Rosenstrasse protest

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

The Rosenstrasse protest was a nonviolent protest in Rosenstraße ("Rose street") in Berlin in February and March 1943, carried out by the non-Jewish ("Aryan") wives and relatives of Jewish men who had been arrested for deportation. The protests escalated until the men were released. It was a significant instance of opposition to the events of the Holocaust.

Events

Just after the German defeat in the Battle of Stalingrad, 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 6,000 of the arrested, and housed temporarily at Rosenstraße 2–4, a welfare office for the Jewish community located in Central Berlin.

According to the German historian Wolf Gruner (in his book Der geschlossene Arbeitseinsatz deutscher Juden : zur Zwangsarbeit als Element der Verfolgung 1938-1943, Berlin : Metropol, c1997), the reason for the separation of these men was that they were not to be deported, since they were exempt from deportation because of their privileged status as spouses of Germans. Rather, they were being held for a period of time so that new officials of the various legal Jewish organizations could be selected from among them, to replace those of the existing officials who were not married to Germans had been dismissed from their posts prior to deportation. However, the purpose of their confinement was not publicly known, and the rumor spread that they were to be deported, along with the unprivileged Jews who had been arrested; because of that rumor, the wives and other close relatives of many of them turned up on the street near the building. For a week, the protesters, mainly women, demanded their husbands back by holding a peaceful protest. The protesters appeared first in ones and twos; afterwards their number grew rapidly, and perhaps a total of 6000 participated at one time or another.

Once the process of selecting new officials for the Jewish organizations had been completed, the men confined were released, giving rise to the incorrect impression that their release had been due to the women's protest. 25 of the men had been sent to Auschwitz by mistake, but due to their privileged status they had been kept separate from the camp inmate population, pending a decision on their treatment; all were sent back to Germany. Almost all the released men survived the war.

However for another evaluation of this event see Richard J. Evans' The Third Reich at War,Penguin Press, NY, 2009 pp. 271f. Evans argues that the interpretation of the incident as a "protest" is an error.

Remembrance

Part of the memorial "Block der Frauen" by Ingeborg Hunzinger, commemorating the protest

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

References

• Nathan Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany, Rutgers University Press (March 2001) ISBN 0-8135-2909-3 (paperback: 386 pages)
• Wolf Gruner, "Widerstand in der Rosenstraße. Die Fabrik-Aktion und die Verfolgung der „Mischehen“ 1943". fibu 16883, Frankfurt 2005, ISBN 3-596-16883-X

External links

• The Women's Rosenstraße Protest in Nazi Berlin, Nathan Stoltzfus
• Resistance by Berlin women against Goebbels
• 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, Jerusalem Post, 4/9/2010. An evocative profile of wartime Berlin reveals the shame, humiliation and destruction that befell the city’s Jews.