WITH GOEBBELS DEMANDING constant updates on the investigation into the firebombing of his Soviet Paradise exhibition in the heart of Berlin, a huge number of officers were now questioning Jews, “trouble-makers,” and factory workers.
Many had heard the reckless Joachim Franke boast about his role in the resistance against Hitler, and in inquiries, his name came up more than once. Four days after the attack, agents went to the AEG factory in Oberschöneweide on the outskirts of the city and arrested the thirty-seven-year-old in the machine shop where he worked as an engineer.
Taken to Gestapo headquarters, Franke took a cigarette from his interrogator and—perhaps hoping for leniency or with a sense of bragging bravado—he began to name those who had helped him.
As officers listened, they sent a team to Siemens, where Herbert Baum, Marianne Cohn, Gerhard Meyer, and Heinz Rotholz were arrested.
In another part of the building Heinz Joachim heard about the arrests and waited anxiously for the Gestapo to come for him, but they did not.
Instead, they went to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and arrested Werner Steinbrink in the very laboratory where he had mixed the chemicals for the incendiary devices.
The Gestapo units then spent the next twenty-four hours sweeping up Franke’s friends: Karl Kunger, the typesetter George Vötter and his wife Charlotte, Hilde Jadamowitz and Hans Mannaberg, and Franke’s wife, Erika. Back at AEG again, they brought in Franke’s workmates Walter Bernecker and Artur Illgen, who had painted anti-Hitler slogans on walls around Berlin. Irene Walther and the translator Suzanne Wesse were arrested at their homes.1
On May 23, staff at the Jewish kindergarten on Jerusalemer Strasse opened the door to the Gestapo. They had come to take Sala Rosenbaum away. The school’s director, Debra Bahnmüller, a Jew married to an Aryan, telephoned Martin Kochmann and told him not to go home. Aware that the line might be tapped, she told him that his wife was ill and he should go to a house in Auguststrasse. Rushing to the address, he found Frau Bahnmüller and his friend Jacob Berger waiting for him. Berger agreed to go to Kochmann’s flat to get him some money and clothes. He also took away a box of illegal books. The Gestapo did not appear to be watching.
Kochmann went to warn Charlotte Paech—an old friend of the Baums’ who worked as a nurse and was a committed antifascist—and her partner, Richard Holzer, on Zechliner Strasse. Warnings were then passed to Heinz Birnbaum and Felix Heymann. At midnight on May 24, two days after the first arrests, the five of them and Heinz Joachim met at Alexanderplatz. All had been involved in antifascist activities for as long as they could remember, and the area around the huge railway station was where many of them had met to discuss politics. Then, it had been almost like a game; now, they were the hunted.
Huddled in the shadows, whispering and smoking heavily, they tried to work out their next move. What evidence did the Gestapo have against the Baums, Kochmann’s wife, Sala, Birnbaum’s girlfriend, Irene, and the others? What could they do to help their friends?
Birnbaum mentioned the cache of materials in the basement of Baum’s building on Stralauer Strasse. There were all the items they had used for the leaflets and pamphlets—the duplicating machine, paper, and ink. Paint, too. Then there were some of the carpets they had taken in the fake Gestapo raid, and a pistol that Alfred Eisenstädter had left when he escaped Germany. There was enough there to hang Baum and Cohn, and maybe the others, and perhaps lead the Gestapo to them as well.
Late the next night Kochmann, Heymann, and Birnbaum walked quickly to Baum’s house and crept into the cellar. There they packed everything into sacks and dragged them three hundred yards to the Waisenbrücke, which crossed the Spree at Rolandufer. Waiting near the blacked-out wrought iron lampposts on the nineteenth-century bridge were Richard Holzer, Heinz Joachim, and Hella Hirsch.
Walking down the steps to the riverbank in the shadow of the bridge, they dropped the pistol, duplicating machine, paper, and flyers into the water. Some money was split, and Holzer took some cartons of cigarettes. Heymann, Kochmann, and Birnbaum each took a suitcase with some of the carpets from the theft. They were valuable and might still be sold to get funds to support them on the run. Heymann took his suitcase to a friend’s house and asked him to store it for him, while Kochmann checked his into a luggage storage area at the Gesundbrunnen train station in Wedding.
