European Union (resistance group)
Encyclopedia
The original European Union (Europäische Union) was an antifascist resistance
German Resistance
The German resistance was the opposition by individuals and groups in Germany to Adolf Hitler or the National Socialist regime between 1933 and 1945. Some of these engaged in active plans to remove Adolf Hitler from power and overthrow his regime...

 group during Germany's Nazi era, which formed around Anneliese
Anneliese Groscurth
Dr. Anneliese Groscurth was the wife of Georg Groscurth and a member of the European Union, an antifascist German resistance group in Berlin, during the Nazi era...

 and Georg Groscurth
Georg Groscurth
Georg Groscurth , was a German doctor and Nazi resistance fighter in the time of the Third Reich.-Life:Georg Groscurth was born a farmer's son in the village of Unterhaun in the Province of Hesse-Nassau, now part of Hauneck in the Bundesland of Hesse...

 and Robert Havemann
Robert Havemann
Robert Havemann was a chemist, and an East German dissident.He studied chemistry in Berlin and Munich from 1929 to 1933, and then later received a doctorate in physical chemistry from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute....

. Other important members were Herbert Richter and Paul Rentsch.

Activity and purpose

The Berlin-based resistance group was founded in 1939. Founding members, Robert Havemann, a chemist and Georg Groscurth, a doctor, met each other at the beginning of the 1930s. Rentsch, a dentist, met Groscurth in 1934. Richter, an architect, was Richter's neighbor. They became friends not because of politics, but because of common interests. They were intellectual, free spirits and came to their political views independently.

Three of the four core members of the EU had direct contact with high-level Nazis. When war broke out, both Havemann and Groscurth tried to extend their work in such a way that they wouldn't be called upon to serve in the military. They took on projects from the Heereswaffenamt, biochemical research that was to put Germany in position to use chemical weapons, but neither they nor other scientists were terribly ambitious about the nominal goal. The architect, Richter, received contracts from the Reichshandwerkskammer and got to know and win the trust of Hermann Göring
Hermann Göring
Hermann Wilhelm Göring, was a German politician, military leader, and a leading member of the Nazi Party. He was a veteran of World War I as an ace fighter pilot, and a recipient of the coveted Pour le Mérite, also known as "The Blue Max"...

. He was already interested in the Communist Party and the information he learned from his personal contact with Göring filled him with hate for the Nazis and only pushed him further toward the idea of resistance. Groscurth, a doctor, had both Rudolph Hess and Wilhelm Keppler
Wilhelm Keppler
Wilhelm Karl Keppler was a German businessman and one of Adolf Hitler's early financial backers. Introduced to Hitler by Heinrich Himmler, Keppler helped to finance the Nazi Party....

 as his patients.

The European Union (EU) stood for the restoration of democratic rights and freedoms and a united, free and socialist Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

. They tried to strengthen the domestic German resistance through contacts with the resistance groups of the foreign forced laborers
Forced labor in Germany during World War II
The use of forced labour in Nazi Germany and throughout German-occupied Europe during World War II took place on an unprecedented scale. It was a vital part of the German economic exploitation of conquered territories. It also contributed to the mass extermination of populations in German-occupied...

. It was an international organization organized as a network of smaller groups of individual resistance fighters. They weren't trying to bring down the Nazi regime themselves, which they expected to collapse of its own, rather they worked to create a political structure that could step in, which would be necessary when the Hitler-regime finally fall apart.

In the meantime, the group produced anti-Nazi leaflets and hid Jews and others hunted by the Nazi regime and supplied them with new identification papers, food and information. Many members were already hiding Jews before 1939, feeding and taking care of them and saving them from deportation to concentration camps. Starting in 1942, they also helped foreign forced laborers. In addition, they stayed in contact with several other groups and individuals, through the various contacts of the core members of the group. The EU eventually numbered about 50 people and included many forced laborers from Ukraine
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...

, Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...

 and France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

, making it an international group with a larger perimeter than the Gestapo investigations reveal. This is underscored by the fact that even as the EU was brought down by the wave of arrests, Konstantin Žadkevič was able to keep working with the forced laborers for another month.

Excerpts from EU flyers

The EU wrote a number of leaflets, some with general political messages, others directed to their own group. Below, are excerpts from two leaflets.

"We are on the eve of collapse of European fascism, which has, with brute force, destroyed every intellectual and revolutionary organization and endeavor. The fascists, who have raged in Germany for more than a decade, have now also, in all the countries of Europe, crushed all the liberal organizations that sought to halt the madness. The fascists believed this would destroy not only their opponents today, but also the leaders of tomorrow. This is the basis of the Nazi theory of chaos till their demise.

