Talk:Rosenstrasse protest

Other peaceful protest

I saw a documentary once about World War 2 which showed a peaceful mass protest one one of the occupied countries, perhaps Denmark. The German forces did not break up the protest. The narration said the Germans viewed the inhabitants of that country as of "good racial stock" and would not have tolerated a similar protest in most of the occupied countries. Thus this may not have been the only such protest. But the other incident needs documentation. Edison (talk) 21:32, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

Media coverage

Was the Rosenstrasse protest covered by either the Allied media or the Axis media? This is a pretty important detail left out of this article.--gwc (talk) 07:09, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

Yes, it was reported in American and British newspapers at the time. German newspapers mentioned the protests, but claimed the women were protesting against the British bombing of Berlin.--A.S. Brown (talk) 00:10, 7 February 2017 (UTC)

Wolf Gruner theory

The reference to Gruner's idea that the Jewsish husbands in question were being held to select leaders of "legal Jewish organizations" sounds a bit crackpot. Why is 1943 Nazi Germany supposedly concerned with setting up Jewish leaders?76.169.35.134 (talk) 21:52, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

I agree.--74.195.63.121 (talk) 14:30, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

According to this article by FSU history professor, Nathan Stoltzfus, the arrests of the intermarried jews were part of the Schlußaktion of the Final Solution. Here is the link: www.rosenstrasse-protest.de/texte/texte_stoltzfus.html. According to him, Goebbels and other Nazi officials were in part persuaded not to deport the men as a result of the loyalty of the Aryan wives. According to him, they were originally arrested for deportation. No mention is made about choosing leaders.--74.195.63.121 (talk) 15:04, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

I agree too. The article on rosenstrasse-protest.de web-site clearly states “Yet when the (non-Jewish) German populace protested nonviolently and en masse, the Nazis made concessions. When Germans protested for Jews, Jews were saved.” which pretty much contradicts this Wikipedia article. --Gurdiga (talk) 21:42, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

My impression from reading this article seems to be that some assert that this means Germans could have done more to prevent what happened to the Jews but I think the small number of Jews involved as well as their special status must be taken into account. The role of Germans and their ability to resist nazis is a very hot historical topic.Jrm2007 (talk) 00:46, 15 January 2016 (UTC)

With all due respect, Jrm2007, the Rosenstrasse protests do prove that protest did work in Nazi Germany. The women protested to save their husbands, there were confronted with troops, and it was the Nazi regime that gave in, just as the Nazi regime always gave in when confronted with protests on the part of Germans. In 1936, the Nazi regime tried to ban crucifixes from the walls of schools in the mostly Catholic state of Oldenburg. The ban prompted huge protests and led to the ban being rescinded as the regime was not willing to use force against the thousands of ordinary people protesting all over Oldenburg. It was very important for Hitler to be seen as the leader of the volksgemeinschaft, and having to use force against thousands of ordinary people in Oldenburg protesting against a ban on crucifixes in schools would suggest to people both in Germany and all over the world that the volksgemeinschaft did not embrace all Aryan Germans as was being claimed. In 1941, the Action T4 program to murder all physically and mentally disabled Germans led to protests, which again led to the Nazi giving in. I am not certain about what you mean by the "small numbers" of Jews involved (the intention of the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" was to kill every single Jewish men, women and child in Europe) as their "special status" (that married to gentile women?) as factors. The Rosenstrasse protests together with earlier protests in 1941 and 1936 do show that the often-repeated claim it was useless to protest in Nazi Germany is a lie. Furthermore, it should be noted that when World War Two began in 1939, Hitler stopped all of the anti-Christian propaganda saying he needed an united home front to win the war, and the anti-Christian propaganda was fracturing the volksgemeinschaft. According to the 1931 census, 87% of Germans regularly attended church, and it is clear that for most Germans Nazi anti-Christian propaganda was offensive, which is why Hitler stopped it in 1939. He was indeed right, the anti-Christian propaganda was fracturing the volksgemeinschaft as it was alienating millions of good church-going Germans who otherwise would had supported the regime and who fell back into line when the anti-Christian propaganda ceased. Notably, Hitler did not stop the anti-Semitic propaganda in 1939, which would suggest that for most Germans were not offended by the attacks on Judaism in the same way that they were by the attacks on Christianity. It is wrong to claim that under the Nazi years that ordinary Germans were hapless bystanders to what was happening. People did have choices, even under the dictatorship and as the Rosenstrasse protests show, even a group of ordinary women could stop the mighty Great Leviathan cold in its tracks and save their Jewish husbands. Anyhow, this article gives a very poor account of the Rosenstrasse protests at present. You would not know from reading this for several days in March 1943 unarmed women carrying signs saying save our husbands faced off with troops who had aimed machine guns at them, or that the women won. --A.S. Brown (talk) 02:33, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

