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Before dawn on Feb. 27, 1943, Gestapo agents and other Nazi police
officers descended upon 10,000 of Berlin's remaining Jews and bludgeoned them
into 300 trucks. It was called The Final Roundup.
Most of them - old people, children, working men and pregnant women,
battered and bleeding, without their winter coats - died within days in the gas
chambers of Auschwitz.
But 2,000 of these Jews who had non-Jewish, German wives, husbands and
children were spirited off to a collection center on a street called Rosenstrasse
in the heart of Berlin.
What happened next is the subject of a riveting new book by FSU Professor
Nathan Stoltzfus about a little-known protest in which courageous German women battled the Gestapo at its very doorstep.
Stoltzfus, who teaches 20th century European history, began his research
for "Resistance of the Heart" when earning his Ph.D. at Harvard University.
Through personal interviews with survivors in Berlin and an exhaustive search of
Nazi records, he is the first to chronicle this singular incident of mass German
protest, which had received barely a mention by other scholars.
"I thought that perhaps it was not a fluke, and could show us something
important about the Nazi exercise of power, the specific Nazi sensitivity to
German popular opinion," Stoltzfus said.
Intermarried German women had anticipated the terrible moment for 10
years, since the inception of the Nazi regime, and were well versed in resisting
threats and sanctions. Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, the minister of propaganda and
public enlightenment, had subjected the couples to brutal humiliations and
pressures to encourage divorce, mostly to no avail.
"Hitler knew that separating them would not be easy," said Stoltzfus. The
most elite SS troops, the Leibstandarte Hitler - all at least 6 feet tall and
blonde, wearing black uniforms and steel helmets, armed with bayoneted rifles and
machine guns - were sent to do the task.
"They hoped to get the men onto trains before anyone knew it," said
Stoltzfus. But the women were always suspicious. As soon as one husband failed to
return home from the factory at the usual time, then another, then another,
anguish and panic quickly spread.
"When they first came to Rosenstrasse, most of the women were desperate
for information about their loved ones, not eager to protest," Stoltzfus said.
But their numbers grew. Women who, as intermarried Germans, had endured
restricted food rations, government insults and the scorn of their own families
grew bold, shouting in the faces of Gestapo officers, "Give us back our
husbands!"
Time and again, the Gestapo threatened to shoot, sending the women
fleeing into courtyards and streets and under bridges. But they always floated
out and reformed their group. "What law did we break?" they demanded. "We're
Aryans!" they declared.
Stoltzfus was fascinated by the paradox: "This seemed like the weakest of
weapons against the most ruthless regime in history. Protest was perhaps a form
of action women were more likely to take than men. Men are prone to use force in
such an extreme case."
Goebbel's chief deputy, Leopold Gutterer, told Stoltzfus in an interview
that if the women had brought guns to Rosenstrasse, "We would have had to shoot
them."
Intermarriage had presented a difficult dilemma for the Nazi's. German
women married to Jewish men were both protected citizens of the Reich and
threatened members of "Jewish households." The German devotion to marriage and
loyalty to family that Hitler extolled directly conflicted with Nazi genocidal
policy about the purity of the Aryan race.
While Nazi leaders debated, the chanting at Rosenstrasse continued for a
week. The wives smuggled food and notes to their loved ones. As many as 600
gathered at once and thousands had joined in by the protest's end.
On the sixth day, remembered protester Charlotte Israel, it was so cold
the tears froze on her face. The guards set up machine guns and pointed them at
the crowd.
"For the first time, we really hollered," she said. "Now, we couldn't
care less. We bellowed. . .'Murderer, murderer, murderer, murderer.' We didn't
scream just once but again and again, until we lost our breath.' Then I saw a man
in the foreground open his mouth wide, as if to give a command. It was drowned
out. I couldn't hear it. But then they cleared everything away. There was
silence."
Though the Gestapo didn't understand anything other than brute force,
Hitler and Goebbels were very sensitive to public opinion and the need to
maintain morale, Stoltzfus said.
"Goebbels could see that the women were attempting to keep their families
together rather than calling for the collapse of the regime," he said.
Fearing a German backlash, the powerful Nazi leaders yielded to the
unarmed street protesters and released the Jews. The German women had risked
their lives and won.
"The official line in West Germany has always been that an individual
could do little to confront the Nazi's," Stoltzfus said. "But the wives of the
Berlin Jews saved thousands of lives by acting on their convictions."
In "Resistance of the Heart," he cites other, smaller pockets of
resistance and explores the crucial question: What might have happened if more
Germans had dared to protest the war?
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