Berlin Ghetto: Herbert Baum and the Anti-Fascist Resistance by Eric Brothers (PDF)

Description

With a foreword by Elie Wiesel, the first book to tell the complete story of Herbert Baum and the Jewish antifascist resistance in Nazi Berlin This fascinating book tells the story of a group of young Jewish people who had lives filled with intellectual exploration, intense friendships and romances, and dangerous and illegal political action, during one of the most anti-Semitic and regressive regimes in history. The roots of Jewish antifascism in the Communist, Socialist, and Jewish youth movements of pre-Nazi working class Berlin are examined in this book. The complete story of Herbert Baum and Jewish antifascism is told through oral and written testimony of survivors, friends, and relatives of group members; Nazi trial documents; and primary documents of the period. Everything fell apart in May of 1942, however, when Baum and a few others went into the massive anti-Soviet and anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda exhibition Das Sowjet-Paradies (Soviet Paradise) and set off several small explosive devices. Unfortunately, a comrade of Baum’s was interrogated by the Gestapo and under duress gave them a list of names of many people associated with Herbert Baum. Little by little, people were arrested, put on trial and executed or sent to death camps. This book is a testament to Jewish antifascist resistance in Nazi Germany.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “A stirring narrative.” — The Herbert Baum Group Blog”This is an important work which, better than many books on the subject, illuminates the division and complexity by which German Jews responded to Nazism.” — Jewish Book World About the Author Eric Brothers is the author of more than 250 published articles, essays, reviews, and blog posts and is an advertising copywriter. Elie Wiesel is a Romanian-born Jewish American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust suvivor.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Published in the ‘Journal of Jewish Identities,’ July 2013The saga of Claus von Stauffenberg and his co-conspirators, whose attempt to kill Hitler in July 1944 resulted in their grisly executions, is well known in Germany and elsewhere. Their sacrifice merits attention and honor; some of us, though, long ago grew weary of books purporting to tell the story of the German resistance while focusing exclusively on the conservative military conspiracy. There were many other Germans who did not wait until Hitler was losing the war to take action, but who bravely combatted the regime from the first day.Herbert Baum, a young Communist activist, organized a network of groups that included several dozen members, a large majority of whom were Jewish. They engaged in creative, bold forms of dissidence and outright resistance, from leafleting and distributing illegal publications to cultural forms of resistance and, finally, an attack on a Nazi exhibition, which led to the group’s demise. Their history has been difficult to reconstruct, owing to the dearth of sources and the fact that they did not fit neatly into postwar narratives on either side of the “Iron Curtain”–or, for that matter, within Israel.Eric Brothers, an independent historian, has helped to expand and correct the record in previous articles. He has now published a well-written, compelling, deeply researched account of the Baum Group, which is essential reading for anyone interested in Jewish or left-wing resistance during the Third Reich. Like almost anyone who would invest so much time in this type of research Brothers sympathizes with his subjects, but he scrupulously avoids hagiography.Herbert Baum emerges as a multi-dimensional and complex person: a charismatic and thoughtful young man and a skilled organizer, but also a doctrinaire Communist who was capable of dogmatism and haughtiness. Brothers vividly captures the social and political atmosphere of the milieu from which Baum recruited, composed of left-wing groups and German-Jewish youth groups (often with the emphasis on “German”) of various sorts. Berlin Ghetto shows that while some members were pulled (or pushed) closer to a Jewish identity, the group itself was becoming estranged and isolated from the Jewish community. These contradictions were sometimes present within a single individual. Lothar Salinger, for example, told his friends in 1941, “Hitler made me a Jew… and I will remain one as long as antisemitism exists” but that the “Jewish god has been thumbing his nose at us. What does it mean to be the “chosen people”? (139)’Berlin Ghetto’ describes why Marxism or communism would appeal to disaffected, rebellious, intellectually curious Jewish youths. Brothers dissects the malignant influence of Soviet Stalinism, as translated by the German Communist Party (KPD), which was unusually slavish in its subservience to Moscow–as was its successor, the post-war SED–and whose activities in the early 1930s were marked by appalling ineptitude and sectarianism. (39-47) As Brothers observes, the Baum Group, contrary to the image conveyed in other accounts both East and West, was not politically homogeneous. One Baum-associated group, which included Ellen Compart (Baum’s groups included a large proportion of women, often in leading roles) studied Trotsky’s ‘The Revolution Betrayed’ (97), which was certainly not on the KPD’s “recommended reading” list. (Baum himself, while a teenager, read parts of Trotsky’s autobiography, ‘My Life,’ Brothers also reports; 15).Brothers reports in intriguing detail the group’s actions, some of which were extraordinarily daring. Baum fashioned “leaflet bombs” out of large, hollowed-out vegetable cans, into which he placed explosives in the bottom, which he “covered with a round metal plate” treated with chemicals to prevent it from burning, then affixed a timer and placed leaflets in the top half of the can. In 1934 Herbert Ansbach, a close colleague of Baum’s in the 1930s, set one of these “leaflet bombs” in a flower box behind a podium where Goebbels was present; “small, round Soviet star emblems and leaflets” exploded into the crowd, sending the propaganda minister scurrying for cover with little dignity. (66) In May 1942 Baum and several comrades, including his wife, attempted to sabotage, with crude explosives, a large, highly publicized exhibit staged by Goebbels called the “Soviet Paradise,” which purported to show the horrors of “Judeo-Bolshevism.” Most members–and many others only tangentially related to the group–were quickly arrested. Baum was tortured and murdered; others were beaten and subjected to farcical trials, then executed in several waves in 1942 and 1943. Ten members were executed in a mere thirty-seven minutes on one day, in August 1943, at the infamous Plötzensee Prison, where the July 20 conspirators would later be killed. (181) After becoming acquainted with many members, whose personalities are much more richly drawn than in any previous account, it is dismaying to read about the futile attempts at escape, arrests, and executions.”Berlin Ghetto” is the most thorough treatment we are likely to see, and is a strong addition to the literature on German anti-fascist resistance and the German-Jewish experience in those years. The book is the product of many years of research. Postwar manipulations of the memory of Baum and his colleagues, and the lives in East Germany of several surviving members, are fascinating stories of their own. Brothers concludes Berlin Ghetto by promising to write a book on those topics, which we hope will take far less than twenty-eight years.JOHN COX, University of North Carolina Charlotte

