Max Diamant

Max Diamant was born on August 5, 1908 in Łódź into an Eastern Jewish working-class family. At the time, the city belonged to the Russian Empire; today it belongs to Poland. His parents had Russian citizenship. Max grew up speaking four languages. His parents, the industrial worker couple Michail and Anna Diamant, née Neumann, spoke German as well as Yiddish, Russian and Polish, as they came from the Galician part of Poland. The Jewish population there was oriented towards Austria in terms of language  

As a schoolchild, Diamant occasionally did his homework at a Jewish workers' educational association founded by his father. His politically active parents brought him into contact with the Polish Social Democratic Party at an early age. 

During the First World War, Michail Diamant fought as a soldier for Russia and was taken prisoner by the Germans in Berlin. After his release, he joined the USPD in 1917. His support for the Russian revolution soon earned him another prison sentence in Warsaw, which was occupied by German troops. The founding of the Polish state in November 1918 led to his release, but Polish nationalists had him imprisoned again in 1919. This third period of imprisonment lasted several weeks.

In order to spare his son the turmoil of the newly founded Poland and to give him a school education in German, his parents sent Max Diamant to his uncle Hermann Lenz in Mannheim in mid-1919. There he attended elementary school in K 5. In the meantime, he also lived in Ludwigshafen. 

When his parents also managed to leave Poland at the beginning of 1920, they soon moved with Max from Mannheim to Zeitz in Saxony-Anhalt, where his father had contacts through his USPD activities. Max attended elementary school and a Communist children's group there until 1922. This was followed by a two-year traineeship at the Saxony-Anhalt state overland office in Zeitz-Theißen. During this time, Max Diamant also attended the town's industrial training school. As a KPD functionary, he worked illegally.

Michail Diamant sympathized with the Soviet Union, the "model proletarian state". As a former Russian civilian prisoner, he had the right to return and so the family moved to Leningrad, formerly St. Petersburg (Petrograd), in the fall of 1924. Max Diamant became a student officer at the artillery academy, but broke off his military training in 1926. A temporary member of Komsol, the youth organization of the CPSU, Max made his first attempts at journalism at the German-language youth magazine "Die Saat" in Kharkov. However, the internal party "purges" of Stalin's dictatorship put Max under pressure. Interrogated by the Kharkov CPSU, he had to retract one of his reports and practise self-censorship. Shocked by the increasingly threatening surveillance, the nineteen-year-old fled illegally from Leningrad to Germany on a steamer at the end of October 1927. His five-year-old brother Arnold was also sent to Germany by their mother. His parents stayed behind in the Soviet Union. 

Michail became a Soviet citizen in 1925 and worked as a weaver at the "Rote Nagler" factory. The family lived at Leninstr. 29, Apt. 77. In 1929, Mikhail was expelled from the party for supporting the Left Opposition and arrested in November. In 1930 he was sentenced to three years in prison by the troika. After his release in 1931, he worked as a train conductor and lived in Leningrad. He was arrested for the second time in 1936. The Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR in Leningrad sentenced him to ten years in prison. He served his sentence in Solovki. On October 9, 1937, he was sentenced to death. 

The parents were accused of their son's political stance and contacts with him. After the fall of Leon Trotsky, Max Diamant, who was living far away in Western Europe at the time, continued to be regarded as a Trotskyist. His father Mikhail Diamant was shot in November 1937. His mother is believed to be missing and was still living in a gulag in 1942. 

Information about the fate of his parents was close to Max Diamant's heart. Until his last breath, he endeavored to obtain information from the Soviet side and, like a legacy, he passed this mission on to his daughter Doris and her sons.

Alternating between Mannheim and Ludwigshafen, Max made contact with the "Socialist Cultural Community" (SKG), a meeting circle of Mannheim social democrats. The SKG was located in the rooms of the psychoanalyst couple Heinrich and Käthe Stern at Kaiserring 36. At the time, the apartment was a meeting place for the region's left-wing intellectual cultural elite. Inspired by the desire to serve the German labor movement, Max joined the SPD at the beginning of 1928. During the election campaign for the Reichstag elections in May 1928, he worked for the SPD party secretary in Mannheim, Ernst Tesslow. He became an employee of the party organ "Mannheimer Volksstimme" and chairman of the local Jusos. 

He earned his living as a freelance journalist, writing for the Leipziger Volkszeitung, among others. With its editor-in-chief Reinhold Schönlank, Max undertook a trip through working-class towns in the Vogtland region on the border between Bavaria, Saxony, Thuringia and Bohemia, where he witnessed the NSDAP's first breakthrough. In the state elections in Saxony on June 22, 1930, it became the second strongest party after the SPD. Back in Mannheim, he wrote about his impressions and called for the founding of "working groups of young Social Democrats", which took place in September 1930. 