The women basically achieved a postponement of whatever kind of deportation the regime had planned for their husbands - a stay (without any promise of how long), not a lasting exemption or a pardon. At the end of the war it turned out that most of the men had not been arrested again, in part because some of them had gone underground, but this was essentially due to sheer luck and conflicting routines within the Nazi administration and the SS. The women didn't achieve a wider political (or even judicial) victory, and even though their action was brave they don't seem to have been seeking to rouse a more general mood of resistance to the persecutions, nor did they try to publicize what they may have known about the Final Solution. The White Rose group, around the same time, were also doing non-violent resistance but they were seeking to awaken the people, thus they were brutally clamped down on and executed.

Contrary to what Brown is saying, the Rosenstrasse protest doesn't show that the Nazi atrocities could have been stopped by non-violent civilians marching and protesting in the streets. Nor could they have stopped the censorship, put an end to the antisemitism of the regime, etc. Such protests as the ones in March '43 had practically no hope of reaching a wider part of the German people and making them question the regime, and they were only possible or grudgingly tolerated once in a while if they did not openly question the Hitler regime as such, the war or the Nazi party. 83.254.141.85 (talk) 22:41, 2 July 2018 (UTC)

It is correct that the Rosenstrasse protesters achieved a postponement of whatever deportation from Berlin the Gestapo had planned for the Jews imprisoned at Rosenstrasse. It is also correct that their release was intended as another “temporary” exemption of the inclusion in the Holocaust of all intermarried Jews in non-privileged intermarriage, who wore the Star of David and were thus marked for death. Goebbels, who on February 18, 1943 wrote of his decision to make Berlin free of persons wearing the Star of David by mid-March or at the latest by the end of March 1943, wrote in his diary on March 6, 1943 that he planned to conduct a more thorough arrest and deportation of the remaining Jews in Berlin sometime later. He viewed the release of these intermarried Jews this way, but he never did conduct this more thorough general deportation.

This comment goes on to say that the women’s efforts were limited and did not inspire further resistance. To minimize the achievement of these women for rescuing their Jewish family members without rescuing others is something like dumping cold on those who hid a single Jew, because they did not hide one or two more. You could also try to minimize the efforts of those who hid Jews by saying that they did not stir up resistance generally, although this might be seen as churlish.

This criticism in fact however does not apply to the Rosenstrasse protesters—because the women married to Jews openly demonstrated their opposition to the regime’s intentions, doing this publicly. Thus they did in fact have a chance of stirring up general dissatisfaction. Without any sign of dissent, others in opposition commonly feel like they are alone in dissent and thus remain silent, but public action reverses this (social psychologists call this ‘pluralistic ignorance’). A central reason the Jews were released was to eliminate any evidence of opposition, not to mention opposition to the deportation of some Jews. What’s more, In fact the Rosenstrasse Protest did cause others who had no relatives imprisoned to join their demonstration out of general opposition (names and evidence are available)

As for claims that some Jews released from Rosenstrasse survived because they went underground where’s the evidence? Can you document a case of any of these intermarried Jews imprisoned at Rosenstrasse who decided to go into hiding after their release in March 1943? Why would they have done this? After all, their partners had proven over the entire course of the Third Reich that they were willing to step in and put whatever they had on the line to protect them Furthermore their non-Jewish partners refused to abandon them, not wanting to be away from them. Victor Klemperer reports that his non-Jewish wife Eva also refused his offer to leave her, because this would protect her. Remaining together had worked for these Jews in contrast to the deportation of almost all other Germans defined as “full Jews” according to the Nuremberg Laws as of March 1943. As a way of saving an intermarried Jew from the Holocaust, Catholic authorities in fact encouraged him to remain married--not to go into hiding.

Also the Jews released from Rosenstrasse were officially registered and thus they received (reduced Jewish) rations, which they would not have had by going into hiding. Further, any Jew who went into hiding would have put himself/herself outside of the law and in the case of being found, could have been punished for hiding (not wearing the Star, etc.), so there was an additional danger of going into hiding for intermarried Jews, relative to those who did not hide, that could have led to deportation and not survival.

