The Soviet paradise

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Sticky notes from the “ Red Orchestra ” as a protest against the exhibition

The Soviet Paradise was the name of a propaganda exhibition from May 8, 1942 to June 21, 1942 in Berlin's Lustgarten by the Reich Propaganda Management of the NSDAP , which, according to official figures, was visited by 1.3 million people.

Tent-like pavilions with photos, graphics, paintings, looted objects and weapons were set up on nine thousand square meters. The centerpiece was the allegedly true-to-original, but in truth falsifying, replica of a district of today's Belarusian capital Minsk and a Soviet village in which people lived in holes in the ground. Some photos were taken with prisoners from Sachsenhausen concentration camp .

The show was in preparation for weeks and, according to the catalog, was supposed to show “Poverty, misery, depravity and need” in the Soviet Union, thus justifying the war against the Soviet Union and strengthening the perseverance of the German population.

The Jewish-Communist underground group around Herbert and Marianne Baum carried out an arson attack on this exhibition on May 18, 1942. Although there was only minor property damage during this action, at least 33 underground fighters were executed. The day before, a group around had Harro Schulze-Boysen and Fritz Thiel a thousand pieces of paper with the ironic inscription "Permanent Exhibition / The NAZI PARADISE / war hunger lie Gestapo / How long?" Throughout Berlin bonded. Many members of this group paid with their lives for this action.

In response to the arson attack, 500 Berlin Jews, including Berthold Cahn and Leo Fichtmann , were arrested as "hostages" on May 27 and brought to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. On May 28 and 29, 1942, the "Reichsführer-SS" Heinrich Himmler had 250 Jews murdered there in revenge for the attack, including 154 of those arrested in Berlin and 96 of those already imprisoned in Sachsenhausen. The recently completed Station Z was selected as the location for the mass murder . In this building, planned as a unit of crematorium and extermination site, there was a shooting range, the functionality of which the SS was tested on the Jewish victims for the first time , as reported by concentration camp inmate Paul Sakowski , who worked in the crematorium .

Before the Berlin exhibition, The Soviet Paradise was shown in Vienna and Prague .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Hella Kemper: Words as Resistance: Sticky Notes against Nazi Propaganda. In: ZEIT ONLINE. ZEIT ONLINE GmbH, February 7, 2012, accessed on November 15, 2019 .
  2. ^ Gustav Landauer Memorial Initiative (Berlin): Berthold Cahn, a life for anarchism , p. 38.
  3. Speech: The murder of the Jewish hostages in May 1942 in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, January 27, 2012
  4. Rosemarie Burgstaller: "Pictures not only in the head". In: Die Presse.com. December 20, 2013, accessed August 16, 2016 .
  5. "WIEHLOVA BRÁNA NA vystaviste POTŘETÍ". In: Czumalova nástěnka. November 11, 2013, accessed August 16, 2016 .