Berthold Jacob

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Berthold Jacob Salomon (born December 12, 1898 in Berlin ; † February 26, 1944 there ) was a German journalist and pacifist . His pseudonyms were Marcel Rollin and Berthold Jay . As a Jew and staunch critic of illegal armament in the Weimar Republic he had in 1933 just after the seizure of power of the Nazis flee the country. He was abducted twice by the National Socialists in neutral countries and deported to Germany. For the first time, after public protests, Switzerland insisted on his deportation , the second time he was secretly deported from Lisbon to Berlin, where he died in 1944 as a result of several years' imprisonment in the Gestapo .

Life

Jacob, who came from a middle-class family, completed a commercial apprenticeship from 1914. In 1917 he volunteered for the front; the war experience made him a radical pacifist. Like the journalist and pacifist Carl von Ossietzky , Jacob worked for the Berliner Volks-Zeitung after the end of the First World War , for which he reported on military-political issues. In addition, he published in pacifist publications such as Das Andere Deutschland and the Warte für Menschenrechte . From 1923 to 1928 he wrote numerous articles for the weekly newspaper Die Weltbühne , including under the pseudonym An old soldier . He was also active in the Peace League of War Participants , in the German League for Human Rights and the German Peace Society .

Jacob's journalistic ambition was primarily to expose the efforts of the German Reichswehr to clandestinely rearmament and circumvent the Treaty of Versailles . In retrospect , the writer Walter Kiaulehn described how meticulous he was :

“He was a true Sherlock Holmes of journalism, constantly working on charts and maps, the perfecting of which revealed all the secrets of his enemies. With a compass he calculated the hiding places of the murderous conspiracy and marked the locations of the Black Reichswehr with flags on his maps . The rankings of the German army were his pillow reading, and the family advertisements from the garrison towns were his best sources of information. "

- Ursula Madrasch-Groschopp : The world stage. Portrait of a magazine

One of these researches led Jacob to discover the system of so-called time volunteers in an article in the Other Germany . These soldiers were used for short-term military exercises and did not appear in any statistics. Because of the article, Jacob and the editor of the Other Germany , Fritz Küster , were sentenced in March 1928 by the Reichsgericht in the " Ponton Trial " for treason to nine months of imprisonment each. According to lawyers, the Reichsgericht took legal positions with this judgment, which later also led to the conviction of Carl von Ossietzky in the “ Weltbühne trial ”.

After becoming a member of the SPD in 1928 , he joined the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany, which was founded by pacifist SPD members among others . As early as 1932 Jacob emigrated to Strasbourg in France and thus avoided a possible arrest by the National Socialists after they came to power in January 1933. From exile he published the Korrespondenz Independent Newspaper Service / Service de Presse Indépendant until 1939 , the focus of which was reporting on the Armament of Germany was. Along with numerous prominent authors and politicians, his name was on the first expatriation list of the German Reich on August 25, 1933. Together with Kurt Grossmann , Jacob initiated the Nobel Prize campaign for Carl von Ossietzky in 1934, which finally led to success in November 1936.

He also tried to uncover the National Socialists' military plans from abroad. In 1935, he published details of their armament plans in French newspapers. Jacob was a thorn in the side of the National Socialists. In 1935 she left the them hated Jacob using a Lockspitzels and active in the emigration of several agents of the Gestapo in Switzerland after Basel draw near the German border. From there, the agents kidnapped Jacob , who had been rendered defenseless by knockout drops, on March 9, 1935 to the neighboring German town of Weil am Rhein . From there Jacob was taken directly to a Gestapo prison in Berlin. What the Gestapo had not expected: Switzerland immediately protested violently and in public against the violation of its sovereign rights and demanded redress. At the same time the Lockspitzel - a German emigrant in Gestapo service named Hans Wesemann  - was arrested in Ascona . After interrogation, he revealed many details of the kidnapping. Since the Swiss police knew almost all the details - above all, they had investigated the involvement of senior Gestapo officers - Germany was threatened with a considerable loss of reputation. In order to limit the foreign policy damage, the German government returned Jacob to the Swiss authorities on September 17, 1935. The main reason for the release, however, was that Jacob had disclosed the secret of his “omniscience” about German armaments and other military matters during the months of imprisonment and under torture by the Gestapo. Jacob could make credible that he had no "secret relationships" and no "agent network". He had gained this knowledge legally by evaluating many newspapers, provincial papers and advertisements. Switzerland expelled Jacob to France, where, in addition to his journalistic work a. a. participated in the Provisional Committee for the Preparation of a German Popular Front . He had already collected so much material that he could write the book The New German Army and Its Leaders , listing in great detail the military district commands, army corps and the generals for the coming war. Wesemann was sentenced to three years in prison in Basel in May 1936.

