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- The Women's Rosenstraße
Protest in Nazi Berlin
- by Nathan
Stoltzfus
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- Entnommen aus: http://www.aeinstein.org/03_winter89_90.html
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- Many people believe that it was
impossible for the Germans to resist the Nazi dictatorship and the
deportations of German Jews. However, a street protest in early
1943 indicates that resistance was possible, and indeed,
successful.
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- Until
early 1943, Nazi officials exempted Jews married to Gentiles or
"Aryans" (the Nazi term for German non-Jews) from the so-called
Final Solution. In late February of that year, however, during a
mass arrest of the last Jews in Berlin, the Gestapo also arrested
Jews in intermarriages. This was the most brutal chapter of the
expulsion of Jews in Berlin. Without warning, the SS stormed into
Berlin's factories and arrested any Jews still working there.
Simultaneously, all throughout the Reich capital, the Gestapo
arrested Jews from their homes. Anyone on the streets wearing the
"Star of David" was also abruptly carted off with the other Jews
to huge provisional Collecting Centers in central Berlin, in
preparation for massive deportations to Auschwitz.
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- The
Gestapo called this action simply the "Schlußaktion der
Berliner Juden" (Closing Berlin Jew Action). Hitler was offended
that so many Jews still lived in Berlin, and the Nazi Party
Director for Berlin, Joseph Goebbels, had promised to make Berlin
"Judenfrei" (free of Jews) for the Führer's 54th birthday in
April. This "Schlußaktion" was, indeed, the beginning of the
end for about 8,000 of the 10,000 Berlin Jews arrested in its
course. Many who left their houses for what they thought would be
a "normal" day of work, without turning back for even a last
glance or hug, were to end up shortly in the ovens of Auschwitz,
never again to see home or family.
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- About
2,000 of the arrested Jews who were related to Aryan Germans,
however, experienced quite a different fate. They were locked up
in a provisional collecting center at Rosenstraße 2-4, an
administrative center of the Jewish Community in the heart of
Berlin. The Aryan spouses of the interned Jews&emdash;who were
mostly women&emdash;hurried alone or in pairs to the
Rosenstraße, where they discovered a growing crowd of other
women whose loved ones had also been kidnapped and imprisoned
there. A protest broke out. The women who had gathered by the
hundreds at the gate of the improvised detention center began to
call out together in a chorus, "Give us our husbands back." They
held their protest day and night for a week, as the crowd grew
larger day by day.
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- On
different occasions the armed guards between the women and the
building imprisoning their loved ones barked a command: "Clear the
street or we'll shoot!" This sent the women scrambling pell-mell
into the alleys and courtyards in the area. But within minutes
they began streaming out again, inexorably drawn to their loved
ones. Again and again they were scattered, and again and again
they advanced, massed together, and called for their husbands, who
heard them and took hope.
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- The
square, according to one witness, "was crammed with people, and
the demanding, accusing cries of the women rose above the noise of
the traffic like passionate avowals of a love strengthened by the
bitterness of life." One woman described her feeling as a
protester on the street as one of incredible solidarity with those
sharing her fate. Normally people were afraid to show dissent,
fearing denunciation, but on the street they knew they were among
friends, because they were risking death together. A Gestapo man
who no doubt would have heartlessly done his part to deport the
Jews imprisoned in the Rosenstraße was so impressed by the
people on the streets that, holding up his hands in a victory
clasp of solidarity with a Jew about to be released, he pronounced
proudly: "You will be released, your relatives protested for you.
That is German loyalty."
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- "One
day the situation in front of the collecting center came to a
head," a witness reported. "The SS trained machine guns on us: 'If
you don't go now, we'll shoot.' But by now we couldn't care less.
We screamed 'you murderers!' and everything else. We bellowed. We
thought that now, at last, we would be shot. Behind the machine
guns a man shouted something&emdash;maybe he gave a command. I
didn't hear it, it was drowned out. But then they cleared out and
the only sound was silence. That was the day it was so cold that
the tears froze on my face."
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- The
headquarters of the Jewish section of the Gestapo was just around
the corner, within earshot of the protesters. A few salvos from a
machine gun could have wiped the women off the square. But instead
the Jews were released. Joseph Goebbels, in his role as the Nazi
Party Director for Berlin, decided that the simplest way to end
the protest was to release the Jews. Goebbels chose not to
forcibly tear Jews from Aryans who clearly risked their lives to
stay with their Jewish family members, and rationalized that he
would deport the Jews later anyway. But the Jews remained. They
survived the war in Berlin, registered officially with the police,
working in officially authorized jobs, and officially receiving
food rations.
- The
implications of this protest are that mass, public and nonviolent
acts of noncooperation by non-Jewish Germans on behalf of German
Jews could have slowed or even stopped the Nazi genocide of German
Jews. True, some six million Jews were murdered. Not many Jews
were saved. Yet when the (non-Jewish) German populace protested
nonviolently and en masse, the Nazis made concessions. When
Germans protested for Jews, Jews were saved.
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- Although
there were a few men in attendance, this was a protest by women;
women were really the origin and the core of the protest. Women,
traditionally, have felt responsible for home and family; to the
women who were protesting, their families were, in some sense,
their careers; to lose their families was to lose everything
meaningful for them.
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- At
the protest in the Rosenstraße there was a flickering of a
tiny torch, which might have kindled the fire of general
resistance if Germans had taken note of the women on the
Rosenstraße and imitated their actions of mass civil
disobedience. Perhaps they did not do so because they were used to
thinking that neither women, nor nonviolent actions, could be
politically powerful.
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