The Rosenstrasse protest was the only mass public demonstration by Germans in the Third Reich against the deportation of Jews. The protest on Rosenstraße ("Roses street") took place in Berlin during February and March 1943.
This demonstration was initiated and sustained by the non-Jewish wives and relatives of Jewish men and Mischlinge, (those of mixed Jewish and so-called Aryan heritage). Their husbands had been targeted for deportation, based on the racial policy of Nazi Germany, and detained in the Jewish community house on Rosenstrasse. The protests, which occurred over the course of seven days, continued until the men being held were released by the Gestapo. The protest by the women of the Rosenstrasse led to the release of approximately 1,800 Berlin Jews.
Context
From the onset of his power, Adolf Hitler dedicated himself fully to accomplishing his idea of the ideal government. In his eyes, a model government drew "conscious consent" from its strength in three pillars of authority. In Mein Kampf, he asserts that a government who has mastered popularity, force, and social tradition "may be regarded as unshakeable". Social acceptance was integral to the Nazi party's continued power. Before beginning to deport Jews as a part of the Final Solution, the regime "made a trial deportation of German Jews" and "had their German neighbors studied attentively" who, in a win for the regime, "had hardly noticed" their missing neighbors.
Many non-Jewish Germans also willingly condemned Jews to the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police, often for very little personal gain. It was partially an "environment of terror" pushing Germans to self-police; however, a large number of Germans "went well beyond what... survival demanded to assist the regime." Laws against relationships between non-Jews and Jews implemented by the regime were precedented by reports made by citizens of what they considered to be antisocial or deviant behavior. In 1935, following a slew of reports to the Gestapo in July, the Nuremberg Race Laws "exclude[d] German Jews from Reich citizenship and prohibit[ed] them from marrying or having sexual relations with persons of 'German or German-related blood' at any point in the future. The Nuremberg Laws, aimed at preventing further racial mixing, did not dissolve existing marriages "in deference to the social and religious sanctity and privacy of marriage."
By December 1942, 27,744 intermarried Jews were registered in Germany.Report by SS statistician Richard Korherr, April 19, 1943, ND NO-5193 Initially, non-Jewish women married more Jewish people than their male counterparts. After the consolidation of power under Hitler, more non-Jewish men had divorced their partners than women, so the majority of intermarried relationships were between a non-Jewish wife and her Jewish husband. These women had long faced social and societal pressure from their communities to divorce their husbands long before the Holocaust. Therefore, when the campaign against their husbands began, non-Jewish women married to Jewish men were already resistant to the outward pressure. As they encountered many Jews in their day-to-day lives, non-Jewish women were not susceptible to "propaganda's abstract evil depictions", causing the regime to turn to force.
In Berlin, the majority of Jews spared from deportation were those in intermarried relationships or those working in armaments factories. Since 1933, these intermarriages were seen by the Nazis as their "certain victims", and the regime tried with all its might to get rid of them. However, these intermarried Jews were woven tightly into their communities, and the regime, cautious of "antagonizing non-Jewish Germans and injuring public morale", had indefinitely delayed their deportation (and likely murder).
Chronology On January 22, 1943, Joseph Goebbels and Hitler agreed that it was time for the final push to expel the last Jews in Germany. 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".Gellatey Robert Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001 page 143. On February 18, 1943, Goebbels proclaimed a policy of "Total War" in a speech in Berlin - he argued that the threat of a second "stab-in-the-back" required the "internal security" situation of the Reich be improved.
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 classified as 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.
The arrests of Berlin Jews, beginning on February 27, 1943, marked an escalation in the efforts made to remove these Jewish family members from their spouses and families. 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 non-Jewish spouses, or employment as officials of the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland, the Jewish organization officially recognized by the German government for the purpose of controlling the Jewish population. According to Mordecai Paldiel, Holocaust survivor and former Director of the Department of the Righteous among the Nations program at Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust authority, "The Rosenstrasse protest embraced hundreds of women at the site where most of the Jewish men were interned (in a building which previously served the Jewish community in Berlin), before being processed to the camps... who gathered every day, and facing armed Schutzstaffel (SS) soldiers, shouted: "Give us our husbands back!""
Despite the media blackout ordered by Goebbels, it was impossible for the state to arrest such a large number of people in Berlin over the course of one day without people noticing. Hundreds of women gathered outside of Rosenstrasse 2-4 and announced that they would not leave until their husbands had been released. Despite periodic threats of being shot on sight if the women did not disperse their protest, the women would scatter briefly, and then return to Rosenstrasse 2–4 to continue protesting. Elsa Holzer, a protesting wife, 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 needed 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."
The protests were briefly stopped on the night of March 1, 1943, when the British Royal Air Force (RAF) bombed Berlin. It was a public holiday in honor of the Luftwaffe, which the RAF decided to mark with an especially large air raid on Berlin. 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". 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." On occasion, people passing by would join the protests in favor of the SS releasing the arrested men.
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 than an attempt to bring down the Nazi regime - 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. American historian and professor Dr. Nathan Stoltzfus 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.Stoltzfus, Nathan. Resistance of the Heart, New York: W.W. Norton, 1996 page 238.
On March 6, 1943, Goebbels in his capacity as the Gauleiter of Berlin ordered all of the people imprisoned at Rosenstrasse 2-4 to be 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 April 1, 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."