After the war began in 1939, initially interned by the French in the Le Vernet camp in southern France, Jacob emigrated after the occupation of France by German troops in June 1940, first via Marseille to Spain, then to Portugal. Shortly before he was able to board the rescue ship that was supposed to have brought him to the USA in 1941 , he was kidnapped by agents of the Nazi security service and taken to Germany again. Rescue attempts were made more difficult because the Gestapo suspected him of being a " double agent " of other refugees after his release. In the following years he was imprisoned in the Gestapo prison on Berlin's Alexanderplatz, where his health deteriorated. Shortly before his death, he was admitted to the Berlin Jewish Hospital with pulmonary tuberculosis and typhus , where he died on February 26, 1944. His father, the antiquarian David Salomon , was murdered in Auschwitz on February 18, 1943 .

Works

  • White book about the Black Reichswehr (with Emil Julius Gumbel ). Published by the German League for Human Rights , Verlag der Neue Gesellschaft, Berlin 1925.
  • Germany's secret armaments? Edited on behalf of the German League for Human Rights by Emil Julius Gumbel u. a., Verlag der Neue Gesellschaft, Berlin 1925.
  • Traitors fall into the distance: victims, murderers, judges 1919–1929 (with Emil Julius Gumbel, Ernst Falck). Malik, Berlin 1929. Review by Kurt Tucholsky from 1930 on Textlog.de - historical texts and dictionaries.
  • The Hindenburg legend. La République publishing house, Strasbourg around 1934.
  • Who? From the arsenal of the Reichstag arsonists. Strasbourg 1934.
  • Memoirs of the Chief of Staff Röhm. Published anonymously, Strasbourg 1934.
  • The new German army and its leaders: With a ranking list of the German army and seniority list (as of mid-August 1936). Éditions du Carrefour, Paris 1936.
  • As editor: Why is the world silent? (with contributions by Carl von Ossietzky , Georg Bernhard , Wolf Franck, Jack Iwo, Alfred Kantorowicz , Rudolf Leonhard , Paul Westheim ). Éditions du Phénix, Paris 1936.
  • World citizen Ossietzky. An outline of his work (with a biography of Ossietzky, foreword by Wickham Steed). Éditions du Carrefour, Paris 1937.

literature

  • Frank Arnau : kidnapping. Kurt Desch, Munich 1968. (The kidnapping of Jacobs between p. 49 and p. 77.)
  • Jost Nikolaus Willi: The Jacob-Wesemann case (1935/1936) - A contribution to the history of Switzerland in the interwar period. Basel 1972, ISBN 978-3-261-00682-0 . (Dissertation University of Basel 1972, 343 pages).
  • Charmian Brinson: The Gestapo and the German Political Exiles in Britain during the 1930s: The Case of Hans Wesemann - and Others. In: German Life and Letters , Vol. 51, Volume 1, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford 1998.
  • James J. Barnes, Patience P. Barnes: Nazi Refugee Turned Gestapo Spy: The Life of Hans Wesemann, 1895–1971. Greenwood Publishing Group, Westport Connecticut 2001, ISBN 0-275-97124-4 .
  • Jacob, Berthold. In: Lexicon of German-Jewish Authors . Volume 12: Hirs – Jaco. Edited by the Bibliographia Judaica archive. Saur, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-598-22692-2 , pp. 304-308.
  • Charmian Brinson ; Marian Malet (Ed.): 'Why is the world silent?' The kidnapping of Berthold Jacob. A documentation . Series of exile documents. Peter Lang Verlag, Bern, Frankfurt a. a. 2014, ISBN 978-3-0343-1573-9 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ursula Madrasch-Groschopp: The world stage. Portrait of a magazine. Berlin 1983, p. 198.
  2. ↑ Michael Hepp (Ed.): The expatriation of German citizens 1933-45 according to the lists published in the Reichsanzeiger . tape 1 : Lists in chronological order. De Gruyter Saur, Munich 1985, ISBN 978-3-11-095062-5 , pp. 3 (reprinted 2010).
  3. ^ Karl Retzlaw : Spartacus . New Critique Verlag, Frankfurt 1971, p. 395, ISBN 3-8015-0096-9
  4. ^ Karl Retzlaw: Spartacus . New Critique Verlag, Frankfurt 1971, p. 396, ISBN 3-8015-0096-9
  5. ^ Karl Retzlaw: Spartacus . New Critique Verlag, Frankfurt 1971, p. 396, ISBN 3-8015-0096-9
personal data
SURNAME Jacob, Berthold
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Jacob Salomon, Berthold (full name); Rollin, Marcel; Jay, Berthold
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German journalist and pacifist
DATE OF BIRTH December 12, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH February 26, 1944
Place of death Berlin