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May 18: The Baum Group

lawrencebush
May 18, 2012
On this date in 1942, a mostly Jewish anti-Nazi group headed by Herbert and Marianne Baum set fire to “The Soviet Paradise,” an anti-Communist, anti-Semitic display established by Joseph Goebbels in Berlin. Within days, hundreds of Jewish Berliners were rounded up and executed by the Gestapo, including the Baums. Herbert and Marianne had met as kids in the Young Communist League in 1931. By 1938 they had organized a network of nearly 100 young Germans, most of them Jewish, to oppose the Nazis. Months before their deaths, the Baums were forced into slave labor in the electro-motors works of the Siemens corporation, and led a group of intimates into the Berlin underground to avoid deportation to concentration camps. 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.” For individual portraits of women of the Baum Group, click here. Monuments were erected by the East German government in Berlin’s Weissensee Jewish Cemetery and the Lustgarten, where the 1942 arson took place. “This was the time when Jewish youth movements were outlawed, though they still managed to get most of their members out of Germany. Under these conditions, the organization became a kind of ‘city of refuge’ for members of Jewish youth movements and organizations who for one reason or another had not left Germany.” —Avraham Atzili