A regime’s revenge metered out upon the innocent.
On the 18th of May 1942, a Berlin Jewish-Communist resistance group carried out an arson attack against a Nazi propaganda exhibition called “The Soviet Paradise” located in the Lustgarten area of Museum Island. The exhibition displayed all of the typical Nazi tropes about Judeo-Communism, and it tried to justify the war against the USSR on the grounds of the Soviet Union’s decadence and inhumane nature.
The arson attack only caused minor damage, but the embarrassment it generated for the regime led to a violent overreaction in which 250 Berlin Jews were killed in retaliation for the relatively minor act of resistance.
Martin Cohn was one of those Berlin Jews.
He was arrested by the Gestapo on the 27th of May 1942 for no reason and he was taken to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. The next day, Martin and another 153 men were shot.
A further 96 male camp inmates would also be killed over the following days.
Martin’s family were deported to Auschwitz six months later, where they were also murdered.
For Martin’s story (in German) visit his entry on the Stolpersteine homepage.
(This is a repost from Instagram from April 14th, 2024)