The Baum Group – Resisting Nazis in Berlin

Herbet  Baum

The Baum Gruppe was an underground anti-Nazi movement, founded in Berlin by Herbet and Marianne Baum  when the Nazis seized power in Germany in 1933 and was made up mainly of Jews who belonged to youth movements who maintained links with all major underground groups in the German capital, strengthening the morale of a Berlin Jewish community being deported to death camps in the East.. Most were Communist, although a few  were left-wing Zionists. Almost all of the Baum Gruppe's members were quite young. The average age of the twenty-odd members of the inner circle of the Baum group was 22; Charlotte Päch, age 32, was nicknamed “Grandma.”

Herbert Baum  the man largely responsible for their actions was born in 1912 into a poor Jewish family in the province of Posen (today Poznan in Poland), but a few years later the family moved to Berlin. There he joined Jewish youth organizations, including the German-Jewish Youth Community (DJJG) and the League of Jewish Youth (Ring). In both groups Baum quickly displayed strong qualities of leadership, but their vaguely idealistic bourgeois ideology soon seemed inadequate to him as the twin specters of Nazism and unemployment loomed on the German horizon. By 1931 he had become a member of the Communist Youth Organization and soon was regarded as a promising Communist activist. He met his wife Marianne in the Communist Youth movement and both were deeply convinced that only the creation of a Communist society would free Germany of the evils of capitalism and anti-Semitism. 

Marianne Baum herself was born Marianne Cohn in Saarburg on December 9, 1912, when that city was part of Germany, grew up in Alsace in the years after that former German province had been returned to France in 1918. After her family moved to Berlin in the 1920s, she became actively involved in Jewish youth activities, moving toward the political Left along with her husband, Herbert, in the early 1930s.

While most Berlin Jews quietly prayed for better times after Hitler came to power, Herbert Baum alongside Marianne and his small circle of Communist activists openly defied the Nazis by building a complex, multitiered cell apparatus and distributing leaflets calling for an overthrow of the regime. As early as July 1934, Baum participated in a successful "action" that disseminated anti-Nazi propaganda to a Berlin populace that still included large numbers of passive anti-Nazis whose morale needed encouragement.

After the Nazi intelligence services succeeded in destroying most Communist and Social Democratic underground cells in 1936 and 1937, the Baum group remained virtually isolated in Berlin, and was ordered by the Communist leadership abroad to maintain itself as an exclusively Jewish organization in order to safeguard both itself and other still-existing resistance cells from Nazi infiltration. But while most members of the group were sympathetic to Zionist ideals, Baum and the inner circle of the organization were orthodox Communists for whom the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin were political wisdom incarnate. His iron devotion to the wisdom of the party's leadership even made it possible for him to accept the correctness of the Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 1939—-an event that prompted many Communists to quit the Party. Without denying his Jewish background, Baum believed that after the fall of Hitler Jews might still be able to live in a renewed German culture purged of Nazi racial hatred, and that as a German and a Communist temporarily transformed into a racial pariah he had a grave responsibility to help bring about this historical turnabout.

In 1936 the Communist underground asked the group's Jewish members to start an independent group and set up Communist units in Jewish youth organizations. From 1937--1942 the group concentrated on giving out illegal literature; organizing political training courses, cultural events, and educational evenings; and bolstering the morale of those Jews who were to be deported.

 Copying leaflets and underground newspapers was not only dangerous but also expensive. As Baum’s resistance group had to rely almost entirely on itself, the members tried to get hold of some of the money they needed for stencils and a duplicating machine through theft. On one occasion, they even broke into the home of a Berlin Jew and stole several valuable items, but were unable to sell them. This radical attempt shows the desperate situation the resistance group around Herbert Baum was in.

The articles for their leaflets were discussed by several members of the group, and usually even written jointly. As Jews were not allowed to use typewriters, the group’s non-Jewish members – such as Irene Walter and Suzanne Wesse – had to type the texts in secret at their workplaces. The stencils were duplicated in Herbert Baum’s basement. Some of their leaflets were widely distributed, while others were given specifically to members of certain professions or sent out by post. Some of the members donated a fifth of their wages to finance the group’s work.

 When World War II broke out, they continued and tried to organize resistance among Berlin’s Jews. In 1940, Herbert Baum was arrested and forced to work for the Berlin-based engineering company Siemens as a slave laborer. Even there, under the most dire circumstances, he organized a group of Jews who resisted Nazism and facilitated some workers’ escape so they could join the Berlin resistance

In May 1942 Baum and several others went into the massive anti-Soviet and anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda exhibition Das Sowjet-Paradies (Soviet Paradise) set up in Berlin by the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda headed by Joseph Goebbels. and set off several small explosive devices This action was considered to be a major offense against the Nazis. The German press was forbidden to publish any stories about the event, and so the German people were never informed that a small but well-organized resistance circle of Jewish Communists had destroyed a major Nazi propaganda show more than nine years after the Nazis came to power in Germany.