Although he had no A-levels, he began studying at the Mannheim Commercial College in the summer semester of 1930, where he passed the aptitude test. He also attended lectures at the University of Heidelberg. There he headed the editorial office of the student magazine "Der Sozialistische Student" and worked with Golo Mann, among others. 

In the "Mannheimer Volksstimme" newspaper, he agitated against the Nazi movement by summoning up the courage to attend and comment on almost all local NSDAP events. 

Like the other party leftists, Diamant was critical of the policies of the SPD party executive. In October 1931, former SPD left-wingers founded the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (SAP), which Diamant joined. Together with other former Mannheim Young Socialists such as Gustav Roos and the brothers Paul and August Locherer, he founded a local branch of the SAP. The SAP district of Baden, which was founded somewhat later, was based in Mannheim. In addition to his position as chairman of the Mannheim local group, Diamant also became chairman of the district leadership. His apartment was both the office for the Mannheim local group and for the Baden district management. 

During those years, Diamant met his future wife. Anni Nord, who was born in Ludwigshafen in 1907, also had Eastern Jewish roots. Her parents, who came from Dukla in Galicia, insisted on a religious wedding. In 1930, Anni and Max were married according to Jewish rites in a prayer room in the backyard of the house at Maxstr. 64 in Ludwigshafen. There was a "Klaussynagogue" there for Galician Jews, where Anni's uncle Viktor Händler was the prayer leader.

In March 1933, Diamant was to be taken into protective custody as a political activist, as editor of the Volksstimme and as a Jew. With the help of friends, he managed to escape to Strasbourg. In an audio report fifty years later, Max Diamant recounts how he was able to cross the Rhine to France unnoticed: 

I then boarded this magnificent barge from Ludwigshafen, armed with a toothbrush and a towel. People were told that I was planning to visit a soldier's grave of a relative in Alsace. But there was an experienced, reliable acquaintance of a friend of mine on this barge who arranged it. And he knew that I mustn't attract attention under any circumstances and that I would have to disappear into a safe hiding place if the police were to visit the ship. That happened twice and I then got to know the bowels of such a barge. Behind rolled-up ship's chains in a certain place, hidden behind them, I survived these ship visits by the police twice, a little smeared. (To listen on https://we-refugees-archive.org/archive/max-diamant-ueber-seine-flucht/) 

Anni followed him to Strasbourg shortly afterwards. Max learned the French language with the help of newspapers and a dictionary. He also taught himself typesetting and worked at the Paris headquarters of the German Socialist Workers' Party (SAP) in Paris from 1934. Anni made a living as a cleaner. 

Max's political mentor was the communist politician and trade unionist Jakob Walcher (1887-1970). During his years in Paris, Diamant also became friends with Willy Brandt (1913-1992), with whom he signed the Paris Popular Front Appeal, which was published in January 1937. Brandt portrayed his friendship with Diamant as follows: 

Max Diamant was five years ahead of me. But he seemed much older due to his experience and theoretical knowledge: a man of stocky, broad-shouldered stature and with thick black hair. He was full of energy and controlled optimism. His analytical inclinations did not make it difficult for him to find rational - though of course not always correct - explanations for very complicated facts. He was born in Łódź, and his father had belonged to the Polish-Jewish 'Bund' - before he became a communist. In 1936 - unbeknownst to us - his parents were arrested in Leningrad. Both remained missing. (Brandt as cited in: Müller 2004)

The Diamants shared an apartment in Vanves, southwest of Paris, with family friend Paul Frölich and his wife Rosi. Anni cooked so well for everyone that they later set up a restaurant in Mexico.

During the Spanish Civil War in 1936/37, Max was a journalist and liaison officer for the SAP and the Partido de Unificación Marxista (POUM) in Barcelona. Under the pseudonym Hans Diesel, he continued to work closely with the future German Chancellor Willy Brandt, who briefly took over his duties after him. Brandt's party colleague and long-time SPD parliamentary group leader in the Bundestag Herbert Wehner, on the other hand, was ideologically opposed to Max Diamant in the 1930s - and vice versa. Wehner described Diamant as a decisive Trotskyist and Menshevik. The Mensheviks (Russian, literally "minorityists") were a faction of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party that stood in opposition to the Bolsheviks grouped around Lenin. When Wehner publicly attacked Diamant as a Trotskyist in 1937, the SAP protested against the naming of Diamant in order to protect his parents, who were still living in the Soviet Union. The fear was all too justified. Max's father Mikhail Diamant was arrested in Leningrad on October 2, 1937 and brought before the "NKVD special consultation". He was sentenced on November 19 and executed in Kemerovo in Siberia on November 24, 1937. NKVD was the name of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, which later became the USSR Ministry of the Interior. As it turned out a long time later, Wehner himself had provided Stalin's secret police with detailed information on individual KPD members, including Max Diamant. His mother was missing from 1942 onwards. 

