Rosenstrasse protest

"Whoever wears this sign is an enemy of our people" – thousands of Jews in non-privileged mixed marriages wore this star of David.

Most historians have understood the protest as part of the history of intermarriages. It was the goal of the Nazi government to classify intermarried Jews similarly to those of the "full-Jew" status as defined by the Nuremberg Laws, and murder them accordingly. However, most of those deemed to be of the Aryan race who were married to Jews refused to divorce. The Nazi regime ultimately refrained from outright persecution of these individuals, possibly to avoid drawing attention to these examples of successful non-compliance. The Nazi regime may have feared jeopardising the secrecy of the Final Solution (there were some 30,000 intermarried couples in Germany as of 1939).[1] Under pressure from this intense lobbying, the regime began to make exceptions for intermarried Jews. Nonetheless, they continued to exert strong pressure on Aryan partners (mostly women) to divorce their Jewish partners. The exceptionally brutal arrests of Berlin Jews, beginning on February 27, 1943 marked an escalation in efforts to remove these Jewish family members.[2].

Recently, some German historians have set the protest within the contexts of left-wing resistance, Jewish underground survival, and Nazi policies of forced labour and deportation, and to argue that while the non-Jewish partners were targeted, harassed and intended for internment, actual deportation was not the aim in early 1943. Wolf Gruner has argued that at this time the Gestapo excluded Jews with Aryan partners from expulsion, and corrected Berlin officials who tried to remove them. German historian Diane Schulle summarizes this perspective in her essay "Forced Labour": "Gruner…suggests that regardless of the protests, the deportation of mixed-marriage partners had never been part of the plan. The arrests of Mischlinge ["half-Jews"] and Jews living in mixed marriages had been undertaken for a purpose other than deportation: registration."[3] Citing Goebbels' diary, Gruner does not dispute that in early 1943 Goebbels and Hitler were determined to conclude the "Jewish Question" in Germany and in Berlin "as fast as possible", and writes that Hitler ordered Nazi Party leaders "to be ruthless". However, Gruner says Nazi directives at that time prohibited the Gestapo from deporting German Jews married to non-Jews, and so in Gruner's view the protest had no impact on the Gestapo, since deportation was not their aim. As evidence, Gruner says that on February 20, 1943, Himmler's Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) ordered that intermarried Jews were to be exempted from the deportations "temporarily". Four days later, a Gestapo order from the city of Frankfurt an der Oder directed Gestapo agents to avoid drawing attention to intermarried Jews. They were instead encouraged to arrest these Jews on other charges including "impudence", prior to sending them to a concentration camp. According to this order, Gruner wrote that "much would depend on the arbitrary behavior of the officers at each location".

On 18 February 1943, Goebbels proclaimed a policy of "Total War" in a speech in Berlin. He now argued that the threat of a second "stab-in-the-back" required the "internal security" situation of the Reich be improved.[4] On January 22, Goebbels and Hitler agreed that it was time for the final push to expel the last Jews in Germany.[5] At this meeting, Hitler and Goebbels agreed that there "could be no internal security" until the last Jews living in Vienna and Berlin could be deported "as quickly as possible".[4]

Just after the German defeat in the Battle of Stalingrad, the Gestapo had arrested the last of the Jews in Berlin during the Fabrikaktion. Around 1,800 Jewish men, almost all of them married to non-Jewish women (others being the so-called Geltungsjuden), were separated from the other 10,000 arrested, and housed temporarily at Rosenstraße 2–4, a welfare office for the Jewish community located in central Berlin.[6]

On the morning of Saturday February 27, 1943, the SS, Gestapo and the Berlin police began to arrest Jews all over Berlin. The 1,800 men were so-called "privileged Jews", a category exempt from deportation and other anti-Jewish measures by reason of being married to German spouses, or employment as officials of the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland, the Jewish organization officially recognised by the German government for the purpose of controlling the Jewish population.[7]

Despite the media blackout ordered by Goebbels, it was impossible for the state to arrest so many Jews in Berlin in one day without people noticing. All over Berlin on 27 February, trucks packed full of Jews were constantly going up and down the streets of Berlin. All throughout March 1, more and more trucks had arrived at Rosenstrasse 2–4 to pack Jewish people from around Berlin into the center. The people arriving at Rosenstrasse were mostly Jewish men married to Aryan women or Mischlinge.

