Transcript
Narrator Léon Blum was one of the most prominent special inmates at the Buchenwald concentration camp. Although he suffered isolation, he enjoyed privileged internment conditions, with accommodation at the quite comfortable Falknerhaus outside the camp. He even got married during his internment on the Ettersberg: Of her own volition, his secretary Jeanne Levylier followed him to Weimar. In spite of everything, Blum feared for his life; a few months after liberation from SS hands he noted:
Léon Blum “We never believed for a minute that we would live to see French territory again. I was in the hands of the Nazis. To them I was more than just a French politician. I also embodied that very thing they hated more than anything in the world: I was a democratic Socialist and a Jew.”
Narrator Léon Blum grew up in Paris in a wealthy Jewish family with roots in Alsace. After studying law, he worked as a lawyer and literary critic.
He entered politics because of the Dreyfus affair, which, centred around a Jewish officer, set off a wave of anti-Semitism in France around the turn of the century. Shocked, Blum joined the Socialists, and after the First World War he became one of the leading thinkers and voices of the party.
In 1936–37 he was Prime Minister for the first time, putting social reforms in place. The French have him to thank for the 40-hour work-week and the right to paid holiday.
After the occupation of France, the Vichy regime, collaborating with Nazi Germany, arrested Blum and had him sent to Germany. Starting in April of 1943, the SS kept him prisoner in the Falknerhaus. It was not without reason that he feared for his life:
Léon Blum “In Buchenwald the year before, we had already felt the presence or the sudden approach of death. I think of the morning in July when the Weimar Gestapo, acting on a command given personally by Himmler, took poor Georges Mandel from the house where we had lived together for 15 months. [...] He hadn’t the slightest illusion about the fate that awaited him [...]”
Narrator Mandel, also a prominent special inmate, held office as French Interior Minister until the armistice with Germany. In July 1944, as Blum remembered, Mandel was brought to Paris. The Gestapo delivered him to the Vichy regime. As retribution for a Résistance attack, he was murdered by the militia in the woods of Fontainebleau.
But on the Ettersberg Léon Blum remained unaware of the nearby mass death for a long time.
Léon Blum “The words ‘loneliness’ and ‘isolation’ are not capable of characterizing the life that we led for two years in this house in Buchenwald. [...] The house was actually not so much a prison as a tomb or a grave: You could only live there if you had retreated from the world once and for all [...].
The severity of our isolation explains one fact, which is at first incomprehensible; I mean the fact that we were unaware for a long time of the unspeakable horrors that were taking place just a few hundred metres away. The first sign that we noticed was the unusual smell that often came in through the open windows in the evenings and followed us through the night if the wind was coming from one direction: That was the smell of the crematoriums. It was easy to die in Buchenwald, but we didn’t know exactly for what reason and in what way people were dying there.”
Narrator Yet Blum survived. Although he and his wife along with numerous other special inmates were moved to South Tyrol in April 1945, they were liberated there by the Americans. Blum returned to Paris, and to politics: As early as the winter of 1945 he was a special envoy of France to Washington. He also took office again as Prime Minister of the country (in a brief interim cabinet of 1946–47). In his final years, the statesman and essayist championed a humanistic socialism with a European perspective.
