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The Herbert Baum Groups: Networks of Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Resistance in the Third Reich

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The Herbert Baum Groups: Networks of Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Resistance in the Third Reich The Human Tradition in Modern Europe 139 The Herbert Baum Groups: Networks of Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Resistance in the Third Reich John Cox The Human Tradition in Modern Europe, 1750 to the Present, Cora Granata and Cheryl Koos, eds., Rowman and Littlefield, 2007, pp. 139-154 http://www.amazon.com/Tradition-Modern-Europe-Present- Around/dp/0742554112 With Germany’s defeat in World War I in 1918, revolution led to the collapse of the German Empire and the establishment of Germany’s first democracy, the Weimar Republic. The republic faced significant challenges, including economic hardship and popular resentment over the terms of the post– World War I settlement. The Treaty of Versailles had imposed on Germany large war payments to Britain and France and the moral guilt of the sole responsibility for the war. In the interwar period, the rising Nazi Party (National Socialist German Workers’ Party) under the leadership of Adolf Hitler profited from these conditions to become a mass party with increasing popular support. When Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany on 30 January 1933, he destroyed the weak parliamentary democracy of the Weimar Republic. The Nazis then began the process of consolidating their dictatorial control over the German government and society. With the policy of Gleichschaltung (roughly translated as “coordination”), the Nazi program attempted to take over most aspects of civil society, from schools and youth groups to sports clubs and churches. Hundreds of thousands of Germans became a part of Nazi-controlled organizations, such as the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls. Under the Nazi vision, all of German society was to be incorporated into the party’s ultranationalist, racist, militaristic, and authoritarian program. However, the Nazis’ control over German society was not absolute, as this chapter demonstrates. Here, John Cox examines networks of leftist, Jewish youth groups that organized around the leadership of a young man named Herbert Baum. Living in the midst of the Third Reich’s extreme anti- Semitism, anticommunism, and oppressive dictatorial rule, these young Cox “Baum Groups” 140 people risked their lives as both leftists and German Jews. They arranged underground readings and music gatherings, distributed anti-Nazi leaflets, and even staged an attack against a Nazi-organized anti-Soviet exhibit. Overall, the anti-Nazi underground’s efforts against the Third Reich within Germany were small, and its abilities to pose a significant challenge to the Third Reich’s political power were extremely limited. The tragic fate of most members of the Baum networks illustrates the immense challenges faced by any who tried to resist. Yet in countless everyday oppositional activities, these German Jewish young people represented individuals who attempted to maintain their integrity, political principles, and sense of self in the face of dictatorship. The inability of such groups to gain wider support among the German population also reminds us of the mass popularity, or at least tolerance, of the Nazis, an attitude that ultimately helped the Holocaust to occur. On 8 May 1942, Soviet Paradise, an exhibition staged by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels depicting the poverty and degradation of Russia under its supposed “Jewish-Bolshevik” regime, opened with great fanfare in the Lustgarten square in Berlin. One newspaper optimistically predicted that it would be “the most successful political exhibition yet. Several million people shall visit.”1 However, not everyone was quite as enthusiastic. At approximately eight o’clock on the evening of 18 May, several explosives ignited around the periphery of Soviet Paradise. Although fire trucks responded quickly, a portion of the installation burned that evening. The German press was predictably silent, but news of the attack spread by word of mouth, and the dictatorship suffered a rare embarrassment. Had Goebbels 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 perpetrated by young Jews—moreover, they were German Jews who belonged to leftist organizations. The Gestapo was too efficient and methodical to allow such an act to go unpunished. Within days, the police had rounded up, tortured, and sentenced to death most of the members of two underground groups led by Herbert Baum, who had organized the attack. While the spectacular assault on Soviet Paradise increased the outside world’s knowledge of the internal leftist opposition, the Baum groups had already earned a reputation within the German underground resistance. Herbert Baum had begun building his network of dissident groups and circles in the first days of the dictatorship, The Human Tradition in Modern Europe 141 and it would become the largest organization of German-Jewish resisters. The story of