Kochmann then traveled to see a friend of the French-speaking Suzanne Wesse among the foreign workers at a factory in Spandau and bought a Belgian identity card in the name of Alfons Buys. He spent the night at Charlotte Paech’s flat.
The next morning he borrowed Richard Holzer’s bicycle and rode to the nearest train station. Storing the bike on the train, he traveled to Potsdam. From there he cycled sixty miles to Brandenburg and took another train bound for Hanover. He was almost halfway there when he was challenged by a railway policeman and could not produce a work-leave pass. Arrested and sent to Magdeburg, he was told he would be sent back to Berlin.
The police had him, but they still believed he was a Belgian worker named Buys.
KOCHMANN’S WIFE, SALA Rosenbaum, was in a cell in the Polizeipräsidium Berlin on Alexanderstrasse, an imposing four-story building alongside the railway station. A prisoner of the Gestapo, she had been given no food since her arrest and was not allowed to sleep. Aware that she was worried about her husband, two agents stood outside and discussed him in loud voices.
“Thank God the Jew Kochmann is dead,” one said.
“Good riddance,” said another.2
Exhausted, Rosenbaum went into deep despair. With her long history in Jewish and left-wing youth groups, she knew as many names as Baum. She had, in many ways, been a coleader of his group. Determined not to give away her friends, she decided on drastic action.
The next time the door opened she was ready. She raced out of the darkness of her cell, shoved past the guard, and threw herself over the banister and down a stairwell.
AFTER DUMPING THE gun in the river at the Waisenbrücke, Heinz Birnbaum had gone to Harry Cühn’s house on Lietzenburger Strasse, close to the scene of the fake Gestapo robbery.
Knowing that, whatever his friends said in their interrogation, the alarm would be raised because he had failed to turn up at work, he took a chance to contact Ellen Lewinsky, the woman who had helped him smuggle the detonator out of the factory they worked in.
He was waiting for her in the darkened staircase of her apartment building when she came home. She said the Gestapo had been to the factory looking for him, and so, although there had been no news in the press about the attack, she had assumed it had gone ahead. She had also assumed he had escaped to France as planned. He said he still planned to but needed her help.
“I still have papers in the apartment—on the bookcase,” he said quickly. “They have to be taken out. Will you do it?”
Once again the nineteen-year-old agreed to help her friend. He made her memorize an address to which she should go afterwards.
“With a little luck we’ll see each other again.” He smiled, and ran down the stairs.
Lewinsky was taking a terrible risk. Birnbaum was high on the Gestapo’s wanted list. There was every chance his home could be watched.
She knocked at his house and, when the landlady answered, told her she needed to take away some of Heinz’s possessions. She knew straightaway the police were not there as the landlady said, “Is he in trouble?”
“I think so,” Lewinsky said.
“Quick, come in.”
Lewinsky grabbed the items and stuffed them into a shopping bag. Removing her yellow star, she took the U-Bahn to the address Birnbaum had given her and knocked on the door. It was opened by a man she did not know.
“I was told to give you this,” she said.
“I know. Thank you very much.”3
The door closed quickly on her, and she hurried away. She never saw her friend Heinz Birnbaum again.
CHARLOTTE PAECH HAD been destined to go into nursing. As a child, she had suffered from rickets and tuberculosis but had not received the greatest of care. She had vowed that she would study medicine and be sure she did better for others. By seventeen she had left home, living in nursing quarters and mixing with Herbert Baum, Marianne Cohn, and Sala Rosenbaum.
But she had never met Joachim Franke and had avoided any association with the arson attack, so when the roundups came, she was able to continue her job at the Jewish hospital on Exerzier Strasse unmolested. She was about to finish a shift there when the Gestapo appeared with a prisoner on a stretcher. Paech recognized the unconscious figure immediately: It was Sala Rosenbaum.