By this point, several of the hundreds of women gathered outside of Rosenstrasse 2-4 had announced they would not leave until their husbands had been released. A vehicle drove up with four men from the 1st Waffen-SS Division Adolf Hitler Leibstandarte to tell the women to go home, but they were ignored. The authorities were astonished by the protests as it had never occurred to them that this was possible, and the SS guards at the Rosenstrasse 2-4 felt it necessary to call upon the Berlin police to provide reinforcements as the crowds outside of Rosenstrasse 2-4 kept getting larger and larger.

The protests were briefly stopped on the night of 1 March 1943 when the British Royal Air Force (RAF) bombed Berlin. It was a public holiday in honour of the Luftwaffe, which the RAF decided to mark with an especially big air raid on Berlin. Those held inside of the Rosenstrasse recalled the cowardice of the SS and Gestapo, who were the first to take to the cellars of the building to escape the bombing as soon as the air raid siren blew. Ursula Braun, a fiancée of one of the interred Jewish men, recalled mixed feelings about the bombing of Berlin: "On the one hand were fury and hate against the Nazis, who deserved the attack, and on the other side there was terrible misery all around each of us-the screaming people, the hellish fires."[8] One Jewish woman, Charlotte Israel, stated: "I always had such fear about the air raids. But on that night I thought, that serves them right! I was so enraged. I was together with a few other, who got down on their knees and prayed. I could have laughed in scorn! But then I thought of my husband, who as locked up at Rosenstrasse. I knew they would not be able to leave the building." Sometimes, people passing by joined the protests.[9]

By 4 March 1943, the regime felt threatened enough by the protests at Rosenstrasse to lash out by executing the last members of the Communist Herbert Baum resistance group who had burned down a Nazi art exhibit in Berlin in May 1942 while arresting several prominent Jewish intellectuals, who were all sent to Auschwitz. The RSHA favored shooting all of the women protesting on Rosenstrasse, but this plan was vetoed by Goebbels, who argued that the protests were apolitical, an attempt by women to keep their families together rather an attempt to bring down the Nazi regime. In the aftermath of the Battle of Stalingrad, a defeat which had gravely shaken German morale and led to the first signs of defeatism among the German people, Goebbels had proclaimed a policy of Total War. Goebbels argued that there was no way the regime could massacre thousands of unarmed women in the middle of Berlin and keep the massacre secret, and the news of the massacre would further undermine German morale by showing that the German people were not all united in the Volksgemeinschaft for Total War. The American historian Nathan Stolzfus argued that the need to keep the appearance of the German people all united in the Volksgemeinschaft might explain why force was not used, but:

Nevertheless, had there been no protest on Rosenstrasse, the Gestapo would have kept on arresting and deporting Jews until perhaps even Eichmann's most radical plans had been fulfilled. Differences existed between Eichmann's office and the leadership on the importance of maintaining social quiescence during deportations, but this would not have mattered if the protests during the Final Roundup had not arisen. Power plays surrounding decision-making on intermarried Jews and mischlinge do not so much explain the survival of these Jews as point to the regime's fear of unrest. There would have been no hesitation and no conflict among officials had intermarried Germans cooperated fully with Nazi racial aims ... It was the recalcitrance of intermarried Germans that had made a real issue out of the different positions of the top leadership and the RSHA on the importance of social quiescence in the first place and it was their protest in 1943 that soon caused Goebbels to revert to the position of temporarily deferring these problem cases.[10]

Despite periodic threats of being shot if the women did not disperse their protest, the women would scatter briefly, and then return to Rosenstrasse 2–4 to continue protesting.[11] Holzer later stated in an interview: "We expected that our husbands would return home and that they wouldn't be sent to the camps. We acted from the heart, and look what happened. If you had to calculate whether you would do any good by protesting, you wouldn't have gone. But we acted from the heart. We wanted to show that we weren't willing to let them go. What one is capable of doing when there is danger can never be repeated. I'm not a fighter by nature. Only when I have to be. I did what was given me to do. When my husband need my protection, I protected him ... And there was always a flood of people there. It wasn't organized or instigated. Everyone was simply there. Exactly like me. That's what is so wonderful about it".