The deportation of Jews of Polish origin, the "Polenaktion" on October 28, 1938, affected several of Max's relatives in Ludwigshafen, including his 80-year-old grandfather Moses Leib Händler, who was declared dead in 1945. 

Max Diamant was interned in France in 1939. When Germany began the Second World War with the invasion of Poland, refugees like Max Diamant were among the "enemy aliens". His wife Anni, who did not have German citizenship, was not affected. The collection camp in the Stade des Colombes in Paris (now the Stade Olympique Yves-du-Manoir) was followed by long months of internment in various camps until Max managed to escape to Brittany. He then made his way south to the unoccupied zone, where he was interned again. In a camp in the south of France, the couple Anna and Max, who had previously only been married in a religious ceremony, got married in a civil ceremony in 1940. 

From March 1941, Diamant worked at the Centre Américain de Secours (CAS) in Marseille. This organization maintained a rescue network that enabled around 2000 people to escape from the Nazis. Max also worked with the CAS in Lisbon to get people out of Europe and send parcels to people in need in France.

At the urging of their friends Rosi and Paul Frölich, who were already living in New York, Max and Anni decided to leave Europe. Coming from Lisbon, they and Max's brother Arnold arrived in the port of Veracruz on the passenger ship Nyassa in March 1942. Completely destitute, they built a new life for themselves in Mexico City. Max could not work as a typesetter because he would have needed Mexican citizenship to do so. At the end of 1942, Anni and Max became restaurant owners. In addition to a leather store called La Palestina, the couple opened the "Gourmet" restaurant. It was located on the Paseo de la Reforma boulevard, which leads from the cathedral to Capultepec Castle. 

In Mexico, their daughter Doris was born in 1947. She attended a Jewish kindergarten, then a Jewish, French and Mexican school. Her parents rejected a German school out of concern about Nazi influences on their child. Doris described her memories of the restaurant in 2012: The "Gourmet" served all kinds of home-produced delicacies: Jewish, Russian, Austrian, German fish, meat and cheese preparations, salads, pasta and cakes. Later, imports of canned goods and cheese, for example from France, were added. My mother was absorbed in this work for the restaurant and delicatessen... She learned to speak Spanish very practically. She wasn't lonely there... 

The restaurant and grocery store not only had to feed the family, but also serve to support relatives in Europe. It was not possible to flee directly to Mexico. Max and Anni therefore concentrated on humanitarian aid such as sending parcels, even after the end of the war. Diamant's political work aimed to combat the influence of the National Socialists on the Mexican public, but also to reduce the pressure exerted by the communist cadres on the exiles. 

From 1947 onwards, Diamant corresponded increasingly with friends in Germany, including Willy Brandt. In it, he also explained why, contrary to earlier plans, he had not just stayed in Mexico "for the duration of the war". The couple were allowed to take Mexican citizenship that year and kept it for life. 

Diamant played an important role in the group of German-speaking socialists in Mexico, which was founded in 1949. It also called itself the "Foreign Group of the S.P.D. and was recognized by the SPD Federal Executive Committee. Diamant's tasks consisted of publishing German-language brochures and maintaining contacts with Mexican, Spanish and exiled socialists. From 1953 he worked as a journalist for periodicals in Mexico and Europe, including the Social Democratic Press Service for Latin America. He subscribed to publications in German, Russian, Yiddish, French and Spanish.

In 1958 and 1961, Max Diamant traveled to Germany. His activities and contacts from the previous years made it easier for him to return. The "reparation" money offered in Germany was difficult for Max to accept. In the end, he was persuaded by the argument that if he turned it down, it might fall into the hands of his political opponents or former Nazis. 

So the family decided to return to Germany. In 1962, he found a job in the board administration of IG Metall in Frankfurt. Anni Diamant found it much more difficult to settle in Germany. She withdrew into her private life, had few contacts and struggled with numerous illnesses. In her last years, she was cared for by Max. She died in 1984, eight years before her husband. 

Daughter Doris recalls in 2012: Unfortunately, my mother hardly spoke about the bitter family losses she had suffered. I learned about this long after her death... I experienced my father as eloquent and combative. I never heard him talk about suffering over family loss... My father was 53 years old when he joined the executive board of IG Metall in 1962. His job was to organize foreign workers employed in the metal industry. It was a challenge to which he was able to contribute all his skills, knowledge and contacts. He never neglected the broad impact of his solutions: democracy was to emerge everywhere. His biography had predestined him for this task. 

Willy Brandt visited Diamant in his retirement home in Frankfurt in the 1980s. 

The couple were buried in the main cemetery in Frankfurt. The inscription plate from the now closed grave is to be placed in the Jewish cemetery in Mannheim.