Alfred Benjamin

Alfred Benjamin (8 January 1911 – September 1942) was a German bank employee who became a Communist activist. He was obliged to emigrate and in 1935 was in France where after 1940 he joined the French Resistance. He died in an accident during the late summer of 1942 while attempting to escape from collaborationist France to Switzerland.

Biography Alfred Benjamin was born in Elberfeld, then a rapidly growing industrial town, today part of Wuppertal. His father was an ironmonger. The family identified as Jewish. Benjamin trained for work as a bank clerk. where the German Communist Party had already established its exiled headquarters in Paris.

In September 1935 he was arrested by the French police after he had made an appearance at a trades union meeting in order to call for solidarity with the German socialist Alfred Kayser, who had recently been sentenced to death. It was only with difficulty that Benjamin avoided deportation to Spain following this incident. He nevertheless remained in France, and in 1936 started producing the news-sheet "Trait d’Union", which he used to inform French workers about the situation in Germany and the anti-Fascist resistance struggle. As well as this he worked as an editor for the (German language) Communist Party news-sheet "Frage und Antwort" ("Questions and answers").

In September 1939 both France and Britain declared war on Germany. It would be some months before it became clear what this would mean for Germany, but in the meantime, in both Paris and London, a large number of German political exiles who had emigrated to escape the Nazi government at home were identified as enemy aliens and arrested. Albert Benjamin was arrested and in October 1939 interned in the camp at Rieucros, near to Albi. By this time, on 22 February 1941,