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The Narrative Arc
When Your Silence Becomes Complicity in Trump’s America
What 1943 Berlin teaches us about fighting back today
When Fear Becomes Policy
During my recent visit to Berlin, I carried a list of historic places I wanted to visit related to the history of Nazism. I wrote about several of them for Medium — the Reichstag, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the site where Von Stauffenberg was executed. But one location on my list remained unvisited: the Block der Frauen, or Women’s Block, on Rosenstrasse.
In February 1943, this unremarkable street became the site of something extraordinary. Around 1,800 Jewish men married to non-Jewish women had been arrested for deportation. For over a week, in freezing winter conditions, approximately 6,000 people — mostly their wives and relatives — protested in shifts outside the building where the men were held. They demanded their release. And incredibly, in Nazi Germany, it worked. The regime relented. The men were freed.
The Rosenstrasse protest stands as one of the few examples of successful mass public dissent against Nazi policies. It proved that even under the most totalitarian conditions, collective action could force authoritarian power to retreat. Such victories were rare —…
