Ludwig Marum

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ludwig Marum

Ludwig Marum (born on November 5, 1882 in Frankenthal , Pfalz ; died on March 29, 1934 in the Kislau concentration camp near Bruchsal ) was a German lawyer and SPD politician . Because Marum was of Jewish origin and had campaigned politically for Weimar democracy and against National Socialism, he was hated by the Nazis. After the seizure of power , Ludwig Marum was imprisoned and murdered by SA and SS people in the Kislau concentration camp .

Life

family

Marum came from an originally Sephardic , i.e. Spanish-Jewish family who immigrated to southwest Germany after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain via the Netherlands .

His parents were the businessman Carl Marum (born July 17, 1850 in Frankenthal; died May 18, 1889 there) and Helene nee. Mayer (born January 12, 1858 in Leutershausen , died 1924 in Bruchsal). Carl Marum had participated as corporal of the 8th Infantry Regiment in the Franco-German War of 1870/71 and was seriously wounded. After Carl Marum's death, the widow Helene moved with her two children from Frankenthal to Bruchsal in 1889. Ludwig Marum had a younger sister Anna (born on November 19, 1885 in Frankenthal). Married to Salomon Pfeffer, she lived in Düsseldorf and fled to Amsterdam when the National Socialists came to power . She was arrested in the Netherlands after the German invasion in 1940 and came to Auschwitz via the Westerbork, Bergen-Belsen and Theresienstadt concentration camps , where she was murdered on October 9, 1944.

Marum married Johanna Benedick on March 8, 1910 in Albersweiler (born on May 3, 1886 in Albersweiler; died on November 13, 1964 in Berlin). From this marriage there were three children:

Elisabeth was born on September 1, 1910 in Karlsruhe, died on June 5, 1998 in New York.
Hans Karl was born on April 28, 1913 in Karlsruhe. Hans was politically involved with the Communists and went into exile in Paris in 1933. He died on April 13, 1979 in Berlin.
Eva Brigitte, born on July 17, 1919 in Karlsruhe, murdered on March 30, 1943 in the Sobibor concentration camp .

Johanna Marum left Germany with her daughter Brigitte within a month of her husband's death. They followed Hans Marum to Paris. Elisabeth stayed in Berlin for the time being to do her professional training as a masseuse and alternative practitioner. She also tried to get Ludwig Marum's life insurance paid out. To do this, she negotiated directly with the Gestapo. The Nazis blocked the payment because they wanted the Marum family to reimburse Ludwig Marum's detention costs. Elisabeth had to accept the conditions. After completing her training as a physiotherapist, she left for Paris in 1936.

The Marums saw themselves as active opponents of Hitler who tried to fight National Socialism within their means. They lived in extreme poverty in Paris, partly because they had been plundered by the authorities when they left Germany. Another reason was that there was no way of earning a living for the large number of German refugees in France.

In 1941 Johanna and her daughter Elisabeth managed to flee to the United States from France, which the Germans had occupied in June 1940 . Hans managed to leave the country illegally with his wife Sophie in 1942 and to emigrate to Mexico. Brigitte stayed in France because she had given birth to a child and considered her vulnerability as a Jewish emigrant in France to be low, even under German occupation. But she was captured in a raid in Marseille in early 1943 and ended up in the Drancy assembly camp near Paris via various stations . From there she was deported to the Sobibor extermination camp on March 25, where she was gas-driven on arrival. Her young son, whom she had given to a children's home in Limoges, survived there under an assumed name and later lived in Israel.

Profession and Politics

After visiting the Schönborn-Gymnasium in Bruchsal studied Marum Law in Heidelberg , where he joined the beating Jewish fraternity Badenia (later than Bavaria Heidelberg refounded) in KC joined.

At a young age he became a member of the SPD and, after settling down as a lawyer (1908) in Karlsruhe, also became involved with the socially underprivileged. In 1910 he became chairman of the Badische workers Sängerbund and was from 1911 to 1921 as a city councilor in the Municipal Council of the City of Karlsruhe operates. In 1914 he succeeded Ludwig Frank, who fell shortly after the start of the war, as a member of the SPD in the Baden state parliament , where he soon emerged as chairman of the justice commission. From 1915 to 1918 he served as a Landsturmmann , for which he was awarded the War Merit Cross in 1917 .

After the November Revolution of 1918, Marum was appointed Minister of Justice to the provisional state government. After the election to the Baden Constituent National Assembly on January 5, 1919, he was involved in the drafting of the state constitution as a member of the constitutional commission. This was the only German constitution at the time to be adopted in a referendum on April 13, 1920 .

