A very unconventional teacher

The repeated mentioning of the Internationale Sozialistische K a m p f b u n d ( I n t e r n a t i o n a l Socialist Combat League, ISK) in Irene Messinger’s article ‘Marriages of convenience as a survival strategy’ in your November issue prompts me to draw attention to the life of a relative of mine, a cousin of my mother, who was a leading light in that organisation and an active anti-Nazi fighter: Julius Philippson (1894-1943). The ISK, which had been founded by, and followed the philosophy of, Leonard Nelson, was not based on Marxism but advocated the leadership of a socialist elite. Philippson had volunteered for service in the First World War, been taken prisoner by the Russians, earned the Iron Cross First Class, and managed to flee from Russia back to Germany. After the war he qualified as a teacher and became a Studienassessor, teaching at schools first in his birthplace of Magdeburg and later in Berlin, where my family lived. He was a very unconventional teacher, encouraging his students to address him by his first name and call him by the informal ‘du’. Due to his left-wing views he was never promoted to Studienrat, i.e. he did not become a permanent member of a school’s staff. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, Philippson’s teaching career came to an end as he was a Jew and, like most ISK members, he started to work illegally against the Nazis. In order to make it more difficult for the Gestapo to find him he never slept at the same address on two consecutive nights and frequently turned up at our flat asking for a bed – always without notice. He had arranged for us to receive the illegal monthly newsletter published by the ISK which was the size of what is now known as A5 – four pages and printed on extremely thin paper. Looking back, I am still surprised that my father had agreed to receive this: it was delivered by hand, we never saw the person pushing it through our letter box, and, if the Gestapo had ever discovered that we received it, the consequences would have been dire. Philippson was eventually arrested by the Gestapo in 1937 and, as he had slept in our flat the previous night, my parents, my sister and I were all summoned to Gestapo headquarters at the Alexanderplatz to be interrogated. We had agreed that we would firmly deny knowing anything about our relative’s political activities and fortunately the Gestapo believed us. It remained our only encounter with the Gestapo, much to our relief. There was a trial by the Volksgerichtshof and Philippson was condemned to lifelong penal servitude. The official Nazi newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, acknowledged his fortitude at the trial, where presumably his admission of his philosophical beliefs saved him from the death penalty. He served time in several prisons and the last we knew about him was in the town of Celle, not too far from Hanover, where I was stationed as a member of the British army in 1945-46. Wearing a British uniform you could get entry practically anywhere, so I went to the prison in Celle and enquired about him. The official who saw me got hold of a fat ledger and very quickly found the appropriate entry: Philippson had been sent to Auschwitz in 1943. We later learned from a fellow prisoner of his, who had survived, that our relative had not been gassed but had died a ‘natural’ death, caused by overwork and poor food. Philippson’s parents – my mother’s uncle and aunt – were deported to Theresienstadt when they were in their eighties and died shortly after their arrival. Kind people in Magdeburg, where they lived, recently arranged for Stolpersteine to be laid in the pavement where their house had been (it was demolished after the war) and one was added for their son Julius. Only a few weeks ago I visited the city, where I had not been for 81 years, and was able to inspect the Stolpersteine, including that for Julius Philippson. Fritz Lustig