 That part of the exhibition could be destroyed by a Jewish resistance unit in the capital of the Greater German Reich proved a severe propaganda defeat for Goebbels, for even though the destruction was not reported in press or radio, virtually the entire population knew about the incendiary act within a few days. But the powerful Nazi intelligence and police system was determined to destroy men and women who, though numerically weak in numbers and resources, had been bold and resourceful enough to achieve such a significant propaganda victory.

A comrade of Baum's was interrogated by the Gestapo and under torture gave them a list of people associated with the Baum group.

On May 22, 1942, Herbert and Marianne Baum were arrested, as were most of the leading members of his group. Herbert Baum was tortured and taken to the Siemens plant to identify fellow workers who had joined in the arson plot, but he refused to reveal anything. On June 11, his frustrated Nazi captors murdered him (the Gestapo simply informed the trial prosecution staff that Baum had "committed suicide"). The trial of the Baum group's leaders resulted in a verdict that was a foregone conclusion—-death by decapitation. The sentence was carried out on August 18 at Plötzensee penitentiary in Berlin. Executed were Marianne Baum, Joachim Franke, Hildegard Jadamowitz, Heinz Joachim, Sala Kochmann, Hans-Georg Mannaberg, Gerhard Meyer, Werner Steinbrink, and Irene Walther. Franke, Jadamowitz, Mannaberg, and Steinbrink were all non-Jewish German Communists who had cooperated with the Baum group, and whose actions were deemed equally treasonous by a Nazi court. Sala Kochmann tried to kill herself during interrogation because of the intense torture used to make her reveal information, but was only able to fracture her spine. She was carried both to the trial and to her execution on a stretcher. 

 The fate of other Baum group members was decided in two other trials. The first of these resulted in indictments on October 21, with sentences rendered on December 10, 1942. All but three of the defendants were sentenced to death. Executed on March 4, 1943 by guillotine were nine members,

Pictured clockwise from left, Marianne Joachim, Siegbert Rotholz. Hella Hirsch, Hanni Meyer. Heinz Birnbaum and Lothar Salinger

Of the three who escaped death sentences, all of whom were women, Lotte Rotholz received a sentence of eight years' imprisonment but did not survive the war, having been sent to Auschwitz extermination camp. Edith Fraenkel and Hella Hirsch received sentences of five and three years respectively, but they too were killed at Auschwitz in 1944. The final trial of Baum group members took place in June 1943. By then the battle of Stalingrad had taken place, and with the Third Reich fighting for its very existence the regime, and its Nazified system of justice, decided it no longer needed to show a merciful face. All of the defendants were found guilty and condemned to death, with sentences carried out on September 7, 1943; Martin Kochmann was among those executed. Of the 31 members of the group (not counting Herbert Baum) who died during the war, 22 were executed by decapitation, while nine died in death camps.

Only five members of the Baum group, Ellen Compart, Alfred Eisenstadter, Charlotte and Richard Holzer, and Rita Resnik-Meyer (Zocher), survived the war. Their oral testimony, as well as the Nazi court documentation, provides a picture of extraordinary courage in the midst of terror and demoralization. There were other, smaller, and less effective Jewish resistance groups in Nazi Germany, who also shared the daily dangers of carrying out conspiratorial work. Because most of these groups pledged allegiance to various forms of Marxian socialism, which was already a harshly punishable offense for the German "Aryan" population, the risks they took were made all the greater. It has been estimated that about 2, 000 Jewish men and women were either members of exclusively Jewish resistance groups or worked with non-Jews in various clandestine political activities in Nazi Germany during the years 1933 through 1945. This number—-given that the German-Jewish community in these years had a disproportionately high number of older people and was led by an elite that hoped to adapt itself to the Nazi dictatorship through compromise and emigration—-strongly suggests that a younger generation had appeared on the scene that would live, and die, not passively but resiliently in the face of adversity, courageously defying and resisting oppression,

Monuments were erected by the East German government in Berlin’s Weissensee Jewish Cemetery and the Lustgarten, where the 1942 arson took place and the street leading to the Cemetery has been renamed Herbert Baum Strasse.

 A memorial monument in the Jewish cemetery in Berlin's Weissensee neighborhood to members of the Herbert Baum Group,