Ellen Marx

Ellen Marx (born Ellen Pinkus; 24 March 1921 – 11 September 2008) was a human rights activist. She was born in Germany and emigrated to Argentina, arriving in May 1939: she never saw her parents again. Her own youngest daughter disappeared when aged 28 in August 1976. After that Ellen Marx became a prominent member of the German-Jewish community in Buenos Aires and a leader in the German originating group within the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo movement.

Life Provenance and early years Ellen Pinkus was born into a German-Jewish family in Berlin. She was her parents' only child. Isidor Pinkus, her father. was a leather wholesaler, and a committed democrat at a time when many Germans identified the new democratic regime as a foreign imposition resulting from military defeat and national humiliation. Her mother, born Gertrud Hoffnung, was a Social Democrat and a member of the German League for Human Rights. Ellen received a liberal Jewish education. She attended the prestigious "Prince Bismarck School" (as it was known at that time). In 1934 she joined the Berlin "Ring" scouting organisation which since 1933 had been part of the "League of German-Jewish Youth" ("Bund deutsch-jüdischer Jugend"). Traditionally the league organised Saturday meetings at which members could learn the revived Hebrew language and study Jewish history.

At the secondary school that Ellen Pinkus attended the atmosphere began to change quite quickly in 1933:

"As early as 1933 I became aware of an increasingly stifling atmosphere. The teachers all identified to some degree with National Socialism..... there were initially many Jewish girls at this school. The first ones that left came from families that had fled Bolshevism in the Soviet Union or anti-Semitism in Poland and Hungary. Evidently these families had preserved their instinct for danger. In contrast, the long-established Jewish educated bourgeoisie felt itself part of the German culture and people, missing or ignoring the danger."

The Nazis had taken power early in 1933 and rapidly transformed Germany into a one-party dictatorship. Antisemitism was integrated into public policy and became progressively more oppressive for those affected. After the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938 Isidor Pinkus lost his customers. The day after the pogrom she was handed a letter at school addressed to her father from the mayor of Berlin in which Ellen's father was requested to remove her from the school. One teacher called her aside and whispered that he wished her "all the best", while other teachers and fellow-pupils looked away. For Jewish pupils, exclusion from the school turned out to be permanent. She never had an opportunity to sit for her school final exams (Abitur), and despite later attempts to catch up after she had left Germany, she would never succeed in completing her schooling. Three months after the military take-over a decree was promulgated making it possible for public service workers to be removed instantly from their jobs without justification. The union activist Nora Marx lost her job two weeks later.

Although the full extent and nature of the disappearances that occurred after the army took power emerged only little by little, people already knew enough for Ellen Marx to have been desperately worried by her daughter's unexplained disappearance. She looked everywhere and asked everyone she could think of for evidence of her daughter's whereabouts. She went to all the police stations in the area. Everyone she asked said they knew nothing about what had happened to Nora. The police stations she visited included Police station number 42 in the Mataderos quarter. There she was assured that there were no detainees held in the police cells. It later transpired, from the testimony of a fellow detainee, that this was the police station to which Nora was taken following her capture and where, with others, she was held and tortured for at least five days.

Eventually Ellen Marx was reconciled to the probability that Nora was dead, but she never stopped trying to find out more about what had happened, though many details remain uncertain. It appears that Nora Marx was captured by "security personnel" between 16.00 and 19.00 on Saturday 21 August 1976. According to one version, Nora Marx was one of several people detained in a workshop used to make tote bags. The workshop also contained a printing machine and towards the end of that Saturday afternoon Nora Marx, with others, had gone to use that machine "to print leaflets".

Later years The military government collapsed in 1983, after which it became easier to investigate what had happened to victims of the Dirty War and to pursue some level of justice. Shortly after Nora disappeared Ellen Marx had become a member of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo movement.

In West Germany Marx addressed the Evangelical Church Assembly, she spoke at press conferences and she addressed universities. Pointing out that she was a Jewess from Berlin she told her audiences: "You Germans know what an authoritarian regime is". She disparaged West Germany's diplomats in Argentina, contrasting their efforts with those of embassies representing countries such as Austria, Spain and Ireland, all of which had done a spectacularly better job of looking after their people. In the case of Nora Marx, however, the court decided it had no competence to hear the case, since the victim was not German.

According to the final report of the commission set up by a later Argentinian government in respect of these matters, more than 12% of the thousands of disappeared under the military dictatorship were members of the Jewish community - many descended from German-Jewish emigrants - even though the overall proportion of the Argentine population identified as Jewish was a little under 1%.

Ellen Marx continued to investigate human rights violations and crimes committed under the dictatorship for the rest of her life. Till shortly before she died she led the group of German-born mothers of the disappeared and the other victims. In January 2008, tend years after the death of her husband, Erich Marx, she died following a fall at the "Hogar Alfredo Hirsch" retirement home just outside Buenos Aires where, by that time, she was living. She had handed over family memorabilia to the Jewish Museum in Berlin.