This terrible threat, and the ruthless willingness to continue on till Europe has sunk into rubble and ash, works like a morbid solution on the masses of Europe. It is true that Hitler has thrown untold numbers of the best and bravest political fighters into concentration camps; and true that he has broken all the old political organizations, and sought to choke any new attempt before its first breath. But one thing has eluded him, he cannot annhiliate the old and eternal, free and democratic ideas which were born in the big Revolution
French Revolution
The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...

s of Europe! The number of those who have escaped the Gestapo seem to many to be few, but there are more trained fighters than Hitler suspects. And these revolutionaries were not idle."


"The world of tomorrow will have a united, socialist Europe."



"In Germany and countries occupied by Hitler, many anti-fascist groups are today still working without connections. Many valuable and skilled political people are still isolated. They're all striving for agreement. This agreement can today only be realized with the elimination of all ideological, dogmatic and religious prejudice. Today, we have no time for such discussions, which mean nothing to the practical political work. The goal is the overthrow of fascism in Europe."


Further in Leaflet No. 35, the EU described their vision of European socialism. They defined what it did and did not mean.
"...socialism does not mean the eradication of the bourgeoisie
Bourgeoisie
In sociology and political science, bourgeoisie describes a range of groups across history. In the Western world, between the late 18th century and the present day, the bourgeoisie is a social class "characterized by their ownership of capital and their related culture." A member of the...

, the suspension of private property and creation of a bloody dictatorship of dogmatic Marxists, [but rather the] elimination of private interests from politics and economy," and a "liberation of the individual from economic paternalism."


"Hitler's resettlement operations and the abduction of foreign workers to Germany in huge masses have prepared the ground for a pan-European solution."



"Without overcoming the nationalist, private capitalist and imperialist structure of modern Europe, the present victims and the nameless misery of the masses will again be in vain."

Arrest and punishment

The EU was stopped by the Gestapo
Gestapo
The Gestapo was the official secret police of Nazi Germany. Beginning on 20 April 1934, it was under the administration of the SS leader Heinrich Himmler in his position as Chief of German Police...

, not for its activities, but because one of the leading members of the EU, Paul Hatschek
Paul Hatschek
Paul Hatschek was a Czech engineer of optical and film technology and a member of the German Resistance against Nazism during the Third Reich. He was involved with Robert Uhrig and then became a leading member of the resistance group, the European Union. According to Robert Havemann, Hatschek was...

 had been under heavy surveillance for years. In 1943, the Gestapo observed Hatschek meeting two parachute landings. After they had enough information from their investigations, they arrested Hatschek on September 3, 1943, subjecting him to intensive interrogation that same day. Two days later, the Gestapo arrested every single person Hatschek had named, big and small. After weeks of interrogation, sometimes brutal, they arrested the core group of the forced laborers working with Žadkevič. By the end, they had over 40 members of the EU; the number of forced laborers arrested, but not brought before a court, is unknown. The Jews being hidden by the EU were sent to Auschwitz, where about half of them were killed.

There were more than 12 trials before the People's Court. Of those, 15 were sentenced to death and 13 were executed. Two died while being interrogated. Havemann survived because his execution kept being postponed, due to intervention from the biochemists he had earlier worked with. His execution was postponed often enough that he was eventually freed by the Red Army
Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army started out as the Soviet Union's revolutionary communist combat groups during the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922. It grew into the national army of the Soviet Union. By the 1930s the Red Army was among the largest armies in history.The "Red Army" name refers to...

. Groscurth, Herbert Richter (also known as Richter-Luckian) and Rentsch were executed at Brandenburg-Görden Prison
Brandenburg-Görden Prison
Brandenburg-Görden Prison is located on Anton-Saefkow-Allee in the Görden section of Brandenburg an der Havel. Erected between 1927 and 1935, it was built to be the most secure and modern prison in Europe. It was a Zuchthaus for inmates with lengthy or life sentences at hard labor, as well as...

 on May 8, 1944. Other group members were indicted before other courts.

In his farewell letter to his wife, written half an hour before his execution, Groscurth wrote, "Dwell on this, that we're dying for a better future, for a life without man's hatred for man."

Postwar politics and suppression

After the war, the story of the EU was widely heralded by the communist government of the German Democratic Republic
German Democratic Republic
The German Democratic Republic , informally called East Germany by West Germany and other countries, was a socialist state established in 1949 in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany, including East Berlin of the Allied-occupied capital city...

