2 Antique books on Zionism: A. Boem, perished in Holocaust, A. Barth, in German
1. Adolf Boehm, perished in Holocaust.
Die Zionistische Bewegung - Eine kurze Darstellung ihrer Entwicklung - 1. Teil: Die Bewegung bis zum Tode Theodor Herzls (Nur Band 1)
Berlin, Welt-Verlag, 1920. 184pp., first edition, Hard cover, 23 x 16 cm.
Cover design by Menachem Birnbaum, perished in Holocaust.
Menachem Birnbaum (also: Menachem Ascher, Acher; born March 13, 1893 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary; probably died in an extermination camp in 1944) was a Jewish book artist, portrait artist and book illustrator.
Condition: Cover stained, rubbed to bottom; yellow paper internally, good condition.
2. Dr. Aron Barth
Orthodxie und Zionismus
Welt-Verlag, 1920. 59 pp. Wrapper. 22 x 15 cm., yellow paper.
Adolf Boehm (January 20, 1873 in Teplitz-Schoenau, Austria-Hungary; † April 10, 1941 in Hartheim, Alkoven (Upper Austria)) was an Austrian factory owner and historiographer of the Zionist movement.
Boehm was a wealthy merchant and manufacturer, co-owner and later owner of the cotton factory Moritz Böhm & Sohn in Vienna, and chairman of the local Jewish National Fund and member of the board of the Jewish community in Vienna. He was highly respected in Vienna's almost 200,000 Jewish community and had made a name for himself in particular as the author of a two-volume history of the Zionist movement, the final third volume of which could not be published. When Martin Buber published the monthly Zionist cultural magazine Der Jude from 1916 to 1924, Adolf Böhm was one of her employees. Together with Leo Goldhammer he edited the magazine Palestine. Journal for the construction of Palestine in Fiba-Verlag, Vienna, and from 1927 he was also its editor.
Böhm rejected repeated invitations to emigrate to Palestine because he did not want to accept the existential threat posed by National Socialism. On one of his last trips to Palestine, probably in 1934, he took extensive parts of Stefan Zweig's library with him, which are now housed in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Almost immediately after the so-called annexation of Austria to the German Reich, SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer Adolf Eichmann began making personal visits to the factory every working day for six weeks in vain to persuade Böhm to draw up a list of the most influential and wealthy Jews for him. Towards the end of the month, Eichmann summoned six leading and still-free representatives of the Jewish community - the president and vice-president of the Jewish community in Vienna, Desider Friedmann and Robert Stricker, and Jakob Ehrlich, former vice-president of the community and president of the "Zionist Organization". , had already been arrested and taken to the Dachau concentration camp[1] - to demand unconditional obedience and uncompromising cooperation from them according to his instructions. He insisted that one of the six be named as the person responsible immediately and suggested Adolf Böhm. Due to Böhm's advanced age and his already poor health, the six nominated the youngest among them instead of him, Alois Rothenberg from the Vienna Palestine Office.[2] Shortly thereafter, Joseph Löwenherz was released from prison and appointed by Eichmann to be the full-time director of Vienna's Jewish community and thus de facto Eichmann's vicarious agent.[3]
Böhm, who continued to have to endure Eichmann's "visits", finally suffered a nervous breakdown from which he never really recovered. He was subsequently first probably housed in the Inzersdorf sanatorium and from September 20, 1940 to March 7, 1941 in the "Berta Presser convalescent home" in Kaltenleutmachen. From there he was transferred to the "Am Steinhof" sanatorium and nursing home in Vienna, possibly with a stopover in Maria Gugging. From there he was taken to the Hartheim killing center on March 13, 1941, along with 20 other patients, and murdered there. Officially, on March 13, 1941, he was transferred to an “institute for the Jewish mentally ill” in the General Government of Poland and died in CheÅ‚m on April 10, 1941; This was a common cover for Jewish victims of the euthanasia murders of “Action T4”: the death certificates were allegedly issued by the “Registry Office Cholm, Post Lublin”, but in fact by the T4 headquarters in Berlin, brought to Lublin and mailed there. [4] His life insurance had already been seized by the Vienna tax office on December 21, 1940 for the Reich flight tax. Böhm's wife Olga, née Lemberger, was deported to Theresienstadt in 1942 and murdered in Auschwitz in 1944. The two children Elisabeth and Ernst managed to escape to North America and Australia in good time.