Although the Gestapo gave the nurses no explanation of what had happened, Rosenbaum’s suicide attempt at the police station had been thwarted by some netting stretched across the stairwell. It had partially broken her fall, but she had still suffered terrible injuries, including a broken spine and fractured skull. As the Gestapo had no knowledge of a connection between the two women, Paech was able to tend to Rosenbaum when she regained consciousness. She was able to whisper to Paech that the group had been betrayed by Joachim Franke. A rumor had spread that Franke had been an informer for the Gestapo—although this has never been proven. “Everyone’s been arrested,” Rosenbaum whispered, in agony on every word she spoke. “I don’t know what’s happened to Martin.”
With the Gestapo on guard on the ward, there was nothing Paech could do for her friend but keep her as comfortable as possible. With her injuries there would be no chance of escape.
SALA ROSENBAUM’S HUSBAND, Martin Kochmann, had been brought back to Alexanderplatz and was now in the same police station where she had tried to take her own life.
Held in a large locked hall packed with foreign prisoners, Kochmann sat quietly, shrugging his shoulders when people spoke, wondering how he could persuade the police that he was the Belgian worker he claimed to be. He looked at the grimy, tired group around him and wondered what their crimes had been. Just being foreign, he supposed. Then he thought about Sala and his friends. They had been in Gestapo hands for days now. It was too horrible to imagine what might be happening to them. Richard Holzer’s words came back to him, his fears about the Nazi reaction to the arson attack. Reprisals, he’d talked about. It was too horrible to think about, and he was too tired.
He folded his jacket for a pillow and tried to sleep on the hard wooden bench.
THE GESTAPO REPORTED the arrests to Goebbels, who, six days after the arson attack, referred in his diary to this “club of saboteurs and assassins”—a mix of “Jews, half-Jews and Aryans.”4 He added later: “Now I’ll accomplish my war against the Jews of Berlin. I’ve ordered the preparation of a list of Jewish hostages . . . Ten Jews in a detention camp or under the ground are better than one of them who is free.”
Then, on May 27, news reached Berlin that Reinhard Heydrich had been gravely injured in the attack by Czechs in Prague. The Nazi hierarchy immediately linked this audacious attack on one of the most senior figures in the Reich with the arson in the center of Berlin. The remaining Jews in Berlin represented “an invitation to assassinations,” Goebbels wrote. “I don’t want to be shot in the belly by some 22-year-old Ostjude like one of those types who are among the perpetrators of the attack against the anti-Soviet exhibition.”5
Revenge would be swift. Five hundred Jewish men were rounded up, and half were sent to either the SS barracks at Lichterfelde or Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where they were immediately shot. Another 250 were imprisoned in the same camp or sent to Auschwitz. None are known to have returned. The families of 154 of the men were shipped to Theresienstadt, a ghetto in Czechoslovakia that for many was only a disease-ridden stop on the way to Auschwitz.
On May 28, the director of the Jewish hospital called all of his staff together and told them gravely that five hundred of their community had been arrested in response to the arson attack.
Charlotte Paech left the meeting and went back to tend to her friend Sala Rosenbaum. She could not bring herself to tell her of the wrath being brought down on Berlin’s Jews.
THE MASS EXECUTIONS and deportations had not included any of those involved in the attack, some of whom remained on the run.
Twenty-one-year-old Heinz Birnbaum’s days of freedom were coming to an end, though. While hiding at the home of Harry Cühn, he received a message to say that Werner Steinbrink wanted to meet him at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. Unknown to Birnbaum, Steinbrink had been in custody for well over a week. The message had been sent by a Gestapo informer. When Birnbaum went to the grand building in Dahlem, the Gestapo was waiting.
Others among the group were staying free by using the false identity cards the group had bought and stored, and by sheltering in a small network of illegally rented flats that Baum had kept as safe houses.
Heinz Joachim and Marianne Prager, who had now been married nine months, were hiding in a summer cottage in Petershagen that had been rented with false papers by Gerhard Meyer’s wife, Hanni. Hanni had been inconsolable since Gerhard’s arrest but had been talked out of going underground by her family, who said going on the run would look like an admission of guilt. Consequently, when the Gestapo came for Hanni Meyer on June 3, she had nowhere to hide.
A search of Meyer’s home by the Gestapo led to discovery of the Petershagen cottage. On June 9, Heinz and Marianne—who still dreamed one day of seeing the little sister she had said good-bye to on the Kindertransport—were arrested.