From 1919 to 1928 Marum was chairman of the SPD parliamentary group in the state parliament of the Republic of Baden . He was particularly active in the area of ​​legal policy, advocating the abolition of the death penalty , for the rights of illegitimate children and against discrimination against unmarried mothers, and advocated equal pay for men and women. Marum had already resigned from the Jewish community in 1910 and joined the Free Religious Community of Karlsruhe in 1912, to whose board he was elected.

In the final phase of the Weimar Republic , he took a clear position against the rising National Socialist movement. As a lawyer, he was often involved in legal disputes with the National Socialists and was therefore particularly hated by them. They referred to him as the "Baden Rathenau " and tried to attach the cliché of the greedy Jew to him by wrongly suspecting him of enriching himself with the sale of a factory to the Reemtsma company and of aiding and abetting tax evasion .

State Councilor Ludwig Marum received an honorary doctorate from the Medical Faculty (Dr. med. Hc) of the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg in 1926 . The rector Wolfgang Jäger declared on September 27, 2007 on the initiative of the Forum Ludwig Marum e. V .: "In the case of the former State Councilor Ludwig Marum, the university would still like to honor the SPD politician as an honorary doctorate from the Freiburg University. The Albert Ludwig University publicly declares that it has not carried out the revocation of the honorary doctorate and that efforts to revoke it declared as irrelevant. " The background was the revocation of the honorary doctorate on January 21, 1938 by Rector Otto Mangold during the "self-degradation of the university by National Socialism".

arrest

In the 1928 Reichstag election , Marum was elected as a member of the Karlsruhe parliament. In the Reichstag election of March 5, 1933, shortly after the “ seizure of power ”, Marum was elected to the Reichstag, this time via the state list. The Nazis had achieved in Baden large electoral gains and began directly after the end of the general election on to take power in Baden and the land equal to switch , although the Baden state parliament and his government still existed. On March 8, the NSDAP Gauleiter Robert Wagner was appointed Reich Commissioner in Baden. He should take over the state executive. The legal state government under the center politician Josef Schmitt protested in vain. On March 10, the SA was appointed auxiliary police and on March 11, the Schmitt government was deposed. At the same time, the leaders of the labor movement were arrested. Ludwig Marum was one of the first to be arrested on March 10, 1933 , in violation of parliamentary immunity . He should be held in so-called protective custody for an indefinite period .

On May 16, 1933, the day the Nazi-ruled state parliament opened, Marum, who was particularly hated by the National Socialists as a Jew and a prominent Social Democrat, the former Baden President Adam Remmele and five other leading Social Democrats in Baden were presented in a large-scale show drive the open loading area of ​​a police truck. The democratic politicians received a large crowd. They were driven in a degrading train accompanied by SA and SS men past thousands of Karlsruhe citizens through the city. They were then taken to the newly established Kislau concentration camp near Bruchsal. Only a few protested by shouting “Red Front” and risked being arrested immediately.

At the same time, the Baden state parliament met for its opening session. Previously, he was the deputy of the already banned KPD "adjusted" and according to the Reichstag been reassembled to a DC circuit to effect. The real ruler in Baden was meanwhile the newly appointed Reich Governor Robert Wagner , to whom Marum had shown himself mentally and rhetorically superior in the years before during the Weimar period .

assassination

The Kislau concentration camp was organized by the Nazis as a showcase camp to mislead about the true conditions in the many other camps. Journalists were shown around and Marum had to give a censored interview.

Although he had been illegally arrested, Marum, like many Jews of his time, had refused to emigrate. He did not take advantage of the opportunity to escape - at the beginning of his detention he was given two days' leave for a family matter. He had given his word of honor to return to prison. Marum believed that he could take the legal position vis-à-vis the new rulers. In the interview mentioned, he stated that he was certain that his nose and ears would not be cut off; rather, the rulers are interested in ruining its economic existence.

Marum wrote another time about the Jewish fellow citizens, it is the tragedy of their fate that they are not for Judaism wanted the Germans but they did not want it that homeless stood between the races. Germany is his home, and he clings to it. This makes it clear that Marum, who broke away from religious ties to Judaism at an early stage, always confessed to his Jewish origins.

While the SPD politicians arrested with him had already been released, Marum was still being held at the instigation of Reich Governor Robert Wagner. On March 29, 1934, Marum was strangled on Wagner's behalf. The three perpetrators were the deputy camp commandant Karl Sauer , a former commercial employee who was now a member of the Gestapo , the SS- Oberscharführer Eugen Müller , Wagner's friend, and the driver Paul Heupel , who had joined the SA at the end of 1932 as a long-term unemployed .

