Authors: Roger Moorhouse
Jewish dead ‘were decently buried in wooden coffins, blacked with
tar-paint’.44 Though his sermons and eulogies were always short, simple
and eschewed any reference to the wider Jewish plight, Riesenburger’s
words could still be very moving. As one eyewitness recalled: ‘He
wouldn’t stop talking until the last person had his handkerchief out.
He could really squeeze the tear ducts.’45
The survival of Weissensee is all the more remarkable when one
considers what befell the other Jewish cemeteries in the German capital.
The one on Schönhauser Allee was desecrated in the spring of 1945.
Its prayer rooms and mortuary were destroyed, and its gravestones
were uprooted to be used to build barricades and anti-tank obstacles.
And, when a group of Wehrmacht deserters was discovered there by
the Gestapo, they were summarily hanged, to a man, from the boughs
of nearby trees.46 The cemetery on the Grosse Hamburger Strasse,
the persistent shadow
265
meanwhile, was bulldozed in 1943. When a slit trench was subsequently
dug across the site, the remaining gravestones were used to shore up
the trench walls, while the bones of the dead were casually tossed
aside. In April 1945, the site was used for sixteen mass graves, containing
nearly 2,500 civilian and military casualties from the battle for Berlin.47
In his post-war memoir, Riesenburger proudly claimed that ‘every
Jew who died, up to the hour of liberation in 1945, was buried precisely
according to the prescriptions of our Jewish religion’.48 As the ‘Last
Rabbi of Berlin’,49 he had ensured that, at Weissensee at least, some
semblance of dignity in death was maintained.
At the Invaliden cemetery, meanwhile, life – and death – continued
rather as they had before. After the highpoint of Reinhard Heydrich’s
burial in the summer of 1942, the number of state funerals held there
tailed off, but the prominent and worthy of the Third Reich still found
their final resting place beneath its trees, close to the Hohenzollern
canal.
Carl August von Gablenz was buried there in the late summer of
1942. A pioneer flier in the First World War, he had gone on to become
a co-founder of Lufthansa, a senior official in Göring’s Air Ministry,
and had been one of the first to fly from Berlin to Peking. He was
killed in a plane crash. Another addition was Lieutenant Hans Fuss,
a fighter ace from the Eastern Front, who had seventy-one victories
to his name and had received the Knight’s Cross only a few weeks
before his death.
Later additions included Wehrmacht General Hans-Valentin Hube,
who died when the plane bringing him back to the Reich from the
Eastern Front crashed near Salzburg in the spring of 1944. A veteran
of the French campaign, Stalingrad and the defence of Sicily, he was
Germany’s only one-armed senior officer, having been maimed at
Verdun in the First World War. Highly respected by his men, he was
known simply as
Der Mensch
– ‘The Man’.50
In the autumn of 1944, a new candidate for the Invaliden cemetery’s
hallowed turf foreshadowed a very tangible change in Germany’s
fortunes. Lieutenant General Rudolf Schmundt was a career soldier.
Having served with distinction in the First World War, he had progressed
into the elite 9th Infantry Regiment of the post-war Reichswehr and
had excelled in a succession of staff positions. A convinced National
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berlin at war
Socialist, Schmundt was appointed as Hitler’s Wehrmacht adjutant in
1938, a position which naturally secured him entry into the Führer’s
entourage.
It was in this capacity that Schmundt was to meet his fate. As a
participant in a situation conference on 20 July 1944, he was present
when Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg made his famous attempt on
Hitler’s life. Though Hitler survived the bomb blast virtually
unscathed, four of those present in the room were killed: the steno g-
rapher Heinrich Berger bore the brunt of the explosion and died at
the scene, while two other senior officers – General Günther Korten
and Colonel Heinz Brandt died of their wounds within days.
Schmundt, meanwhile, lost an eye and both legs. Though he initially
made a promising recovery and was well enough to be visited in
hospital by the Führer, he deteriorated in early October and finally
succumbed to blood poisoning and organ failure.
Schmundt was accorded a state funeral, held in the imposing sur -
roundings of the Tannenberg Memorial in East Prussia, with Göring
in attendance, on 6 October 1944. The following day, his coffin was
taken to Berlin’s Invaliden cemetery, where it was buried after a grave-
side eulogy from General Heinz Guderian. Alongside the generals,
the field marshals and the ministers of war, he would not have
appeared out of place, but his presence there spoke volumes about
the spirit of the age. Rudolf Schmundt was the first resident of the
Invalidenfriedhof to have been murdered by his fellow German offi-
cers in an attempted
coup d’état
.
13
Enemies of the State
The Lustgarten, or ‘Pleasure Gardens’, in the very heart of the German
capital, was well known to every Berliner. Located on one of the islands
in the River Spree, in the shadow of Berlin’s impressive Protestant cathe-
dral, it was an open area of parkland that had long been the location
for parades and public events. It had been there that a large crowd had
gathered to hear the Kaiser speak on the outbreak of war in 1914, and
where an even larger crowd had assembled to witness the declaration
of the German Republic four years later.
In the 1920s, the Lustgarten had hosted not only boxing matches,
Christmas markets and May Day festivities, but also communist,
socialist and Nazi rallies. It had also earned a reputation as a place of
protest. It had been there that tens of thousands had gathered for an
anti-war demonstration in 1929; and four years later, 200,000 Berliners
had assembled on the Lustgarten to protest about the appointment
of Adolf Hitler as German Chancellor.1
In May 1942, the tradition of protest returned. That summer, the
Lustgarten was the location of an important exhibition. Sarcastically
entitled ‘The Soviet Paradise’, it was intended to highlight all the ‘poverty,
misery, depravity and need’ of life in the Soviet Union. Inside a long,
single-storey building, which had been specially constructed on the
Lustgarten in the stark neo-classical style, various dioramas and exhibits
were intended to bring home to Berliners the full horror of life under
the Bolsheviks: the miserable hovel inhabited by a poor cobbler, for
instance, or the grim surroundings of a worker’s flat.