FELIX HEYMANN AND his girlfriend, Hella Hirsch, seemed to have beaten the odds. Posing as two French workers, they were staying in a Baum group flat in Fredersdorf. Hirsch’s teenage sister, Alice, who had been trying to make some money as a cleaner, was in another of the group’s rooms in Glienicke but would later move in with them.
For days Heymann and Hirsch barely dared to leave their flat, but they had no money and little food. Heymann sneaked out and asked friends for work. A Hungarian friend helped him a little, and one evening in their hiding place, Heymann and Hirsch decided to get married. The wedding was held in secret with barely a witness. Hella, who was twenty years old, told a friend that they wanted to do it in case their lives were cut short.
During the second week in June the newly married couple began to wonder if the arrests were over. Hungry and isolated, they decided to return to their jobs at the IG Farben factory, where they were forced laborers. They were greeted with a wedding gift from their coworkers and settled back into their shifts. But the special Gestapo team tasked with tracking down the saboteurs was still on the case, and on July 8 Heymann wandered into the building where he lived and was warned by the landlady that the police were looking for him. Unable to warn Hella or her sister, Alice, he went to see an old non-Jewish friend named Wolfgang Knabe, who worked on the railways at Wedding. The friend agreed to put him up for a few days.
At the factory, two Gestapo men handcuffed Hella Hirsch and took her to Alt Moabit, a nineteenth-century prison that the Nazis used as a detention center for political prisoners. Hella’s sister was brought in the same day, as was Harry Cühn’s fiancée, Edith Fraenkel.
A week later Lothar Salinger, Helmut Neumann, and Siegbert and Lotte Rotholz were arrested. The Rotholzes were suffering from scarlet fever and had to be dragged from their beds. Hildegard Loewy was arrested at home in front of her mother. As the Gestapo burst into her home, she kissed a photograph of her boyfriend, who was living nearby, and hid it between the pages of a book.
THE GESTAPO CELLS were now full, and the prosecutor at the Sondergericht—National Socialist Special Court—prepared his case for trial. The question of guilt for the Baum group would be a foregone conclusion, but how many would face the death penalty?
Herbert Baum had already suffered the wrath of Himmler’s secret police. Identified very quickly as the ringleader, Baum could expect little mercy from the Gestapo, and he received none. He was seen only once after his arrest, when officers took him to the Siemens factory where he had worked. He had already been beaten, and his face was a bloody pulp.6 The macabre parade around the site was staged in the hope that other associates would give themselves away, perhaps by trying to bolt. Nobody did. The Gestapo turned on Baum and asked him to identify his coconspirators. He said nothing.7
The Gestapo kept no record of its interrogation of Herbert Baum, but it appears to have reserved its most severe methods for him. Gestapo torture was less common on German prisoners than on those in the occupied territories, but Baum—the man who had humiliated the Nazi elite—was both a Communist and a Jew. Special permission was generally required for “intensified interrogation” but not, according to rules laid down by Heydrich in 1941, when applied to “Communist or Marxist functionaries, Jehovah’s Witnesses and saboteurs.”8 Anything up to twenty-five strokes with a bamboo cane was permissible on any prisoner, but Baum could expect far worse: being plunged into a cold bath until he could barely breathe; having electrical wires attached to his hands and genitals; suffering a device based on a garlic press applied to his testicles; being hung from the ceiling by his hands.9 On June 11, 1942, after three weeks in custody, Baum died. Most likely the torture went too far, although as in all such cases the Gestapo recorded his death as a suicide. The day after his death, Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller changed the rules on intensified interrogation “for simplicity’s sake” so it could be used in cases where a prisoner had “important facts concerning hostility to the state and nation” but was unwilling to reveal them.10
Herbert Baum, who had led one of the most significant groups of resisters in Germany, a group that united women and men, Jews and non-Jews, died in the darkness of a Gestapo cell. He was thirty. His friends now faced the charade that presented itself as Nazi justice.
THE FIRST TRIAL of the Baum group took place at the Sondergericht V in Berlin on July 16 and included the core members who had been arrested early on. All were accused of high treason. Sala Rosenbaum—unable to walk after breaking her back in her suicide attempt—had to be carried into court on a stretcher.