the Baum groups is also significant because it is only one example of a broader history of anti-Nazi activism among young Jews living under Hitler’s reign of terror. Herbert Baum was born in February 1912 in Prussia. His political activity commenced at an early age, which was not unusual at that time. Baum belonged to the Social Democratic youth movement, the Red Falcons, from 1925 to 1928. From 1928 on he was a member of the German-Jewish Youth Society (DJJG), where he met his future wife, Marianne Cohn. Around the time that the DJJG broke up, in 1931, Baum joined the Communist Party youth organization, the KJVD. In each of these groups he quickly assumed a leading role. Baum was a gifted organizer, melding personal charisma with political passion. An acquaintance of Baum’s from the 1920s recalled, “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” should possess. Another old friend from the Jewish youth movement attested to these qualities, adding, “We all tried to outdo ourselves when ‘Hebbi’ [Baum’s nickname] participated.”2 These traits were augmented by a “combative nature,” according to another former comrade, who explained that Baum declined to flee Germany in the late 1930s because “he saw himself as head of a group with special responsibilities and believed in the imminent defeat of fascism.”3 Baum’s principal allegiance was to the German Communist Party (KPD), the world’s largest such party outside the Soviet Union in the 1920s and early 1930s. Larger yet was the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). Along with smaller radical groups, the KPD and the SPD grew substantially during the turbulent years of Germany’s Weimar Republic (1919–1933), and together the two parties enjoyed the support of millions of workers and more than one-third of the electorate. But the left was not the only political force to gain sustenance from Germany’s deepening economic and political turmoil. Initially a minor grouping in the spectrum of nationalist and racist organizations, the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP, or Nazi Party) drew German nationalists, anti-Semites, and other right-wingers under its banner during the Weimar years. Founded as the German Workers Party in early 1918, the party adopted its full name in early 1920, a few months after a thirty-year-old demobilized army veteran from Austria, Adolf Hitler, found his way into its ranks. Cox “Baum Groups” 142 In the early 1920s the Nazis were based in Munich, the site of their ill- fated 1923 Beerhall Putsch, which led to the deaths of a few members and Hitler’s conviction and imprisonment. A sympathetic criminal-justice system ensured that Hitler served less than one year of his five-year sentence. The NSDAP languished in the political wilderness for several more years following Hitler’s release from prison, but gained greater support as well as converts at the end of the 1920s. The Nazi Party quadrupled its membership in the second half of the decade, from 25,000 to 100,000, although this was still not a large number on the landscape of German politics. The Nazis combined radical-sounding populism with ultranationalism and extreme anticommunism and anti-Semitism. Their paramilitary squads and penchant for street battles with leftists appealed to wayward youths, and they benefited from an upsurge in nationalist sentiment. While most of the Nazis’ vote, as well as membership, came from lower-middle-class Germans, by the early 1930s they received significant support from workers as well. The worldwide economic depression brought about the collapse of Weimar’s governing coalition. The centrist parties were pushed to the sidelines by the Far Right and Far Left, whose parties made significant electoral gains in the early 1930s, and in July 1932 the NSDAP gained the largest share in federal elections. These elections mirrored the severe polarization of German politics, which was now embodied in the spectacle of 100 uniformed KPD deputies and 196 brown-shirted Nazi deputies sitting in the parliament (Reichstag). By this point a growing number of Germany’s landowning and industrial elites had come to see the Nazis, whose hooliganism and overheated rhetoric they had earlier disdained, as their best defense against the far more frightening specter of revolution from the Left. In January 1933 President Paul von Hindenburg and other ruling conservatives appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor, believing they could thereby rein in the Nazis. They would be grossly mistaken, as Hitler and his movement consolidated their rule over the next year and a half. Baum had one foot firmly planted in the thriving subculture of the German-Jewish youth movements, and the other foot in the Communist milieu, when disaster struck in 1933. Hitler’s victory would violently shatter each of those social and political worlds. The German Left and labor movements were the regime’s first victims: By the end of Hitler’s first year in power tens of thousands of KPD members were under arrest, many of them doomed to that feature of Nazism that would come to define its rule throughout Europe—the concentration camp.
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