Heinz Joachim

Heinz Günther Joachim (13 December 1919 – 18 August 1942) was a German music student. He played the clarinet. In 1941 he became involved with an anti-government resistance group. He was arrested at work on 22 May 1942 and murdered/executed at Plötzensee Prison on 18 August 1942.

Heinz Joachim and his family were Jewish. His wife and his father were also killed under government auspices during the Hitler years. His mother and four younger brothers survived the Holocaust, however. After 1945 they moved to Uruguay and, supported by relatives there, started new lives.

Life Heinz Günther Joachim was born in Berlin a few months after the end of the First World War, the first-born of his parents' five sons. Baum was a few years older than most of their friends and colleagues. At around the time of their marriage Heinz and Marianne Joachim became members of what came to be known as the Baum group, a circle of forced labourers living in Berlin. Joachim got hold of a copying machine which the group could use to produce political pamphlets.

The Baum group's most highly publicised political action was an arson attack carried out on 18 May 1942 against the "Soviet Paradise" exhibition in Berlin's "Lustgarten" pleasure park. The arson attack inflicted relatively little physical damage on the exhibition, which re-opened the next day, but news of it had a more lasting impact. Further arrests followed. Just over two weeks later Marianne Joachim was arrested at the home the couple had shared.

Heinz Joachim was executed at Berlin's Plötzensee Prison on 18 August 1942. Alfons Joachim, the father of Heinz, was the subject of a denunciation in July 1944: he is known to have died on 4 December 1944 at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. The mother of Heinz Joachim, Anna Emilie Luise Joachim, was still alive in 1945, as were his four younger brothers. In 1947 they emigrated together to Uruguay where his aunt had married a businessman called Viktor Friedheim. Friedheim owned a chocolate factory and was able to give the family survivors work and support.