Remembering Anti-Nazi Jewish Resistance in the GDR: Communist Martyrs or Jewish Resisters?

In 1981’s city government built a memorial to the Herbert Baum Groups, an organization of young leftist Jews who had formed a resistance network during the Third Reich. Their leader, Herbert Baum, and three dozen others were executed by the Nazi state in 1942. One side of the memorial is inscribed: “Forever allied in friendship with the.”

           Many of the Baum Groups’ members, however, believed that their resistance was not in the service of the Soviet Union, but of the beleaguered Jewry of Germany and. The organization’s leader, Herbert Baum, was a long-time leader of the German Communists, but the membership was quite diverse, including Communists, Socialists, left-wing Zionists, and others. After the war, several surviving veterans of the Baum groups lived in, where the Communist Party (SED) memorialized them as “Communist resisters,” consistently refusing to acknowledge their Jewish origins.           

East Germany’s official narrative subordinated the suffering of the Jews under Hitler to that of the Communists. Simultaneously, SED mythology exaggerated Communist resistance while minimizing that of German Jews, going so far as to invent a false distinction between those victims who had combated fascism—the Communists—and those who presumably had not—the Jews.           

Veterans of the Baum groups possessed a complex memory of the anti-Nazi struggle. Surviving members were well aware that the memory of the Baum Groups was being manipulated by the SED, and some bravely sought to counter this official memory by organizing their own memorializations of the Baum Groups, emphasizing their Jewish identity. These efforts led some Baum veterans to be investigated and persecuted by the East German state.