On 6 March 1943, Goebbels in his capacity as the Gauleiter of Berlin ordered all of the people imprisoned at Rosenstrasse 2-4 released, writing "I will commission the security police not to continue the Jewish evacuations in a systematic manner during such a critical time [a reference to the defeat in the Battle of Stalingrad]. We want to rather spare that for ourselves until after a few weeks; then we can carry it out that much more thoroughly". In reference to the protests, Goebbels attacked the RSHA, stating "One has to intervene all over the place, to ward off damages. The efforts of certain officers are so lacking in political savvy that one cannot let them operate on their own for ten minutes!". On 1 April 1943, the American Legation in Bern reported to Washington: "Action against Jewish wives and husbands on the part of the Gestapo ... had to be discontinued some time ago because of the protest which such action aroused".

The first page of a list of 67 women from the Berlin Bureau of Reparations who attested to protesting at the Rosenstrasse demonstration.

Leopold Gutterer, who was Goebbels's deputy at the Propaganda Ministry, remembered that Goebbels stated if force was used to crush the demonstrations, it would prompt wider protests all over Berlin, which might soon become political, and could possibly even lead to the overthrow of the Nazi regime. Gutterer stated in an interview: "Goebbels released the Jews in order to eliminate that protest from the world. That was the simplest solution: to eradicate completely the reason for the protest. Then it wouldn't make any sense to protest anymore. So that others didn't take a lesson [from the protest], so others didn't begin to do the same, the reason [for the protest] had to be eliminated. There was unrest, and it could have spread from neighborhood to neighborhood ... Why should Goebbels have had them [the protestors] all arrested? Then he would have only had even more unrest, from the relatives of these newly arrested persons". Gutterer also said: "That [protest] was only possible in a large city, where people lived together, whether Jewish or not. In Berlin were also representatives of the international press, who immediately grabbed hold of something like this, to loudly proclaim it. Thus news of the protest would travel from one person to the next". Goebbels swiftly realized that to use force against the women protesting on the Rosenstrasse would undermine the claim that all Germans were united in the volksgemeinschaft, which was especially threatening as belief in the volksgemeinschaft held the German home front together. Furthermore, using force against the protestors would not only damage the volksgemeinschaft, which provided the domestic unity to support the war, but would also draw unwanted attention to the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question". Stolzfus wrote: "A public discussion about the fate of deported Jews threatened to disclose the Final Solution and thus endanger the entire war effort."[12]

Despite the news blackout imposed by Goebbels, the news of the protests on the Rosenstrasse had traveled swiftly by word of mouth all over Germany and beyond; in Switzerland, British and American diplomats heard rumors of the Rosenstrasse protests, and in the first week of March 1943, British and American newspapers reported on the protests in Berlin. Goebbels hit back by having the German newspapers claim that the women were actually protesting against the British bombing of Berlin, and far from cracking, the volksgemeinschaft was stronger than ever, stating that charity donations in Germany had gone up 70% in the last year [i.e. a sign that the volksgenossen or "National Comrades" all cared for each other],

Hitler himself expressed concerns that the protestors on the Rosenstrasse reminded him too much of those Germans who protested against World War I in 1918, which presaged the November Revolution. The National Socialist regime had based its claim to legitimacy to a very large extent on the claim the volksgemeinschaft had been created in 1933, and anything that suggested that the volksgemeinschaft was maintained only by force instead of free will thus threatened the regime's claim to legitimacy. On 9 March 1943, during a meeting, Hitler told Goebbels that he acted "correctly" as he understood the "psychological" reasons for the Rosenstrasse protests. Having praised Goebbels for "having done the right thing", Hitler added he still expected Goebbels to make certain the Jews of Berlin "disappeared", if just not right now. The Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, through he intensely disliked Goebbels, also approved of releasing the Jews held on the Rosenstrasse. Himmler, who liked to boast that he "felt the pulse of the German people", had advised in 1941 during the protests against the Aktion T4 mass murder program to cancel the program as it was creating too many protests, and now advised that it was better to give in since using force would only cause more protests.

