In the heart of Hitler’s Berlin, a small group of young Jewish men and women chose to fight back. On this day in 1943, nine of them were beheaded by guillotine at Plötzensee Prison. They were mostly in their early twenties. Their crime was resistance.
The Baum Group was founded in 1933, almost immediately after the Nazis seized power, by Herbert Baum, a Jewish electrician and committed socialist, and his wife Marianne.
What began as clandestine meetings in friends’ apartments, discussing politics and distributing anti-fascist leaflets, grew into one of the most remarkable acts of organised Jewish resistance inside the Third Reich.
By 1942, with deportations accelerating and death camps operating in the east, the group resolved to strike a visible blow.
On 18 May 1942, they set fire to Das Sowjetparadies, a vast Goebbels-sponsored propaganda exhibition in Berlin’s Lustgarten, designed to mock the Soviet Union and associate Jews with Bolshevism. The fire caused limited physical damage, but the symbolic impact was enormous.
Jewish resisters, in the very capital of the Nazi state, had attacked the regime openly.
The reprisals were savage. Herbert Baum was arrested, tortured in Moabit Prison and murdered by his captors on 11 June 1942, his death falsely recorded as suicide.
Marianne Baum and eight others were executed on 18 August 1942.
Then, on 4 March 1943, a second group, including Heinz Birnbaum, Hella Hirsch, Marianne Joachim, Heinz Rotholz, Siegbert Rotholz, Lothar Salinger and others, were put to death.
A final group followed in September 1943. In total, 22 members were executed.
Others perished in Auschwitz.
The Nazis also murdered 500 Berlin Jews in collective punishment for the arson attack.
The Baum Group was not a monolithic organisation. Its members came from communist, socialist, and Zionist backgrounds, united less by ideology than by urgency and courage.
Non-Jewish German comrades stood and died alongside them.
Sala Kochmann fractured her own spine attempting suicide under torture rather than betray her friends.
Only five members survived the war.
We remember them.