She was sentenced to death.
As were Baum’s wife, Marianne Cohn; Sala’s best friend, Suzanne Wesse, whose language skills had helped the group make contacts with foreign workers; Hilde Jadamowitz; Heinz Joachim; Hans Mannaberg; Gerhard Meyer, who had married his fiancée, Hanni, only seven months earlier; Werner Steinbrink; and Irene Walther.
Joachim Franke, who many of his co-accused considered their betrayer, was also in the dock and was also sentenced to death. If there had been any agreement with the Gestapo, it had not saved him.
SALA ROSENBAUM’S HUSBAND, Martin Kochmann, was in custody, but the Germans still believed he was a Belgian worker. He spent six weeks in the detention hall at Alexanderplatz before he was given a hearing in front of a judge.
Presenting his papers as “Alfons Buys,” Kochmann said he was the son of a German woman who had become homesick and wanted to return to Belgium. He said he was a good worker and not a troublemaker. Inquiries were made at the factory in Spandau at which Buys supposedly worked, and a foreman was brought to the court by a police officer. The man, who was Dutch, was asked by the court if he recognized Buys. Kochmann’s heart sank: He knew his charade must be over. But the Dutchman nodded and said, “Yes, this is Buys.” The judge thanked the man and turned Buys over into the Dutchman’s supervision to return to the forced-labor factory. The pair got as far as the S-Bahn station without a word and then Kochmann said: “It would be a shame for you to waste your money on a fare for me.”11
The Dutchman smiled, waved good-bye, and hopped on the train back to Spandau.
Wondering who else might be still at large, Kochmann headed straight back to the flat owned by the nurse Charlotte Paech on Soldiner Strasse. He found that her partner, Richard Holzer, had used his Hungarian passport to escape to Hungary and that she was hoping to follow him. However, for the moment, Paech was going through her own agonies, not related to her Baum group work but to an incident that had happened earlier that year. A Jewish woman had needed an abortion as her Aryan husband had threated to divorce her. Separation would have put her and her other children in danger of arrest. Paech had allowed her kitchen to be used for the procedure. It had gone ahead successfully, but the doctor had been denounced. He, the woman, and her children were sent to a concentration camp. Paech was arrested and received a one-month prison sentence that had been deferred due to her hospital work. Now she was waiting for the court to contact her to say the sentence had to be served.
Paech’s ex-husband, Gustav, a former trade unionist, agreed to help his former wife. The couple had separated after his descent into alcoholism following a period in Gestapo detention for leading a railway strike. He still loved her; she was fond of him. Gustav agreed to look after her flat and their daughter, Eva—who, now aged nine, had been born a few months after Hitler came to power—and to keep stalling the court and prison authorities over her sentence.
Paech was worried that her ex-husband might get into trouble, but she was desperate and agreed to his plan. She and Kochmann went into hiding, first in the center of Berlin and then in the farming town of Kummersdorf, about twenty miles south of the city. On August 18, eager to see her daughter, she returned to Berlin and called with a friend. There was terrible news: The prison authorities had lost patience with Gustav, and the Gestapo had arrested him. No one knew where little Eva was, and, in hiding, Paech had no way of finding out.
Out of her mind with worry, she wandered down the street near her flat, too afraid to knock on the door to speak to a neighbor.
As she walked, she saw Jewish friends gathering around a poster edged with a thick red line. When everyone had moved on, taking care not to be seen, she took a look and felt her legs buckle.
It was the announcement that ten people—those tried on July 16—had been executed at Plötzensee. She turned away, stunned, and staggered down the street.
PLÖTZENSEE PRISON, WHERE so many of the Third Reich’s enemies of state met their end, stood on a large expanse of land covering the size of about thirty soccer fields, where fashionable Charlottenburg met the working-class area of Wedding.
Dating from the nineteenth century, the prison had become—since 1933—a facility for pretrial confinement for persons arraigned on political charges. Most were due to come before the Nazi regime’s Special Courts or the People’s Court, but it was also a place of execution. The war years had seen an increase in the numbers of political suspects awaiting execution and foreign forced laborers who had fallen foul of the regime. From 1890 to 1932, there were thirty-six people executed at Plötzensee; between 1933 and 1945, there were 2,891.12 About half of those executed were Germans, most of whom had been sentenced to death for acts of resistance against the state.
