Eugen Brehm

Eugen M. Brehm (born October 4, 1909 in Ulm , † November 27, 1995 in Reading ) (pseudonyms Max Herb , Max Hole , Ernst Bredt ) was a German-British publicist and pacifist.

Life and activity

Origin and early life

Brehm was a son of August Martin Christoph Brem (1882–1949) and his wife Minna, geb. Schneider, (1880-1959). The father was a trained plumber and plumber and owner of his own company.

After attending a secondary school in Ulm, Brehm completed a commercial apprenticeship from 1927 to 1929 and then from 1929 to 1930 an internship in an Ulm bookstore. In 1930 he went to Berlin, where from 1930 to 1933 he worked as an employed bookseller - assortment and second-hand bookshop - for the bookseller Friedrich Katz in Gleißestrasse.

In Berlin, Brehm and his wife sublet lived with a Frau Hirsch in Lutherstrasse. Another subtenant, who lived in the next room at the same time, was Fabian von Schlabbrendorff , who later became President of the Federal Constitutional Court .

As a staunch anti-militarist, Brehm joined the German Peace Society in 1925, of which he headed the Ulm branch from 1926 to 1929. He resigned from the Peace Society in 1929 after a public scandal revealed that some of its leading members had received bribes. Instead, Brehm founded a local group of the group of revolutionary pacifists in Ulm that year and headed this local group until 1930. In 1930 he moved to Berlin, where he worked closely with Kurt Hiller and in the same year joined the Reich executive (Reichsleitung) of the group of revolutionary pacifists has been recorded. He was a member of this until its dissolution and acted as its secretary.

In 1931 Brehm took part politically in the founding of the SAPD , a split from the SPD.

Early Nazi period (1933/1934)

After the National Socialists came to power, Brehm was taken into protective custody in March 1933 as a member of the Reich leadership of the group of revolutionary pacifists . He spent this first in the police prison on Alexanderplatz and then in the Lehrterstrasse prison. In May 1933 he, like some other pacifists, was released again due to the efforts of the new government at the time to demonstrate its willingness to make peace abroad.

Brehm had lost his job with the bookseller Katz while he was still in prison - in March 1933 he received a letter of resignation from the prison, so that he was released again and instead tried to start his own business as an antiquarian bookseller, which failed due to the circumstances.

In the summer of 1933, Brehm shifted the focus of his activity to working as a freelance writer. In addition, he turned to active political activity in the SAP, for whose Reich leadership and district leadership he worked in Berlin from that point on. In February 1934 he was sent to London with a party assignment, where he was supposed to establish contacts with the Independent Labor Party .

In June 1934 Brehm returned to Berlin via Paris, Basel and Ulm, where he was accepted into the illegal SAPD Reich leadership.

In December 1934 Brehm was arrested in Dresden . It was then brought to Berlin, where they wanted to use it to locate and evacuate other SAP members. On January 18 or 19, 1935, Brehm succeeded in an adventurous way to escape from captivity with the help of SAP members: after he had convinced the Gestapo, he was left alone for two hours to scout SAP members to let go of the city - previously several attempts to send him accompanied by officials to SAP meeting points (especially cafes) in order to attract other officials who could then be arrested had failed - a SAP liaison man approached and then failed brought to the apartment of a SAP functionary, Werner Klatt , on Uhlandstrasse, in a detour - in order to shake off any shadowy ones - by frequently changing subways and taxis . In retaliation for his escape, Brehm's wife was arrested by the Gestapo and held in Moabit women's prison for twenty-one months.

After Brehm had been hiding in Klatt's apartment for eight days, both traveled to Silesia by train. There they crossed the green border on skis in the Giant Mountains to the town of Svoboda in Bohemia. From there he went to Prague, where he became a member of the SAPD exile group there. At that time he was supported by the Democratic Refugee Agency and the International Pacific Aid Fund. Due to political differences, he left SAP in 1936.

Exile (1935 to 1945)

In the years that followed, Brehm and his wife - who only emigrated in 1936 after imprisonment - managed to get by in Prague as a German teacher and as a correspondent for the newspaper The New Leader and as a Southeast Europe correspondent for the Sozialistische Warte . In addition, he contributed to magazines such as Die Truth , Der Sozialdemokrat , Der Kampf and Die Brücke .

In the course of his journalistic work in exile, Brehm mostly used pseudonyms such as Ernst Bredt , Erich Burger , Jim Mac Cartney , Max Hole , Hannibal Hase and Max Herb (an anagram for Brehm) to disguise his identity. Under the last-mentioned pseudonym he published an extensive monograph on Southeast Europe.