As the Jews were released from the Rosenstrasse 2–4, they were warned by the Gestapo that this was not the end, and to enjoy their moment of freedom while it lasted, because they would be coming for them again.

Despite his promise to Hitler, Goebbels did not try to deport the men of the Rosenstrasse to Auschwitz again, saying the risk of protest was too great, and instead ordered the men of the Rosenstrasse to stop wearing their yellow stars of David on 18 April 1943. Without knowing it, the women who protested on the Rosenstrasse had also saved the lives of other Jews. On May 21, 1943, in response to a question from the chief of the Security Police in Paris, Rolf Günther, who was Adolf Eichmann's deputy at the Jewish Desk of the RSHA, stated that French Jews married to Gentiles could not be deported until the question of German Jews in mixed marriages was "clarified". As half of the Jews living in mixed marriages in the Reich were living in Berlin, the question could not be "clarified" until Jews living in mixed marriages in Berlin were deported, which thus led Günther to rule no deportations of French Jews in mixed marriages at present. On 21 May 1943, Ernst Kaltenbrunner of the RSHA issued a memo ordering the release of all German Jews in mixed marriages from concentration camps except those convicted of criminal offenses. The same memo listed four categories of Jews who until now had been spared deportation, including those considered "irreplaceable" by the arms industry; the memo ordered the first three categories deported, but spared the fourth, namely those in mixed marriages as it stated a repeat of the Rosenstrasse protests was not desirable. The men imprisoned in the Rosenstrasse survived the Holocaust. The protests on the Rosenstrasse were the only time that there was ever a protest against the "Final Solution" in Nazi Germany.[9]

The building in which the detainees were held no longer exists. A rose-colored Litfaß column commemorates the event.

Rosenstrasse protest memorial

The building on Rosenstraße, near Alexanderplatz, in which the men were held, was destroyed during an Allied bombing of Berlin at the end of the war. The original Rosenstraße location is now marked by a rose-colored Litfaß column 2–3 meters high, dedicated to the demonstration. Information about this event is posted on the Litfaß column.

In the mid-1980s, Ingeborg Hunzinger, an East German sculptor, created a memorial to those women who took part in the Rosenstraße Protest. The memorial, named "Block der Frauen" (Block of Women), was erected in 1995 in a park not far from the site of the protest. The sculpture shows protesting and mourning women, and an inscription on the back 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." The Israeli historian Omer Bartov observed that the memorial does not actually explain what the Rosenstrasse protests were or achieved, as if many Germans would prefer to forget about the protests, presumably because the protesters achieved their demands.[14]

The events of the Rosenstraße protests were made into a film in 2003 by Margarethe von Trotta under the title Rosenstraße.

There is a roleplaying game by Unruly Design, as part of their Warbirds collection, called Rosenstrasse that has players act as Jewish-German couples in Berlin leading up to the protest.

2018 officially marks the 75th anniversary of the protest. In an article titled "Rosenstrasse at 75", the events of the protest are highlighted and compared to societal grievances associated with Iranian protestors today. Furthermore, the German consulate in New York, United States commemorated this anniversary on February 24, 2018.[15]