In order to say that going “underground” was a factor in the survival of Jews released from the Rosenstrasse there will have to be not only evidence of a particular person(s) going underground who survived. There will also have to be a record of someone who was released from the Rosenstrasse who did not go into hiding, and who thereafter was deported to the camps and did not survive. In other words, if all the Jews survived from each category--those who hid and those who remained registered in Gestapo records—if all of these survived, then there was no survival advantage in hiding.

The important point here is that going “underground" does not appear to have made any difference for survival, and to suggest that it did is misleading unless evidence shows otherwise. You write that “most of the men had not been arrested again.” Can you name a single example of anyone who was arrested again, and then identify his fate? What case can you document of an intermarried Jew released from Rosenstrasse who survived because he/she went into hiding?

Finally, Goebbels’ failure to live up to his resolve on March 6 1943 to deport the Jews he had released at some later date was not "essentially due to sheer luck and conflicting routines within the Nazi administration and the SS.” (What are the conflicting routines are you referring to and why did this not rescue Jews at some other point?)

Rather, the reason these Jews were not deported thereafter was due to: 1) the fact that the intermarried “Aryan” women had raised the stakes in the Nazi quest to deport their Jewish family members, and; 2) the war thereafter continued to deal defeat after defeat to Germany.

Certainly luck played a large role in the survival of Jews in camps. But these women were “Aryan” and had a hand to play. The fact that the intermarried Rosenstrasse women had a hand in making their own luck is clear from the regime’s response to their noncompliance and protest, beginning already in 1933. While most of society chipped in or passively traveled along with the regime, these women did not, as indicated by the overwhelming majority who refused to divorce, despite the regime’s increasing pressures and efforts of intimidation.

This is why the regime made a series of “temporary" exceptions for intermarried Jews who never agreed to divorce. On the other hand, Jews whose non-Jewish partners divorced them were routinely deported at once. How can luck be seen as the cause of the survival of these Aryan women and the survival of their Jewish family members, when the fate of these family members depended every moment on whether they decided to abandon them? This was an existential test every moment of the 12 Nazi years and well over 90 percent refused to divorce.

Why were all but a few German Jews who survived married to non-Jews? It seems to indicate a pattern beyond luck.

¹Die Juden in Berlin werden nun endgiiltig abgeschoben werden. Mit dem ll Stichtag des 28. Februar sollen sie zuerst einmal alle in Lagem zusammengegefaBt werden und dann schubweise, Tag ffir Tag bis nt 2000, zur Abschiebung kommen. Ich habe mir zum Ziel gesetzt, bis Mitte, spatestens Ende März Berlin giirzlich judenfrei zu machen. Feb. 18, 1943. "Gerade in diesem Augenblick hält der SD es für günstig, in der Judenevakuierung fortzufahren. Es haben sich da leider etwas unliebsame Szenen vor einem jüdischen Altersheim abgespielt, wo die Bevölkerung sich in großer Menge ansammelte und zum Teil sogar für die Juden etwas Partei ergriff. Ich gebe dem SD Auftrag, die Judenevakuierung nicht ausgerechnet in einer so kritischen Zeit furtzusetzen. Wir wollen uns das lieber noch einige Wochen aufsparen; dann können wir es umso gründlicher durchführen." March 6, 1943.

²“[Marion] Kaplan estimates that 99 percent of Jews who did not emigrate from Hitler’s Reich survived in mixed unions.” Evan Bukey cites Emil Tuchmann, the Health Services Director for the Vienna Jewish Community, who reported in mid-April 1945 that “96 percent of the city’s surviving Jews lived in mixed marriages.” A “survey taken in September of 1944 by the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland” cited by this author indicated that “some 98 percent of officially registered ‘full’ German Jews” who had not yet been deported were intermarried, a percentage that likely varied little by the end of the war since evidence indicates that intermarried Jews did not die disproportionately compared to other Jews but in general survived following September 1944, despite orders such as that of the RSHA in January 1945 for the deportation of intermarried Jews ( Evan Burr Bukey Jews and Intermarriage in Nazi Austria (Cambridge University Press, 2011) 83, 189, 90). Bukey’s study adds as well to known data on the percentage of intermarried couples who divorced, evidence that is fragmented due to incomplete documentation and limited studies. Büttner estimated that 7.2 percent of intermarried couples divorced during the Nazi years in Baden Württemberg while 9.9 percent divorced in Hamburg between 1942 and 1945. Concerning mixed marriages in Vienna Bukey calculates as “reasonably certain” that following the Anschluss only “5 to 7 percent divorced” (94, 191). “93 percent of German Gentile women stood by their Jewish men, while among “partial Jews” applying to elevate their “racial status” 84 percent succeeded (Bukey, 196). FloridaStudent3 (talk) 03:31, 10 July 2018 (UTC)