 (GDR), and Havemann became a representative in the Volkskammer
Volkskammer
The People's Chamber was the unicameral legislature of the German Democratic Republic . From its founding in 1949 until the first free elections on 18 March 1990, all members of the Volkskammer were elected on a slate controlled by the Socialist Unity Party of Germany , called the National Front...

. However, in 1956, after Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War. He served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, and as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or Premier, from 1958 to 1964...

 made his "secret speech
On the Personality Cult and its Consequences
On the Personality Cult and its Consequences was a report, critical of Joseph Stalin, made to the Twentieth Party Congress on February 25, 1956 by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. It is more commonly known as the Secret Speech or the Khrushchev Report...

" revealing the purges and mistakes of Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...

, Havemann began to find himself increasingly opposed to the government and became a thorn in their side. The Socialist Einheitspartei Deutschlands
Socialist Unity Party of Germany
The Socialist Unity Party of Germany was the governing party of the German Democratic Republic from its formation on 7 October 1949 until the elections of March 1990. The SED was a communist political party with a Marxist-Leninist ideology...

 (SED) government began suppressing information about the EU. In 1963, he was forced to give up his teaching position at Humboldt University and in time, became a leading dissident in the GDR. The SED government was in possession of all the documents relating to the Nazi's investigation of the EU and kept them under lock and key, hoping to ruin Havemann's reputation by finding evidence of betrayal of his comrades. They never found any.

Annelise Groscurth also experienced difficulties. In 1951, she was let go from her job as a doctor, also for political reasons. She spoke out against the rearmament
Wiederbewaffnung
Wiederbewaffnung refers to the United States of America plan to help build up West Germany after World War II. They could not function outside an alliance framework . These events lead to the establishment of the Bundeswehr, the West German army, in 1955.Heinz Guderian stated that the fight was...

 of Germany and although she was not a member of any political party, she was defamed as a Communist, a severe charge in the Cold War
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...

 era. As former Nazis returned to their old jobs, they made her life difficult. She was unable to get a passport until the 1960s, out of fear of what she might say about Germany while abroad.

EU survivors were denied wiedergutmachung
Wiedergutmachung
The German word Wiedergutmachung after World War II refers to the reparations that the German government agreed to pay to the direct survivors of the Holocaust, and to those who were made to work as forced labour or who otherwise became victims of the Nazis.The noun Wiedergutmachung is the general...

(reparations payments), as mandated by the 1949 German Restitution Laws
German Restitution Laws
The German Restitution Laws were a series of laws passed in the 1950s in West Germany regulating the restitution of lost property and the payment of damages to victims of the Nazi persecutions....

. They were even denied or experienced delays receiving money that would normally have been due, such as pension and death benefits or the return of property after the war.

Memorials and posthumous awards

On April 7, 1995, Georg Groscurth was honored with a memorial plaque at the hospital where he had worked, Moabiter Krankenhaus.

On August 23, 2001, the city legislature of Arolsen decided to name a street after Groscurth.

In 2006, five members of the EU, Anneliese and Georg Groscurth, Robert Havemann, Paul Rentsch and Herbert Richter were awarded the title, "Righteous among the Nations
Righteous Among the Nations
Righteous among the Nations of the world's nations"), also translated as Righteous Gentiles is an honorific used by the State of Israel to describe non-Jews who risked their lives during the Holocaust to save Jews from extermination by the Nazis....

" from the Israeli Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem
Yad Vashem
Yad Vashem is Israel's official memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, established in 1953 through the Yad Vashem Law passed by the Knesset, Israel's parliament....

.

Also in 2006, a square in the Westend
Westend (Berlin)
Westend is a locality of the Berlin borough Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf situated on the Spandauer Berg, the northern peak of the Teltow plateau between the river valleys of Spree and Havel...

 section of Berlin was renamed for the Groscurth couple.

On May 15, 2008, the city of Diensdorf-Radlow
Diensdorf-Radlow
Diensdorf-Radlow is a municipality in the Oder-Spree district, in Brandenburg, Germany....

, dedicated a memorial plaque for Paul Rentsch and Herbert Richter "to commemorate the Richter couple and Rentch, who hid Jews [including] Elisabeth von Scheven, and to remember the crimes that claimed these victims, which began in Diensdorf with the arrest by the Gestapo in the spring of 1943."

Elisabeth von Scheven was deported to Auschwitz after her arrest, but survived and was able to emigrate to the USA in 1945.