The displays were accompanied by a fifteen-minute film, which
juxtaposed the positive images of Soviet propaganda with some of the
gruesome discoveries supposedly made by invading German troops:
starving, neglected orphans, desecrated churches and massacred
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berlin at war
civilians. ‘Where once stood prospering villages’, the film began, ‘the
grey misery of the collective farm predominates today. This is where
the Soviet peasant lives as a slave.’2 For those who were still confused
as to why Nazi Germany had declared war on its erstwhile ally in June
1941, the propaganda offensive of the ‘Soviet Paradise’ was intended to
provide some conclusive answers.
Not everyone was convinced, however. One communist resistance
group distributed stickers across the capital, which parodied the
exhibition:
Permanent Exhibition
THE NAZI-PARADISE
War Hunger Lies Gestapo
How much longer?3
Others resorted to more extreme methods. One night in mid-May,
some ten days after the exhibition had opened, the police were called
to the site after it emerged that an arson attempt had been made.
Damage to the exhibition was minimal and it opened, as usual, the
following day, but the fact that it had been attacked at all was enough
for the matter to be taken seriously. As the Gestapo report noted:
At about 8 p.m. on May 18, 1942, as yet unidentified perpetrators
attempted to set fire to the exhibition. A wad of cotton soaked in
phosphorous and placed on a wooden post covered with cloth was set
aflame at the site of the first fire. An incendiary device with two bottles
of phosphorous carbon disulphide exploded in the farmhouse. . . . A
sabotage committee of the State Police office in Berlin has begun
necessary investigations without delay.4
Those investigations quickly bore fruit.5 Just four days after the
arson attempt, the perpetrators were rounded up in dawn raids at a
number of locations across the city. Joseph Goebbels recorded the
arrests in his diary entry of 24 May:
We have now discovered a club of saboteurs and assassins in Berlin.
Among them are also the groups who undertook the bombing of the
anti-Soviet exhibit. Significantly, among those arrested are five Jews, three
enemies of the state
269
half-Jews and four Aryans. An engineer at Siemens is even among them.
The bombs were manufactured partly at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.6
That ‘Siemens engineer’ was Herbert Baum, the leader of the group.
Born in 1912, Baum had grown up in Berlin and trained as an electri-
cian. Already active in left-wing circles prior to 1933, he began to
organise a Jewish, pro-communist youth group after the Nazi seizure
of power, hosting clandestine discussion evenings and cultural events
in the capital, or arranging outings and walking expeditions to the
countryside.
Soon, his activity grew more overtly political, including attempting
sabotage actions at Siemens and assisting those Jewish colleagues who
wanted to escape deportation by going underground. Among other
activities, he printed and distributed anti-Nazi flyers, especially after
the attack on the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. One of these
flyers was sent to Berlin’s doctors and surgeons, reminding them that
the military casualties acknowledged by the regime on the Eastern
Front were but a fraction of the true figure. Other campaigns targeted
German housewives or soldiers. One of the latter proclaimed: ‘point
your weapons at the grave-diggers of the German people! Death to
Hitler!’7
In the spring of 1942, however, Baum seems to have sensed an
opportunity to step up his activity. Given that the Nazi war against
the Soviet Union was now entering its second year, and increasingly
aware of murmurings of discontent on the home front, he decided
on decisive action. It was not an entirely popular move, as some within
the group were wary of provoking the Nazi regime unnecessarily,
but Baum had won his opponents round. By targeting the anti-
communist ‘Soviet Paradise’ exhibition, he wanted not only to strike
a symbolic blow against the Nazi propaganda campaign; he also
hoped that his action would provide the spark that would foment
revolution in the capital.8
In this wider ambition, Baum would fail, frustrated not only by the
rather puny results of his arson attempt, but also by the news blackout,
which kept his efforts from the attention of the Berlin public. His action
would not be without consequence, however. For one thing, given that
the majority of those arrested with Baum were both Jews and commun -
ists, the incident appeared to confirm the Nazi world view that
270
berlin at war
conflated those two enemies into one all-encompassing conspiracy.
Moreover, coming as it did only a few days before the assassination of
SS-
Obergruppenführer
Reinhard Heydrich in Prague, the Lustgarten
sabotage was seen in Berlin as a profoundly worrying precedent. As
Goebbels wrote in his diary, the remaining Jews in the German capital
represented ‘an invitation to assassinations’; and the Minister for
Propaganda, for one, did not want ‘to be shot in the belly by some
22-year-old
Ostjude
like one of those types who are among the perpe-
trators of the attack against the anti-Soviet exhibition’.9
Thus Nazi revenge was swift to materialise. Goebbels pressed Hitler
to speed up the deportation of the remaining Jews in Berlin, and five
hundred Jewish men were rounded up immediately. Half of them
were shot out of hand in Sachsenhausen, the remainder were sent to
the concentration camps.10 In addition, their families were deported
to an unknown fate ‘in the east’.
The fate of Baum and his fellow conspirators was similarly grim.
Arrested a few days after the arson attempt along with his wife Marianne,
Baum was subjected to a ferocious and prolonged ‘interrogation’, and
died three weeks later in the cells of the Gestapo headquarters.11 It is
not known whether he took his own life or succumbed to torture. His
fellow arsonists, meanwhile – including his wife – were tried for high
treason on 16 July. Found guilty, they were executed by guillotine in
Plötzensee prison on 18 August.