⭐”Better to reign in Hell, than to serve in Heaven,” Satan’s epigrammatic turn in John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” would lead one to believe that Adolph Hitler and Josef Stalin may have been in their youth English lit majors. Eric Brothers, in his turn, has fashioned a valuable addition to the literature that documents one of the most horrific periods in human history, the twenty years or so that span Hitler’s rise and fall. Although the central figure in “Berlin Ghetto” is Herbert Baum, Brothers does a masterful job of describing Baum’s world, the zeitgeist in which he finds himself and to which he responds. We see Baum, a committed, idealistic communist, struggle with issues of identity in a Germany that is becoming virulently anti-Semitic, anti-democratic and anti-communist. Ultimately Baum sees himself as a communist above all, embracing an ideology that to him provides the solutions for a corrupt, war-mongering, capitalistic world. The title of Chapter 11 sums up nicely what Baum and many of his associates were thinking: “Communism as a Cure for Naziism (1937).”Of course, the great irony and the great pity, is that Baum and the communists, Jew and non-Jew alike, would look to the land of Hitler’s evil twin, Josef Stalin, for psychic relief, spiritual sustenance, ideological direction. In one of the strongest chapters of the book, “Living on the Edge and ‘Soviet Paradise’ (1942),” Brothers describes the disastrous and inept attempt of the Baum group to fire bomb “Soviet Paradise,” an “expansive anti-communist propaganda exhibition” intended “to show that Bolsheviks, communists, socialists, Jews and the Devil were one and the same, out to conquer the world and destroy the racial superiority and uniqueness of the German people.” Appalling and repugnant assertions, no question, but the exhibition also sought to illustrate the “grey and joyless lives” of the “miserable” Soviet worker. Even the great Nazi baloney-making machine could slice off a bit of truth now and then.Brothers’ book is well documented, beautifully written, and powerful in its impact. We see not only the struggles of young Jews in Nazi Germany and the brutality unleashed upon them as they raged against the machine, but we see them do what young people are supposed to do: have fun, make love, fall in love, marry. Sing, dance, make merry and make babies. That they tried to live decent, ordinary, satisfying lives against such an appalling backdrop tugs more than a little at one’s heart strings. Furthermore, in their youth most saw themselves as loyal Germans, good Germans who loved the fatherland, whose relatives had fought bravely in World War I, who wanted only the best for themselves and their country. They got Auschwitz instead. Brothers deftly limns their journey from optimistic beginnings to cruel, cold-blooded endings.The book carries the reader along, but one needs to pay attention. The narrative is detailed and brisk, and there is an alphabet soup of various organizations (SPD, DJJG and so on); a large cast of characters with names, nick-names, married and maiden names, false names. Many dates, times, locations and the activities that go with them. But these are quibbles, actually, for they neither impede nor weaken this powerful story. Get the book and see.

⭐The amount of research involved is absolutely amazing. The author, Mr. Brothers brings the characters who are real people very human and easy to understand where they came from and their views which made them fight against the Natzis as anti-facist freedom fighters. This book should be used as a text book in Universities and High Schools to make students aware of the resistance and who these people were.This book is more than a historical overview of the resistance in Berlin.

⭐A wonderful insight into a little-known aspect of ther sruggle by young German Jews against the Nazi terror.

⭐This book is the best single study in English on the Herbert Baum Group, operating against the Nazi regime in Berlin and largely comprised of young German Jews, in the main dedicated communists. It is based in part on direct interviews after 1980 with some of the survivors.One of the survivors, Charlotte Paech Holzer, recorded her extended memoirs in 1966/67 in German in East Berlin. The manuscript for various reasons was (surprisingly) never published, neither in East Germany nor West, and we are currently translating it to appear as a book with Yad Vashem/Jerusalem. In his book BERLIN GHETTO, Eric Brothers often mentions Charlotte Paech (née Abraham, 1909-1980), a Jewish nurse, based on an earlier deposition of hers, but was unable to interview Charlotte, she passed away in East Berlin before he began his research project. Many of the core Baum Group were arrested and executed. Most of the survivors settled in East Berlin.As Eric Brothers notes in his Introduction: “What all the people I write about had in common was an absolute hatred of National Socialism […] BERLIN GHETTO is about Jews and gentiles working together in the Berlin anti-fascist resistance in what essentially was a cultural ghetto. The Jews among them saw themselves as German anti-fascists and thus resisted as Germans; however, they were nonetheless persecuted as Jews by the Nazi regime” (p. 10).Herbert Baum (1912-1942), whose photo is on the book cover, perished in Moabit Prison after torture in June 1942. There is a plaque in the Weißensee Cemetery in East Berlin commemorating the Herbert Baum Group, where Charlotte Holzer is also buried. The Weißensee Cemetery is the second largest Jewish cemetery in Europe, dedicated in 1880. Significantly, the Herbert-Baum-Strasse is today a street leading from the Berliner Allee to the Weißensee Cemetery. In 1961 the East German government issued a commemorative series of five postage stamps honoring anti-fascist fighters, including Herbert Baum (see below).

⭐All good.

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