In 1943, hundreds of German women saved their Jewish husbands from death camps
The Rosenstrasse protest was the only one of its kind
The Nazis were waiting until they won the war to deport the rest of the German Jews, namely the ones who were married to Aryan women. Then they jumped the gun, and ended up facing the only major act of public protest by Germans throughout the entire war.
Before dawn on February 27, 1943, the Gestapo pulled Jews from their homes and jobs, captured them off the streets, and stuffed them into trucks headed for various detention centers throughout Berlin. Most of these people were Jewish men who were married to “Aryan” women, or the male children of these so called inter-marriages (called mischlinge, or mixed blood).
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, some 2,000 of these people were transported and held at a local Jewish community center on Rosenstrasse (Rose Street). There, police planned to check their papers and determine whether the prisoners would be deported — for labor camps or extermination camps, no one really knew.
Family members, wives, mothers, and children panicked. Initially, they had no idea where their men were being detained, and didn’t even know if they would ever return.
Adding to the anxiety was operation Fabrik-Aktion (Factory Action), a German move in early March that rounded up 11,000 Jews and shipped them to Auschwitz. The Gestapo never intended to send mischlinge Jews to Auschwitz, but rather to keep “exempted” Jews inside the Reich borders, at forced labor camps. But that didn’t matter.
In short order, word spread among the “mixed” families that their relatives were being held at the Rosenstrasse center. Inside, the men had very little food and inadequate sanitary facilities. Slowly, a crowd amassed, mostly of wives and mothers hoping to learn more about who was inside. Frustrated by the lack of information, they stayed day after day in the freezing temperatures. They chanted, “Give us our husbands back.”
February crept into March. The crowds grew to 150 and then 200 people, some reports say into the thousands. Word spread about the group, first across the city, then to international press. It was an unprecedented demonstration by German citizens against Jewish incarceration. The protesters occasionally yelled but sometimes stayed silent, watching. When officers and trucks with machine guns threatened lethal force, the women stayed and faced them.
“Without warning, the guards began setting up machine guns,” said Charlotte Israel, one of the protesters, in 1990. “Then they directed them at the crowd and shouted: ‘If you don’t go now, we’ll shoot.’ The movement surged backward. But then, for the first time, we really hollered. Now we couldn’t care less…Now they’re going to shoot in any case, so now we’ll yell too, we thought. We yelled, ‘Murderer, murderer, murderer, murderer…’”
The Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels knew a massacre of hundreds of German women in the middle of Berlin wouldn’t look good. And it would further depress military morale after recent defeats on the battlefield — half a million soldiers had died in the Battle of Stalingrad by time the Nazis surrendered on February 3. Goebbels ordered the release of the intermarried Jews at Rosenstrasse. In his journal, he promised to finish the job “in a few weeks.”
Officials released the first “mixed-marriage” Jewish man on March 1. The processing would continue until March 12, by which time the protesters had dispersed. Of the 2,000 detained men, 25 were sent to Auschwitz. The rest were considered “exempt.” However, the day after their release from Rosenstrasse, Gestapo officials returned and deported them to nearby labor camps. The plan was to ship them on to extermination camps once the Germans had won the war.
The same paranoia and uncertainty that Nazi Germany cultivated as a weapon against its own people was what ultimately caused citizens to rise up. Partners of “mixed” marriages had been persecuted since the rise of the Third Reich in 1933. Jews whose German spouses divorced them were sent to death camps; those who refused divorce were spared but faced complete social ostracism. By the end of the war, 98% of surviving German Jews were those in intermarriages. But between 160,000 and 180,000 German Jews were killed; in total, up to 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust.
At Rosenstrasse, the wives and mothers could only guess what horrible fates awaited their husbands and sons, and they would not take it. Without their actions, it’s unclear how many more men would have been shipped directly to Auschwitz.
The success of the Rosenstrasse protest — albeit mixed — raises uncomfortable questions about what other public steps German citizens could have taken to protest genocide under Nazism, writes Nathan Stoltzfus in Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany (2001), with the knowledge that resistance might not necessarily lead to martyrdom. To be sure, all acts of resistance came at great personal risk, not the least of which was deportation. Roughly 77,000 German citizens were killed for sabotage. Other subversive German efforts to cripple the Reich included hiding or smuggling out Jews, distributing anti-Nazi literature, attempted coups, or using established government, military, or church channels to spy and hatch conspiracies. As such, much of the effort against Hitler happened from within, argued German historian Hans Mommsen in 1985. It was a “resistance without the people.”
Well, most of it. The Rosenstrasse community center no longer exists, but a sculpture memorial called Block der Frauen (Block of Women) was erected in a nearby park in 1995. The inscription reads, “The strength of civil disobedience, the vigor of love overcomes the violence of dictatorship; Give us our men back; Women were standing here, defeating death; Jewish men were free.”