• Wolfgang Scheffler, Judenverfolgung im Dritten Reich 1933 bis 1945, Gutenberg (1965): 44, 69.
• Kurt Jakob Ball-Kaduri, Berlin wird judenfrei: die Juden in Berlin in den Jahren 1942/1943, Saur (1973): 212–214.
• Marlis G. Steinert, Hitler's War and the Germans: Public Mood and Attitude During the Second World War, trans. T.E.J. de Witt, Athens: Ohio University Press (1977): 142.
• Joachim Neander, Sein Leben, seine Lieder, sein Tal, Verlag Presseverband der Evangelischen Kirche im Rheinland (1980).
• Monika Richarz, Judisches Leben in Deutschland: Selbstzeugnisse zur Sozialgeschichte, vol. 3, 1918–1945, Stuttgart: Dt. Verl.-Anst. (1982): 64.
• Helmut Eschwege and Konrad Kwiet, Selbstbehauptung und Widerstand deutsche Juden im Kampf um Existenz und Menschewuerde 1933-1945, Hamburg: Christians (1984):43.
• Konrad Kwiet, Selbstbehauptung und Widerstand: Deutsche Juden im Kampf um Existenz und Menschenwürde, 1933-1945, Christians (1984). ISBN 978-3767208506
• Sybil Milton, Women and the Holocaust: The Case of German and German-Jewish Women, in When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany, ed. Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, and Marion A. Kaplan, New York: Monthly Review Press (1984): 319.
• Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics, New York: St. Martin's Press (1987): 337.
• Helmut Eschwege, Fremd unter meinesgleichen: Erinnerungen eines Dresdner Juden, Ch. Links; 1. Aufl edition (1991). ISBN 978-3861530237
• Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933-1945, New York: Aaron Asher Books (1992): 132.
• Antonia Leugers, Gegen eine Mauer bischöflichen Schweigens: Der Ausschuss für Ordensangelegenheiten und seine Widerstandskonzeption 1941 bis 1945, Verlag J. Knecht (1996).
• Christof Dipper, Schwierigkeiten mit der Resistenz, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 22 (1996): 409–416.
• Heinz Boberach, Aemter, Abkuerzungen, Aktionen des NS-Staates, Munich: Saur (1997): 379.
• Eric A. Johnson, Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans, New York: Basic Books (1999): 25.
• Marion A. Kaplan, Dignity and Despair, Oxford University Press: (1999): 193.
• Jill Stephenson, Women in Nazi Germany, Routledge; 1 edition (2001).
• Nathan Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany, Rutgers University Press (March 2001): paperback: 386 pages. ISBN 0-8135-2909-3
• Christof Dipper, Third Reich History as if the People Mattered, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 26, no. 4 (2000).John J. Michalczyk, Confront!: Resistance in Nazi Germany, Peter Lang (publisher), (2004): 8. ISBN 0820463175
• Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II, Cambridge University Press; 2 edition (2005).
• Wolf Gruner, Widerstand in der Rosenstraße, Fischer Taschenbuch Vlg. (2005). ISBN 978-3596168835
• Doris L. Bergen, War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., (2009): 202.
• Katharina von Kellenbach, The Mark of Cain: Guilt and Denial in the Post-War Lives of Nazi Perpetrators, Oxford University Press; 1 edition (2013).
• Nathan Stoltzfus, Hitler's Compromises: Coercion and Consensus in Nazi Germany, Yale University Press (2016). ISBN 978-0-300-21750-6
• Nathan Stoltzfus and Birgit Maier-Katkin, Protest in Hitler's "National Community": Popular Unrest and the Nazi Response, Berghahn Books (2016). ISBN 978-1-78238-824-1
• Mordecai Paldiel, Saving One's Own: Jewish Rescuers During the Holocaust, University of Nebraska Press (2017). ISBN 9780827612617
• Paul R. Bartrop and Michael Dickerman, The Holocaust: An Encyclopedia and Document Collection, ABC-CLIO (2017).

• The Women's Rosenstraße Protest in Nazi Berlin, Nathan Stoltzfus
• Resistance by Berlin women against Goebbels (German language)
• Encyclopedia of Jewish Suffering, Book review of Jews in Nazi Berlin: From Kristallnacht to Liberation. Edited by Beate Meyer, Hermann Simon and Chana Schuetz, The University of Chicago Press. Book review By Alexander Zvielli, The Jerusalem Post, 4/9/2010. "An evocative profile of wartime Berlin reveals the shame, humiliation and destruction that befell the city's Jews."