Celebrating the heroes of the Fight against fascism

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Palestine-Berlin underground -- Second of two parts**

(Reprinted from the November 11, 1995 issue of the People's
Weekly World. Maybe reprinted or reposted with PWW credit.
For subscription information see below)

(World correspondent Hans Lebrecht served in the resistance
movement against fascism in Hitler Germany in the late 30s.)

By Hans Lebrecht

TEL-AVIV -- In May 1937, after receiving my diploma I became
unemployed and had no hope of work in my profession. So I
turned to my underground friends, volunteering for real and
active anti-fascist activity. They told me to go to the
"Palestine Bureau" in Berlin, Meinecke St. 10, and ask to
meet a certain Berthold (I forget the family name). He would
advise me about a possible further underground career. I was
astonished, since the Palestine Bureau was the headquarters
of the Zionist organization in Germany and I never even
thought of becoming a Zionist, or emigrating to Palestine,
but had many, sometimes quite heated arguments with Zionists
at the time.

Berthold told me I had to get a good cover in addition to
being a son of a well-known bourgeois industrialist. So they
thought to make out of me a trustworthy Zionist,. In fact,
the Nazi regime and the Gestapo cooperated at the time to
some extent with the Zionists, mainly out of their common
strategic aim -- to relieve Germany of as many Jews as
possible. At that time, the Nazis had not yet designed the
"Endloesung," the physical annihilation of German and
European Jewry.

Berthold and some young women comrades who secretly worked
in the Palestine Bureau for the Communist Party and its
underground sent me in September 1937 to Palestine as a
guiding instructor of a "Youth Aliya" (Zionist Youth for
Palestine) group of about 50 youths aged 9-14. I remained in
Palestine for about four weeks, spending most of the time
with my already then beloved girlfriend, and later my
lifelong companion Tosca, who was already in Palestine,
after which I returned to Germany as a recognized Zionist
youth instructor.

Back in Germany, I was sent to be secretary of a small group
of young prospective Zionist settlers on a preparatory
professional course to learn agricultural labor, working on
a large farm in southern Germany, not far from the Austrian
and Swiss border. I knew the region well from previous
hiking and skiing trips on both sides of the border.

When there was no other job to do, I milked cows and raised
calves and piglets. Sometimes, after a coded telephone
message, I had to go to town, officially to attend to
matters of the Zionist group. In fact, I was engaged in
smuggling people and money across the "green border," the
men and women to join the German "Thaelmann Battalion,"
fighting with the Spanish Republicans against the fascist
onslaught of Franco and their Italian and German
collaborators upon the legal republican regime; the money
went to finance the battalion.

Among the people I smuggled over the border were not a few
who succeeded in escaping from Gestapo detention and even
from concentration camps. On the way, after we were safe
across the border, I heard many a story of the horrible fate
of the detained and tortured opponents of the Hitler regime.
I relayed these reports back to my superiors in the
underground. I believe that I did a small, but important job
against the Nazis, strengthening somehow the revolutionary
anti-fascist forces that fought against the inhuman fiend
with arms in their hands. I wished I could be one of them --
but my orders were to do my job here, on the underground
home front. Retrospectively, I think I was not aware, or did
not care too much about the dangers to my person, or that of
my comrades-in-arms, by doing my clandestine job. All that
was against the hated Nazi regime, was good and worthwhile
for me.

After about 10 months, I was warned that the Gestapo had
issued a warrant for detaining me and two other of my fellow
activists, and that most probably their men were waiting for
us in the border region. We were instructed to stop
immediately our activity. I was ordered to leave the farm
and await further orders.

I left the farm and traveled to Nuremberg to contact my
superiors in the underground. Our standing order was, in
case of danger to our activity, to travel to the southern
French port Marseilles and there to apply to the recruiting
office of the International Brigades in Spain. But at the
time -- autumn 1938 -- the Franco hordes already had overrun
the republican army, and the International Brigades crossed
into France and demobilized. So our standing order became
obsolete, and I did not know what to do. After some
deliberations, I was advised again to turn to my friends at
the Palestine Bureau in Berlin who would provide me with an
entrance visa into Palestine for three months as a tourist.
I was quite glad to leave Hitler's fascist "Thousand Year
Reich" and had no intention to return to Germany, except
after the elimination of the Nazi specter.

Right after the nationwide November 1938 anti-Jewish pogrom,
during which 91 Jews were killed and tens of thousands were
gravely injured and incarcerated in concentration camps,
nicknamed by the Nazis as "Kristallnacht" as if only glass
and crystal was broken during that pogrom, the German
Communist Party (KPD) was the only force in Germany proper
that published, and widely distributed as clandestine
leaflets, a declaration under the headline: "The Disgrace of
the Anti-Jewish Pogrom." In it, the KPD condemned the pogrom
and warned that this was the opening signal for an
aggressive war against the nations of Europe and an all-out
mass murder of Jews. I left the Nazi Reich just a few weeks
before that infamous pogrom.

After Hitler's starting the war in Europe, and especially
after the German invasion into the Soviet Union, I tried to
join the British army to fight Nazi Germany, but was
rejected because of my record of having spent (1940/41) some
time in the British colonialist Central prison in Acre,
Palestine, as a sympathizer of the outlawed Palestinian
Communist Party, and because of a chronic dysentery (I am
still suffering from), I had contracted in jail.

The prison where I met for the first time Jewish and Arab
Communists face to face, was a good educational experience
that convinced me to join the Party as an active member. I
was arrested by the British police for being an "illegal
immigrant," a tourist who overstayed his residence as
"tourist" in Palestine for two-and-a-half years. However,
during the interrogations at the Haifa headquarters of the
CIC (the British Intelligence), the interrogators knew very
well about my activity in the Communist underground in
Germany, as well as my connections with the British
Communist Party. So, after I paid my symbolic fine of one
shilling (almost worth a day's work at the time) for being
an illegal immigrant, I remained detained under suspicion of
being a Communist. Shortly after the release from prison, I
joined the Palestinian Communist Party.

After Hitler's army invaded the Soviet Union (June 22,
1941), Great Britain and the Soviet Union became allies in
the war against Nazi Germany. Following this, the
Palestinian CP went into the open, to continue, now legally,
the 20-year common Arab-Jewish struggle against the
oppressive British colonial rule in the country.

>From 1929 to 1939, the British colonialists, often in
connivance with the Zionist leadership and the Zionist
trade-union Federation Histadrut, deported more than 2,000
Jewish Communists from Palestine to the countries they
emigrated from in Europe, among them also Nazi Germany. So
if I have been detained earlier, it may well be that I would
have been deported, too -- may be even back to Hitler
Germany.

During the war Tosca and I found many left-wing comrades in
the British army. In May 1945, we were invited by British
friends to a victory celebration to the Royal Air Force base
near Petah-Tiqva. We were favorably surprised to find that
only in front of the base headquarters the British colors,
the Union Jack, was hoisted and a picture of King George
hung over the entrance, while almost all other barracks were
decorated with red flags and pictures of Stalin. "The
Soviets, led by Stalin, had been the main victors in the war
and suffered the greatest loss in Europe," our friends
explained.

I am sorry and upset that now, as an active member of the CP
and the progressive peace camp in Israel, I still have to
fight fascism. I am currently a member of the leading bureau
of the International Federation of Resistance Fighters. The
fight against neofascism in Europe and throughout the
capitalist world continues.
(...)

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