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.
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,
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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,
