
Scheer, Im Schatten, 269.
28
Kreutzer, 137.
29
BA Zw, Z-C 12460, folder 5, 26 May 1942 Werner Steinbrinck interrogation
record.
30
Scheer, Im Schatten, 272.
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
Scheer, Im Schatten, 306.
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.
The “Soviet Paradise” and the Demise of the Baum Groups
143
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
YVA, 03/4134, “Testimony of Rita Zocher.”
50
BA, SgY 30/1224, 11 May 1963 Memoirs of Herbert Ansbach.
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.”
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
144
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)
146
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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
147
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
148
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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
The Baum Groups Remembered
149
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
150
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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
The Baum Groups Remembered
151
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”)
152
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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
The Baum Groups Remembered
153
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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Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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
The Baum Groups Remembered
155
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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157
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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Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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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159
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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Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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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161
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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Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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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163
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 Charlotte Paech and Richard Holzer, 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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Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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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165
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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Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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
The Baum Groups Remembered
167
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
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
168
NOTES
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.
The Baum Groups Remembered
169
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
Herf, Divided Memory, 186.
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
Herf, Divided Memory, 111.
29
Herf, Divided Memory, 112.
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. <http://www.cyberussr.com/rus/vrach-ubijca-e.html> (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.
The Baum Groups Remembered
171
34
Herf, Divided Memory, 127.
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
Herf, Divided Memory, 125.
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.
The Baum Groups Remembered
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.
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
174
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
Alice and Gerhard Zadek, Meschugge, 54.
72
Alice and Gerhard Zadek, Meschugge, 243.
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
BA, SgY 30/1224, 11 May 1963 Memoirs of Herbert Ansbach.
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
The Baum Groups Remembered
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
178
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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
180
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Resistance in Its Time and Beyond
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
182
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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.
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Resistance in Its Time and Beyond
183
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
184
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany
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.
Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Resistance in Its Time and Beyond
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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