During these years Brehm worked politically with Max Sedewitz , Otto Friedländer , Kurt Hiller and Otto Straßer . In addition, he maintained connections to the People's Socialist Movement to Zavis Kallandra and his anti-Stalinist circle around the newspaper Vorba .

His journalistic activities against the Nazi regime brought Brehm or his pseudonym Max Herb into the sights of the National Socialist police organs at the end of the 1930s, who finally classified him as an important target: In the spring of 1940, the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin put Brehm's pseudonym Max Herb on the special wanted list GB (The list entry for Herb suggests that the Nazi police authorities were not aware that Herb was a pseudonym and that they did not know that it was Brehm who was hiding behind him, but that they were Herb for a separate person [a "writer / emigrant"]), a list of people who were considered particularly dangerous or important by the Nazi surveillance apparatus, which is why the occupying forces would succeed them in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht Specialized SS commandos identified and arrested with special priority should be used.

In 1939 Brehm moved to London. There he became a board member of the People's Socialist Movement. In December 1939 he found a job with the BBC Monitoring Service.

Since he was still formally a German citizen at the time, Brehm was interned by the British authorities as an enemy alien in various camps from June to December 1940 (first in Evesham, then in Huyton). After his release from internment, he was able to return to his position with the BBC.

During the war he presented several other anti-Nazi publications, such as the brochure Towards a New German Foreign Policy (1943). He also worked in left-wing writers' groups, particularly from 1939 to 1945 in the group of independent German authors . It also belonged to the national group of German trade unionists .

post war period

After World War II, Brehm continued to work for the BBC until he retired in 1971. Most recently he reached the position of Assistant Head of Department in this. He was naturalized in Great Britain on November 30, 1948. As part of his work for the BBC, he was from 1940 to 1971 in the Association of Broadcasting Staff . As a writer, he was also a member of the PEN Club.

Brehm briefly considered a return to Germany in the first post-war years, but finally decided because of the political developments in the post-war years, in particular because of the development of the Social Democratic Party under Kurt Schumacher - according to his judgment, this was too much "legalized" in its orientation at the time - , and finally against this because of his professional security at the BBC.

In addition to his work for the BBC, Brehm was the London correspondent of the Neue Zeitung from 1947 to 1950 after the war . He finally handed this task over to Peter de Mendelssohn due to lack of time .

In the post-war period, Brehm was politically active at Amnesty International and Greenpeace .

As a retiree, Brehm attracted the interest of numerous historians and publicists who were interested in socialist emigration in Czechoslovakia and Great Britain in the 1930s and 1940s and in pacifist exile, to whom he willingly provided information.

Brehm's estate is now being kept by the Munich Institute for Contemporary History . This includes his correspondence (especially with prominent contemporaries such as Kurt Hiller) as well as unpublished manuscripts.

Marriage and offspring

Brehm was married to Katja Hemke (1900–1972) for the first time since 1933. Like him, she worked for the SAPD in the 1930s. In January 1935 she was arrested for violating the law against the formation of new political parties of July 14, 1933 (RGBl. I p. 479) and sentenced to a twenty-one-month prison sentence, which she served in the women's prison in Berlin. In 1936 she emigrated to Czechoslovakia, where she wrote articles for anti-fascist periodicals under the pseudonym Katja Herb. In 1939 she emigrated to London. The marriage lasted until her accidental death in 1972.

In his second marriage, Brehm was married to Martha Miriam Katz (1913–1987). She was a trained teacher and, like him, worked for the BBC Monitoring Service from 1942 to 1972.

Fonts

• Southeast Europe - Form and Demand , Paris 1938. (under the pseudonym Max Herb)
• Towards a New German Foreign Policy , London 1943.
• “A Democratic Foreign Policy”, in: Kurt Hiller (Ed.): After Nazism - Democracy? A Symposium by Four Germans , London 1945.
• The bestiality of the German past Letters to a young German (1946) , in: Europäische ideen, Heft 10, pp. 1–14, Ed .: Andreas W. Mytze, Myler Druck, Dransfeld 1996.

literature

• Werner Röder / Herbert A. Strauss (Eds.): Biographical Handbook of German-Speaking Emigration after 1933 , Vol. 1 (Politics, Economy, Public Life), Munich / New York 1980, p. 91.

Web links

• Description of Brehm's estate in the Institute for Contemporary History
• Minutes of a recorded life report by Brehm at the IfZ

Individual evidence

1. ^ Entry on Max Herb on the special wanted site GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London) .