References

Blotted out

Just to expand on the above points, this article should mention that the memory of the Rosenstrase protests were blotted out for a long time in Germany. I have always maintained whatever happened in history happened, but what changes over time is the memory of the past. For an example, Winston Churchill in his final volume of his History of the English-speaking Peoples published in the 1950s described the end of Reconstruction in the United States in 1877 as a positive good as it was a stupid idea for the U.S government to try to make black people the equals of white people. No historian today would write about the end of Reconstruction and the triumph of white supremacy in the South that way, especially given the Reconstruction was ended as a result of a shameful political bargain, where Rutherford Haynes agreed to sacrifice the American blacks so he could get the votes of the Southern electors. Getting on with the topic on hand, the Rosenstrasse protests of 1943 were erased from German memory of the Nazi era until 1993, when somebody discovered the dramatic story of a group of gentile women successfully protesting in March 1943 to save their Jewish husbands from being deported to Auschwitz. It is rather odd that the Rosenstrasse protests were forgotten in Germany for over 50 years as Germans like stories of Germans saving Jews during the Holocaust. The reasons why are as follows. The first is during the Nazi period, gentiles married to Jews came under considerable pressure from the state to divorce their Jewish spouses, and those who stayed faithful towards the ones they loved were ostracized for the most part by the rest of the Germans. The women of the Rosenstrasse by standing by their Jewish husbands were people considered social outcasts in Nazi Germany, and after the war, a great many Germans did not want celebrate the heroism of women whom they had spurned during the war. Second, almost all of the popular historical writing and much of the scholarly writing on the subject of resistance in Nazi Germany focuses on conservatives opposed to the Nazi state, pretty much to the exclusion of all the other resistance groups. The story of ordinary women resisting the Nazis has no role in these histories. Furthermore, a great many of these accounts are frankly more of a hagiography rather than history. I don't deny that there were people both good and brave involved in July 20th bomb plot, but nobody can be as pure and virtuous in the way that some accounts portray them as. Most of the people involved in the July 20th bomb plot had started out as supporters of the Nazi regime and became disillusioned over time, and some of them had blood on their hands. Take for example, SA Obergruppenführer Count Wolf von Helldorf, the police chief of Berlin from 1935 to 1944. Helldorf as one might gather by his rank in the SA was an ardent Nazi active in völkische groups from his teenage years on who was appointed police chief of Berlin in 1935 because he was a vicious anti-Semite. Goebbels thought the current police chief, Admiral Magnus von Levetzow was not anti-Semitic enough for his tastes, and so had Helldorf, a well known hardcore anti-Semite appointed as his replacement. Unlike Levetzow, Goebbels was not disappointed with Helldorf. As police chief of Berlin, Helldorf spent a disproportionate amount of his time harassing the Jews of Berlin and played a prominent role in arranging the deportations of Jews to be exterminated. Yes, Helldorf was involved in the putsch attempt of July 20th, 1944, for which he was executed, but he also had blood on his hands, an aspect of his career that the more hagiographic accounts of the July 20th putsch pass over in silence. Moreover, the hagiographic accounts of widerstand tend to portray the men involved in the July 20th bomb plot as larger than life figures, as almost superhuman in their courage and goodness. In comic books and films based on comic books, it takes a super-hero to defeat a super-villain, and likewise, these sort of accounts often seem to imply it took people who were the moral equivalents of super-heroes to take on the Nazis, thereby implicitly suggesting that ordinary people could not take part in this struggle. A number of these books make statements along the lines that it took someone "extraordinary" to be in the resistance, suggesting somebody ordinary could not be in the resistance. Another reason for why the Rosenstrasse women were ignored was that they were well aware of what "resettlement in the East" really meant. The women did not know about Auschwitz, but they did know that "resettlement in the East" meant extermination. In the decades after 1945, a great many in Germany insisted that they had no idea of the "Final Solution" was occurring during the war, and only learned about what was happening after the war. An especially egregious example of the tendency to claim ignorance of the Holocaust was Albert Speer, the minister of armaments and the chief of Todt organisation who was taken seriously for a time (including by British and American historians who really should had known better) with his ludicrous claim he had no idea of the "Final Solution" was going on during his time as a cabinet minister. A strange country where a cabinet minister who as chief of Todt organistation was deeply involved in using slave labor from the death camps and who was extremely close to Hitler had no idea of the "Final Solution" was going on, yet a group of ordinary German women married to Jewish men did. How was this possible? Finally, the Rosenstrasse women were ignored because they were successful. A group of ordinary women without guns took on the Nazi state and won, which puts to the lie the often repeated claim that ordinary people could do nothing to stop the "Final Solution". Now, if the Rosenstrrasse women were shot down in a massacre, I might agree with that, but that is not what happened. What happened instead was the women won. Their husbands were released and not sent to Auschwitz. So, ordinary Germans, if they were enough of them and they were brave enough to stand up, could take on the Great Leviathan and win. So, for all these reasons, the story of the Rosenstrasse women was ignored it was discovered in 1993. This article should talk about all that. --A.S. Brown (talk) 01:29, 4 February 2017 (UTC)