Other members

  • Members of the group who were executed:
    • Vladimir Boisselier (September 19, 1907 - Oktober 30, 1944), electrician, Moscow-born Frenchman
    • Walter Caro (resistance fighter) (1899–1945), executed at Auschwitz
    • Jean Cochon (b. July 29, 1916 in Gensac-la-Pallue
      Gensac-la-Pallue
      Gensac-la-Pallue is a commune in the Charente department in southwestern France.-Population:-References:*...

       (Charente); d. October 30, 1944), electrician, Résistance
      Resistance
      - Physics :* Electrical resistance, a measure of the degree to which an object opposes an electric current through it* Friction, the force that opposes motion** Drag , fluid or gas forces opposing motion and flow...

    • Elli Hatschek
      Elli Hatschek
      Elli Hatschek was a member of the German Resistance against Nazism. She was married to Paul Hatschek, a leading member of the resistance group, the European Union and who was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943. Under heavy interrogation, he gave up the names of others in his group, who were then...

       (July 2, 1901 - December 8, 1944), second wife of Paul Hatschek
      Paul Hatschek
      Paul Hatschek was a Czech engineer of optical and film technology and a member of the German Resistance against Nazism during the Third Reich. He was involved with Robert Uhrig and then became a leading member of the resistance group, the European Union. According to Robert Havemann, Hatschek was...

    • Krista Lavíčková
      Krista Lavíčková
      Krista Lavíčková was a Czech secretary who fought against Nazism with the German Resistance group, the European Union. She was arrested on September 3, 1943 and was tried along with her father, Paul Hatschek, at the Volksgerichtshof . Her father's second wife, Elli Hatschek, was arrested with her...

       (December 15, 1917 - August 11, 1944), née Hatschek, daughter of Paul Hatschek, secretary
    • Paul Hatschek
      Paul Hatschek
      Paul Hatschek was a Czech engineer of optical and film technology and a member of the German Resistance against Nazism during the Third Reich. He was involved with Robert Uhrig and then became a leading member of the resistance group, the European Union. According to Robert Havemann, Hatschek was...

       (March 11, 1888 - May 15, 1944), engineer, Czech
    • Kurt Müller (resistance fighter) (1903–1944), executed at Brandenburg Prison
    • Nikolai Savitsch Romanenko (May 1, 1911 - October 30, 1944), technician, from the USSR
    • Galina Romanova
      Galina Romanova
      Galina Romanova was a Ukrainian doctor who was deported to Germany during World War II to provide medical care for forced laborers. She became involved with the German resistance against Nazism and was executed at Berlin-Plötzensee prison.- Biography :Romanova was born in Romankowo,...

        (1918–1944), doctor, from Ukraine
      Ukraine
      Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...

      , executed at Berlin-Plötzensee
    • Alexander Westermayer (October 29, 1894 in Goslar - June 19, 1944), carpenter
    • Konstantin Žadkevič (also spelled Shadkevitsch or Zadkievicz; August 3, 1910 - October 30, 1944) chemist, Czech

  • Not executed due to illness:
    • Heinz Schlag (b. October 23, 1908; d. 1961), doctor

  • Other known members:
    • Miron Broser (b. December 20, 1891 in Tula, Russia), translator, sentenced to two years in prison, liberated by U.S. troops; last known translation into German, 1949
    • Oskar Fischer (1892–1955), released
    • James Frichot (b. March 2, 1918 in Boulogne (Seine)), electrician, French, released
    • Helmut Kindler (1912–2008), journalist and publisher, released
    • René Peyriguére (b. June 1, 1917 in Paris), chemist, French, released
    • Wilhelm Hartke (1879–1966), philologist and theologian

Further reading

  • Simone Hannemann, Werner Theuer and Manfred Wilke. Robert Havemann und die Widerstandsgruppe „Europäische Union“. Eine Darstellung der Ereignisse und deren Interpretation nach 1945. Robert-Havemann-Gesellschaft, Berlin. (2001) ISBN 3980492052 Book review
  • Manfred Wilke and Werner Theuer. Der Beweis eines Verrats läßt sich nicht erbringen. Robert Havemann und die Widerstandsgruppe Europäische Union. (The Evidence of Betrayal Refuses to Surface. Robert Havemann and the Resistance Group, European Union") German National Archive, Cologne (1999), p. 899–912
  • Friedrich Christian Delius. Mein Jahr als Mörder. Roman. (Literary portrayal of the lives of Anneliese and Georg Groscurth) Rowohlt, Reinbek (2006) ISBN 3499239329
  • Werner Theuer. Robert Havemann Bibliographie: mit unveröffentlichten Texten aus dem Nachlass Akademie Verlag GmbH (2007) ISBN 978-3050041834

External links

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