Culture of remembrance | Jewish anti-fascist replaces Marshal Vorwärts

Blücherplatz is now called Eva-Mamlok-Platz. Photo: dpa/Jens Kalaene On Friday, Blücherplatz in Berlin-Kreuzberg was renamed Eva-Mamlok-Platz. This means that a Prussian field marshal disappears from the street scene, who became famous through victories over Napoleon's troops at the age of more than 70. Blücher's nickname was "Marshal Forward." In the military, the saying “He goes at it like Blücher” trivialized the so-called forward defense for a long time. It was associated with the deaths of many soldiers in assault attacks.

Eva Mamlok is an anti-fascist who became involved at a young age. At the beginning of the 1930s she climbed to the roof of the Tietz department store at Halleschen Tor. There she wrote the slogan “Down with Hitler.” Mamlok was arrested, but he was not yet 14 years old and therefore not yet of criminal responsibility.

This courageous anti-fascist intervention by Inge Berner, née Gerson, has been handed down. She was a member of Herbert Baum's Jewish-Communist resistance group, which carried out a spectacular arson attack on the propaganda exhibition "The Soviet Paradise" in the Lustgarten in 1942. Numerous members of the Herbert Baum group were executed.

Inge Gerson had already left the group at this point due to political differences and thus escaped repression. As a Jew, however, she had to do forced labor and met Eva Mamlok, who was resisting the Nazis with a group of young women. These young women distributed literature banned by the fascists and painted anti-fascist slogans on the walls of houses.

Gerson joined this group around Mamlok. On September 30, 1941, Eva Mamlok, Inge Gerson and Inge Lewinsohn were denounced and taken to prison for possessing and passing on banned books. According to Berner's later memories, the three women were sentenced to death for undermining military strength. However, the sentences were commuted to life imprisonment in a concentration camp.

To this day, documents relating to the verdicts are still missing. The little information about Eva Mamlok and her group comes from Inge Berner, whose memories were incomplete in her old age. The reasons for the conversion of death sentences to life imprisonment, which was rare at the time, remain unclear. According to Inge Berner, her non-Jewish uncle successfully campaigned for this. According to other reports, Mamlok's mother was able to bribe an official and thus ensure that Eva Mamlok and her fellow activists were spared execution.

The future fate of the anti-fascists is undisputed. They were deported to the Riga ghetto in January 1942 and, after it was dissolved, transferred to the Riga-Kaiserwald concentration camp. In 1944 Mamlok was transferred to the Stutthof concentration camp. She died there on December 23rd at the age of 26. The official cause of death is “general physical weakness.”

Only Inge Gerson survived. But their statements remained unpublished for a long time. A research project in Berlin has been examining the life of Mamlok since 2003. The exhibition “The Eva Mamlok Group – Stories of Resistance” was on view at the Kreuzberg Museum from June to September 2024. What was known about the life and death of the courageous anti-fascist was very meticulously documented there. The gaps in the biography were not hidden either.

The square now named after Eva Mamlok is very fitting for such an honor. Nearby was the Tietz department store, which the young Eva Mamlok had climbed during the Nazi era.

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