Excessive References

I would like to delete all of the references to Dr. Stoltzfus' book because they are all coming from a very specific portion of the book and it is excessive to cite every piece of information to the same book. Just wanted to put this out here on the talk page to hear from others on the matter. Taylor6644 (talk) 18:02, 3 April 2017 (UTC) Taylor6644

I agree that the current abundance of citations seems a bit off-putting. On the other hand, I understand that Wikipedia:Verifiability requires just that. A good start would be to consolidate a large number of identical references per WP:NAMEDREFS. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 05:01, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

The use of correct citations does not require so much redundant citing. This method violates Wikipedia's stipulation that an article be well written. It seems to have been fixed in the past. Why were the changes undone? Dscharf (talk) 15:42, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

NPOV tag

I added this tag (it may not be the most appropriate template, but it was one I knew how to use) due to a number of sections reading more like a charged essay or opinion piece, to some degree, than an encyclopedia article. I imagine the content itself is factual enough, but it feels like much of the article could stand some rewriting to adopt a more matter-of-fact tone. Russ3Z (talk) 18:11, 21 July 2019 (UTC)

I agree. There are many points in the article where it reads in an unencyclopædic tone, clearly inserting the author's opinion or reading more like a personal reflection or essay. For example, the final (unreferenced) sentence of the Chronology section is clearly not neutral, reading:

"The women who protested at Rosenstrasse saw themselves not as a part of a larger picture, but acted as wives and mothers demanding to have their loved ones back; they did not see this as an inherently political movement, yet they projected a voice so powerful not even the Nazi party was able to resist giving in to their demands."

There are instances elsewhere in the article, such as the Significance section, where similar language is used. I've added the Essay-like template alongside NPOV. I think the article needs a rewrite, in particular it could benefit from attention from editors with the historical knowledge to do this appropriately. GhostOfNoMeme (talk) 12:53, 13 August 2020 (UTC)

On Mordechai Paldiel

FYI, that book that is cited isn't very good. It frequently cites Wikipedia as a source.[1] (t · c) buidhe 23:37, 15 July 2020 (UTC)

The book is pretty much a pure tertiary source, which makes it less valuable. Appears that Paldiel what has to say on the protest is derived from two other authors, Kulka and Stoltzfus.[2] These writers should be cited directly. (t · c) buidhe 23:46, 15 July 2020 (UTC)

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Glaring Omissions

The fatal shortcoming of the article as it stands is the failure to discuss the conclusions reached by the most eminent Holocaust historians regarding the Rosenstrasse protests. Their conclusions, based on more credible evidence than the article draws on, clearly undercut the thrust of the article as presented in the opening paragraph.

doorsbows Saul Friedlander in The Years of Extermination (2007) wrote "Such unusual gatherings certainly demanded a measure of courage, but they were relatively modest and completely nonaggressive. They did not bring about the release of the detainees, as deportation had not been planned at any time for these Jews. the event turned into a legend, however: A demonstration of thousands of German women brought about the liberation of their Jewish husbands. It is an uplifting legend, yet a legend nonetheless."

Peter Hayes in Why?: Explaining the Holocaust< (2017) wrote "The Rosenstrasse protest...was limited to a few hundred relatives of the rather small number of men affected, not joined by other so-called Aryans, and not accompanied by any popular resistance to the deportations of thousands of other Jews from Berlin and the Reich at this time...the protest accomplished little in protecting men whom the SS intended to use in the near term and dispense with later...Far from demonstrating what greater popular resistance might have accomplished, the Rosenstrasse incident showed that overt protest had little impact on the direction or pace of the regime's relentless course. 2603:7080:2701:579A:C445:EBA3:ED00:536 (talk) 17:54, 7 August 2023 (UTC)