The Week Hitler Backed Down

By Steve Rodan

In early 1943, the Germans were hard at work killing the Jews in occupied Europe. Ghettos were decimated and their starved inhabitants sent to Auschwitz and Treblinka. Hitler was assured that everything was going according to plan.

But there were still plenty of Jews left in Germany, some of them hiding not far from Gestapo headquarters on No. 8 Prince Albrecht St. in Berlin. Nearly 40,000 Jews were still believed to be living in what had been promised to be the Judenrein capital of the Third Reich. The only ones who lived openly were Jews married to gentiles. They thought they would remain exempted from the Final Solution.

That was shattered on Feb. 27, 1943, when the Gestapo and police raided homes and factories throughout Berlin. Many Jews were grabbed on the streets and taken to assembly points for deportation to Poland. In an operation ordered by German Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels, about 2,000 people were packed into the Jewish community building on Rose St. or Rosenstrasse 2-4. The detainees, many of them beaten and bleeding, were inspected to determine whether they could be sent to the death camps. The assessment of the Germans, including Adolf Eichmann, was that this would be a quick operation that would show the Nazi leadership that Berlin was free of Jews.

On the first morning of their incarceration, Jews were assembled in a courtyard and an SS man barked whether there was anybody who could play jazz piano. Several raised their hands. Was there anybody who could breed horses? More hands went up. Within hours, they were on the train to Auschwitz.

But outside something took place that soon filled Hitler and his henchmen with dread: There was open resistance by the Germans.

It began with the gentile spouses, mostly women and long pressured to abandon their Jewish husbands. They arrived at Rosenstrasse, and in the freezing cold waited for the release of their loved ones. Then, they demanded information. Many of them refused to return home.

"There were already about 150 women there," Charlotte Israel, one of the gentile spouses, said. "Through a trick I determined that my husband was [interned] there. I asked the guard for the potato ration cards, which Julius had. Then I received them too! On the back he had written very lightly, so that I could read it when I held it up to the light: 'I'm fine!'" [1]

On the following day, the women were no longer polite. They chanted and shouted at the SS guards at Rosenstrasse. Despite threats, they would not leave the streets. The spouses were quickly joined by passersby who did the same. The crowd grew from scores to hundreds to as many 1,000. A man in a German Army uniform marched to the building where the Jews were held. He had just returned from the Eastern Front. Other soldiers joined him.

"The people gathered together in large throngs and even sided with the Jews to some extent," Goebbels wrote in his diary on March 6, 1943.

The SS men threatened to shoot. At times, that would send some of the women scurrying. But several minutes later they would return and hurl abuse.

Although there was no coverage of the protest, word spread throughout Germany. The fuhrer had encountered open opposition.

"If you don't let us in we will come back and make trouble," one of the protesters shouted. "We'll bring a battering ram and break through the door."

Two of the prisoners were Margot and Gerhard Beck, who later changed their names to the Hebrew Miriam and Gad. Their mother converted to Judaism in 1920, and three years later she gave birth to twins. Gad would become one of the last Zionist organizers in Germany during World War II and helped Jews hide. Many of his colleagues had already been deported. From inside Rosenstrasse, Gad could see his relatives and many others.

"More and more people stood there, demonstrating against the regime," Gad recalled. "What an inner strength the goyim had developed! I always try to remember what it was like as they stood in the middle of the city shouting, 'Give us back our children: Give us back our husbands and our wives!' Many of them had been totally apolitical citizens up to then. So that too was a show of German resistance, not just the officers involved in the July 20 plot to overthrow Hitler." [2]

The vigil alarmed the German leadership. Goebbels, who had long targeted mixed marriages, failed to keep the showdown in downtown Berlin a secret, and it came to the attention of the international media. He did not want to bring his dilemma to Hitler, and yet he was sure the fuhrer was being briefed on a daily basis.

SS chief Heinrich Himmler was even more frightened of angering Hitler. They all remembered the riots against Kaiser Wilhelm II as the Germans went down in defeat at the end of World War I. Now, Berlin was again losing.

"It wasn't united whether they should overthrow the protest by force or whether they had to find another solution," Leopold Gutterer, Goebbel's deputy, recalled more than four decades later. [3]

On March 6, the Jews were released from Rosenstrasse. Goebbels returned 35 Jews who had been sent to Auschwitz. The gentile women had done what the Jews never dared -- to protest German oppression. Hitler did not forget the Jews of Berlin, and by June he agreed with Himmler that the intermarried as well as half- and quarter Jews must be eliminated regardless of public reaction.

But three months marked a long time as Germany was being pummeled by the Red Army in the east and massive air attacks from the west. In the end, Berlin failed to become Judenrein. Beck survived the war and eventually emigrated to Israel.

Quietly, historians have raised a basic question. If Hitler had been deterred in 1943, could a courageous effort by the Jews and their gentile supporters in 1933 have suspended or blunted the atrocities?

"If ample evidence shows that Hitler drew back whenever he met public resistance, how are we to know where the regime would have drawn the line had there been much more such behavior?" Nathan Stoltzfus wrote in his book Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany. "The regime made concessions when it calculated that the popular support it could thus maintain was more valuable than the immediate implementation of its policies and goals."

Notes

1. Interview with Charlotte Israel Freudenthal, February 1985, and statement of Charlotte Freudenthal in Bezirksverordnetenversammlung von Charlottenburg, Schon damals fingen viele an zu schweigen. Berlin: Page 197. 1986.

2. An Underground Life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin. Gad Beck. Frank Herbert. University of Wisconsin Press. 1999.

3. Interview with Leopold Gutterer, August 19, 1986.

Below: Rosenstrasse today