From the air, the main building of the prison, known as House III, resembled a large cross. It was here that condemned prisoners were brought immediately before their sentence was to be carried out. The special cells on the ground floor where the condemned would be shackled had become known as the “house of the dead.” Their final steps would then take them outside through a small courtyard and to the execution shed, where, for women, the Fallbeil, or guillotine—deemed to be a more humane form of execution—was waiting. The redbrick building they would pass included a chapel, an infirmary, and dormitories for prison staff.
The first ten to die from the Baum group had faced the guillotine. On August 18 they came through House III one by one. In a corridor they were allowed a final cigarette together. One of them offered one to Joachim Franke, who, eyes filled with tears, said, “You do this for me, now?”13
In the execution shed waited Ernst Reindel, a stocky man in his early forties who wore dark trousers, a top hat, and tails. One of Nazi Germany’s three state executioners, Reindel had been proficient in carrying out the state’s will with an axe until the numbers of deaths had become such that the guillotine was preferable.
Reindel dispatched the ten condemned in thirty-seven minutes, between 5:00 and 5:37 a.m. Prison officials noted that he and his three helpers had shown remarkable efficiency, especially when they took into account the fact that Sala Rosenbaum had been unable to walk and had to be wheeled into the chamber. Paralyzed from the neck down, Rosenbaum had been unable to position herself under the blade, and so the men had had to lift her into place.
The executioners at Plötzensee received a 60-Reichsmark bonus for each execution. The families of the dead were invoiced for expenses. The public prosecutors charged 1.50 Reichsmarks for each day in custody in the prison, 300 Reichsmarks for the execution, and 12 pfennigs to cover the cost of posting the invoice.
KEY MEMBERS OF Baum’s group remained on the run. Felix Heymann was hopping between different friends’ homes in Berlin and in the countryside nearby. He spent two weeks of July in a hayloft, and August and September sleeping on friends’ floors. Every person who gave him shelter, and there were at least half a dozen, was risking their life.
Charlotte Paech had returned to the countryside around Kummersdorf after the shock of finding that her friends had been executed, her ex-husband arrested, and her young daughter missing. Sitting in a field one August afternoon, she saw a German in Luftwaffe uniform approach her across a field. Knowing there was a base nearby, she hoped the man was just being social and that appeared to be the case.14 He asked to sit with her, shared some food, and chatted about trivial things. Before he left, he asked if he could see her again, but she said she was returning to Berlin the following day.
Paech traveled to Berlin to look after her friend Rita Meyer, who had a fever. Rita’s husband, Herbert, was also ill, and they were also now harboring Martin Kochmann.
One day there was a heavy banging on the door and everyone thought their time had come. Rita answered while the others hid, daring not to breathe. After a few moments she closed the door and came back into the room. The tension was broken by dark humor: The Gestapo had been looking for the Jews who lived next door, and had seemed quite unaware that they were calling at a house harboring two wanted fugitives.
But a Gestapo game was afoot, designed to use the last of those on the run to incriminate others. Paech’s ex-husband, Gustav, had been beaten and tortured, and had revealed the names of friends, incriminating himself and others. He had since been sent to Sachsenhausen.
On October 7, the Gestapo decided they had given the others enough rope. They banged on the door of the Meyers’ flat again—and this time it was for real. Trapped, Charlotte Paech asked to be allowed to use the bathroom.
As she was about to shut the door, a Gestapo man grabbed her purse from her hand and shook it open: A dose of poison from the hospital fell out. He turned on Paech, beating her to the floor before a colleague dragged her out and threw her into a van alongside the Meyers.
Kochmann had been out when they called but returned later, unaware of the danger. He knocked and was let in by the Gestapo. He had been on the run for more than three months, but now his freedom was ended.
LESS THAN A week after the arrests at the Meyers’ flat, the Gestapo finally caught up with Felix Heymann, who had been skipping from friend to friend. Like Paech he tried to kill himself on arrest and almost succeeded—cutting his throat with a razor blade. He was taken to the Jewish hospital, and his life was saved by nursing staff under Gestapo supervision.