The spread of the authorities version Marum've suicide committed, found no credence in the population. The burial of the urn with the ashes of Marum on April 3, 1934 at the main cemetery in Karlsruhe turned out to be a demonstration in which over 3000 people took part , despite the omnipresence of the Gestapo .

Fate of the family

After the crime against the husband, the widow emigrated to Paris with her two daughters and son. After Hitler's Germany attacked France, the youngest daughter, Eva Brigitte, was taken to the Sobibor extermination camp and murdered there. The eldest daughter, Elisabeth, lived in the USA until her death in 1998. The mother and son Hans and his family fled to Mexico. They returned to the Soviet Zone in 1947 .

Work-up

Criminal justice

In one of the rather rare acts of coming to terms with Nazi injustice, Sauer was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder and Heupel to twelve years imprisonment for manslaughter on June 4, 1948, by the second criminal chamber of the Karlsruhe Regional Court . Müller could no longer be called to account; he was killed in World War II .

souvenir

Memorial plaques on the Reichstag
  • Frankenthaler before Marum's birthplace in the former Färbergasse today Willy-Brandt-conditioning, as well as in front of his former home in the Karlsruhe Wendt Street 3 were stumbling blocks set.
  • Since 1992, one of the 96 memorial plaques for members of the Reichstag murdered by the National Socialists has been commemorating Marum near the Berlin Reichstag .
  • In Karlsruhe, a Ludwig-Marum-Strasse was dedicated to Marum and a Ludwig-Marum-Weg in neighboring Bruchsal .
  • The SPD Karlsruhe has awarded a Ludwig Marum Prize every year since 1988 . It should “set an example for a responsible relationship with German history, for vigilance against all forms of intolerance and humanity in dealing with strangers”.
  • On October 16, 1985, the grammar school in the nearby Pfinztal was named after Marum, and a foundation close to the grammar school has been offering a Ludwig Marum Prize since 1998 . He can z. B. “are awarded for work that deals with the history of fascism or with the fate of the Jews or other persecuted minorities. But it could also mark a certain exemplary social behavior or actions that turn against the new right-wing radicalism ”.
  • A memorial plaque unveiled on November 8, 2014 on the tax office building (the seat of the Schönborn grammar school when Marum attended school) not far from the Bruchsal Palace commemorates Marum and the stages of his life spent in Bruchsal. Before the memorial plaque was unveiled, the mayor invited a party to the town hall. Many guests were present at the celebration, and the family was also well represented.
  • On May 7, 2019, the city of Bad Schönborn in the Mingolsheim part of the municipality, where the Kislau concentration camp was located, decided to name a street after him.

