Rosenstrasse protest

The Rosenstrasse protest was a collective street protest on Rosenstraße ("Rose street") in Berlin during February and March 1943. It was initiated and sustained by the non-Jewish ("Aryan") wives and relatives of Jewish men who had been arrested for deportation. The protests by these intermarried German women continued until the men were released. It was the only continuous street demonstration by Germans against the deportation of the Jews.

There is a dispute about the key context of events for understanding the regime’s response to the Rosenstrasse Protest. What happened, and how did the regime perceive the protest?

Most historians have understood the protest as part of the history of intermarriages. The Nazi dictatorship wanted to murder these Jews along with all the other German Jews it had identified under the 1935 Nuremberg Laws as “full Jews.” Most “Aryans” married to Jews, however, refused to divorce. In a succession of actions beginning already in 1933, they placed themselves between the regime and its mission to destroy their marriages so that their Jewish family members could be socially isolated and persecuted. Of course, the dictatorship could have achieved its will at any point by using force. But it refrained due to its overall goals. It did not want to draw attention to intermarried couples and their examples of noncompliance, possibly inciting scenes that would perhaps “sacrifice the secrecy” of the Final Solution (there were some 30,000 of these intermarried couples in Germany as of 1939). As these Germans refused the dictatorship’s incentives and intimidations, the regime began to make exceptions for intermarried Jews while also increasing measures of intimidation to persuade their intermarried Aryan partners to divorce. The exceptionally brutal arrests of Berlin Jews, beginning on February 27, 1943 represented an escalated effort to intimidate these Aryans into allowing the dictatorship to have its way with their Jewish family members. When the women refused, signaling that they were prepared to die in order to show their Jewish family members that they cared, the regime again backed down, once again temporarily exempting them from deportation.

Recently, German historians have placed the protest in a variety of other contexts, including that of Communist and Socialist resistance, Jewish survival in the underground, or Nazi forced labor and deportation policies. Wolf Gruner has argued that at this time, the Gestapo’s resolve to clear the German Reich of the last Jews living there did not include Jews marrried to Aryans. It did not plan to deport any intermarried German Jews in early 1943, and it corrected Berlin officials who violated this intention. In Gruner’s view the protest had no impact on the Gestapo because the Gestapo never planned to deport any intermarried Jews at this time. German historian Diane Schulle summarizes this perspective in an essay titled “Forced Labor”: “The Gestapo decree recently brought to light by historian Wolf Gruner … suggests that regardless of the protests, the deportatoin of mixed-marriage partners had never been part of the plan. The arrests of Mischlinge [“half-Jews”] and Jews living in mixed marriages had been undertaken for a purpose other than deportation: registration.” ).

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