On the floor occupied by the Gestapo at the Alexanderplatz Polizeipräsidium, Charlotte Paech was put in an office to await interrogation. She tensed as she heard heavy boots in the corridor, and the door swung open. In came the “Luftwaffe” man she had met in the field. He was Gestapo, and they had been following her the whole time, hoping she would give away Richard Holzer—now in Hungary—or others. The man who had flirted with her turned out to be a brutal and sadistic Nazi. In an interrogation that lasted through the night, he broke her jaw. He told her that they already knew everything so she might as well speak. She refused. She was given no bread or water, and allowed no sleep. The torture was repeated the following night, and again, and again. In the end, instead of making continual denials, she fell completely silent.
After three weeks they stopped coming to her cell block to take her away for questioning.
THE SECOND TRIAL of the Baum group took place in December 1942. Harry Cühn, the black marketeer whose fiancée, Edith Fraenkel, was among the accused, had arranged a worthy defense attorney for them—something not normally seen in a Nazi courtroom.
Heinz Birnbaum and Heinz Rotholz had both been tortured in the weeks before the trial but had given nothing away.
When he appeared before the court, Birnbaum had just turned twenty-two, and in many ways he was still a child at heart. He had never learned to cook for himself, preferred chocolate to any other kind of food, and called everyone either “girl” or “buddy” from behind his boyish grin.15 But he had stayed in Berlin when his mother had left because even as a young teenager he had been committed to fighting Hitler, and he showed maturity and commitment when he faced the judge in the Special Court. “We are here not as political fighters,” he said. “We have been condemned as Jews.”16
The defense attorney, a First World War veteran named Masius, managed to successfully argue that three of the accused should receive prison terms: Lotte Rotholz, eight years; Edith Fraenkel, five years; Alice Hirsch, aged just nineteen, three years. He also launched an appeal when the others—for the “protection of the people and Reich”—were condemned to death.
The condemned were Birnbaum, whose lover, Irene Walther, had already been executed; Hella Hirsch, Alice’s older sister, who had married Felix Heymann while on the run; Marianne Prager, whose sister had escaped on the Kindertransport; Hildegard Loewy, who despite only having one arm had tried to escape out of a window of the jail;17 Hanni Meyer, whose husband, Gerhard, had already been executed; Helmuth Neumann, a friend of Joachim Franke’s; Heinz Rotholz; Lotte’s husband, Siegbert Rotholz; and Lothar Salinger.
The court had heard statements of remarkable courage from them all. Heinz Rotholz stated: “I knew about the preparations of the sabotage action against the ‘Soviet Paradise.’ Had the comrades not excluded me from the act because of my Jewish appearance, I would have gone to the exhibit and taken part.”
Lotte Rotholz told the Gestapo: “One must utilize every opportunity to fight against the present regime. One thing was clear to me: as a Jew I must not lag behind . . . My ties were and remain with Baum.”18
Music-loving Marianne Prager wrote in her last letter to her mother and father: “Think of the songs we all sang together—all is fine! Live well, my beloved parents!”19
All spent the winter in Plötzensee prison. Ellen Lewinsky, the friend of Birnbaum who had smuggled a detonator out of the factory for him, received a note from him saying he was freezing in his cell. She knitted a sweater and gloves, and they were smuggled in to him.
On March 4, 1943, Wilhelm Röttger readied himself for a long day at work with a series of cigarettes. Another of the main three Nazi executioners, the chain-smoker was two days short of his forty-ninth birthday. Working bare-chested, he prepared the guillotine with efficiency, allowed the prison pastor to say his last prayer with the condemned, and then carried out his work.
When the blade had fallen, he turned to the representative of the court who was present and stated formally: “Herr Staatsanwalt, das Urteil ist Vollstreckt.” “Mr. Prosecutor, the verdict is enforced.”20
He said it ten times that day as Birnbaum and the others from the second trial were executed.
The bodies of Hella Hirsch and Marianne Prager were among those supplied to the University of Berlin’s Institute of Anatomy, where Dr. Hermann Stieve had become one of the most influential specialists in his field despite the fact that many of the bodies with which he was supplied during the Nazi era were headless.