literature

  • The last year in letters: the correspondence between Ludwig Marum and Johanna Marum (March 7, 1933– May 14, 1933), Ludwig Marum's letters from the Kislau concentration camp (May 16, 1933– March 7, 1934). Selected and edited by Elisabeth Marum-Lunau and Jörg Schadt. Ed. Andrée Fischer-Marum ed., Stadtarchiv Karlsruhe + Stadtarchiv Mannheim + Angelika von Loeper Literaturverlag, Karlsruhe 2016, ISBN 978-3-86059-375-2 .
  • Konrad Exner-Seemann : Ludwig Marum - state politician and Nazi victim in Kislau / Bad Mingolsheim . In: Franz Hamburger u. a. (Ed.): Pedagogical practice and educational theory between locality and globality . Frankfurt am Main 2000, ISBN 3-631-35323-5 (Festschrift for Volker Lenhart on his 60th birthday).
  • Detlev Fischer : Ludwig Marum (1882–1934) . In: Karlsruher Rechtshistorische Blätter, series of publications by the Legal History Museum . Issue 10, Legal History Tours through Karlsruhe - Residence of Law . Karlsruhe 2005.
  • Andrée Fischer-Marum: "You are all so far away." Letters from my grandmother Johanna Marum from East Berlin to New York from June to December 1947. In Irene Below ; Inge Hansen-Schaberg ; Maria Kublitz-Kramer Ed .: The End of Exile? Letters from women after 1945. Series: Women and Exile, 7th edition text + kritik , Munich 2015, ISBN 3869163739 , pp. 136–150.
  • Ilse Fischer:  Marum, Ludwig. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 16, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-428-00197-4 , p. 317 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Frithjof Kessel: On the development of the memory of Ludwig Marum . In: Harald Denecken (Ed.): … You must never forget him! The Ludwig Marum Prize 1988–1999 . Karlsruhe, ISBN 3-88190-250-3 , p. 36-51 .
  • Manfred Koch: They can take my freedom, but not my dignity and pride . In: House of History Baden-Württemberg (Hrsg.): Political prisoners in Southwest Germany . 2001, ISBN 3-87407-382-3 .
  • Monika Pohl: Ludwig Marum . A social democrat of Jewish origin and his rise in the Baden labor movement from 1882 to 1919. Info Verlag, Karlsruhe 2003, ISBN 3-88190-341-0 (biography and dissertation at the same time; research and sources on city history, Volume 8, series of publications by the Karlsruhe City Archives).
  • Monika Pohl: Ludwig Marum - opponent of National Socialism . The fate of persecution of a social democrat of Jewish origin. Info Verlag, Karlsruhe 2013, ISBN 978-3-88190-724-8 .
  • Clemens Rehm (Ed.): Why Marum - Mensch. Politician. Victim . Exhibition catalog. Karlsruhe 2006, ISBN 3-88190-463-8 .
  • Martin Schumacher (Hrsg.): MdR The Reichstag members of the Weimar Republic in the time of National Socialism. Political persecution, emigration and expatriation, 1933–1945. A biographical documentation . 3rd, considerably expanded and revised edition. Droste, Düsseldorf 1994, ISBN 3-7700-5183-1 .
  • City archives Karlsruhe and Mannheim (ed.): Ludwig Marum, letters from the Kislau concentration camp . 1984, ISBN 3-7880-9700-0 (including various contemporary documents and a longer version of Joachim W. Storck's Marum biography).
  • Joachim W. Storck: Marum, Ludwig . In: Baden biographies . New episode . tape 4 , 1996.
  • Ulrich Wiedmann: The Kislau Trial - Ludwig Marum and his executioners . Ink bottle edition, Neckarsteinach 2007, ISBN 978-3-937467-40-5 .

Web links

Commons : Ludwig Marum  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Paul Theobald: Jewish fellow citizens in Frankenthal with Eppstein and Flomersheim from 1800 to 1940 . Frankenthal January 2014.
  2. ↑ Monika Pohl: Ludwig Marum - opponents of National Socialism. The fate of persecution of a social democrat of Jewish origin . Info Verlag, Karlsruhe 2013, ISBN 978-3-88190-724-8 , p. 149.
  3. ^ Pohl: Ludwig Marum - Opponent ... Karlsruhe 2013, p. 147.
  4. ^ Pohl: Ludwig Marum - Opponent ... Karlsruhe 2013, p. 160 ff.
  5. ^ Pohl: Ludwig Marum - Opponent ... Karlsruhe 2013, p. 16.
  6. ^ Letter from the Rector of the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg dated September 27, 2007 to the Forum Ludwig Marum and the same wording to the descendants
  7. ^ Pohl: Ludwig Marum - Opponent ... Karlsruhe 2013, p. 50 ff.
  8. ^ Marum, letter of July 29, 1933.
  9. ^ Marum, letter of September 26, 1933.
  10. ↑ Erika Schwarz : Microcosm of the 20th Century. Ludwig Marum and his German-Jewish family
  11. ^ Files in the General State Archives in Karlsruhe.
  12. ^ Stumbling block campaign on November 7, 2006: Ludwig Marum. Friends of Jewish Remembrance in Frankenthal, accessed on April 12, 2016 .
  13. ↑ SPD city association Karlsruhe: Ludwig Marum Prize. Retrieved July 19, 2011 .
  14. ^ Ludwig Marum Foundation: "What does the Ludwig Marum Foundation want"? , on the website of the Ludwig-Marum-Gymnasium.
  15. ↑ Bruchsal is reminiscent of Ludwig Marum. (No longer available online.) In: Official Journal Bruchsal, KW 46/2014. P. 7 , archived from the original on April 25, 2016 ; Retrieved April 12, 2016 .
  16. ^ Reports from the event on November 8, 2014 , on the Bruchsal.org Internet portal.
  17. ↑ Name of the street for the development plan area “Anzlinger”, Mingolsheim. In: Website of the city of Bad Schönborn. Retrieved November 7, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Marum, Ludwig
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer, politician (SPD), MdR and victim of the Nazi regime
DATE OF BIRTH November 5, 1882
PLACE OF BIRTH Frankenthal , Palatinate
DATE OF DEATH March 29, 1934
Place of death Kislau concentration camp near Bruchsal