Do nonviolent protests work, even in a fascist country? A protest in 1943 Nazi Germany did work despite it butting heads with the SS. In Hitler’s Germany, being Jewish was often a death sentence. By 1943, many Jews had already been killed in death camps. But the Final Solution was not finished. There were still Jews exempted from persecution. One of those groups was Jewish husbands of non-Jewish wives. On Feb. 27, 1943, the Gestapo began Operation Fabrikation (Factory Action) which was the roundup of the rest of the Jews in Berlin. Up until then, there had been little pushback to the Holocaust by Germans. From the beginning, the Nazi regime used social acceptance to determine how far it could go. From the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, the German public accepted the persecution without any significant questioning. Aryans noticed Jewish families missing from their communities and said nothing. With each escalation of the mistreatment, the Nazis found that the German public was mostly apathetic and many were sympathetic.
The only mass protest occurred because about 2,000 husbands of non-Jewish spouses were arrested among the total of 10,000. They were housed in the Rosenstrasse community center in Berlin. Starting on Feb. 28, hundreds of wives and relatives came to the site to protest. They chanted “Give us our husbands back!” and “Let our husbands go!” They linked arms and sang songs. This was done in freezing weather. The SS guards would threaten to shoot them and they would disperse, but they always came back.
Elsa Holzer, a protesting wife, later stated in an interview: “We expected that our husbands would return home and that they wouldn’t be sent to the camps. We acted from the heart, and look what happened. If you had to calculate whether you would do any good by protesting, you wouldn’t have gone. But we acted from the heart. We wanted to show that we weren’t willing to let them go. What one is capable of doing when there is danger can never be repeated. I’m not a fighter by nature. Only when I have to be. I did what was given me to do. When my husband needed my protection, I protected him … And there was always a flood of people there. It wasn’t organized or instigated. Everyone was simply there. Exactly like me. That’s what is so wonderful about it.”
The protest gained national attention and then the story expanded internationally. Josef Goebbels was concerned with the bad publicity. After the loss in the Battle of Stalingrad, Goebbels felt now was not the time to show that there was a difference of opinion amongst the public. The German people needed to be united in the war effort. Or at least look united. He also feared that if the SS used force, the protest would spread. On March 6, 1943, Goebbels ordered the release of the husbands.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenstrasse_protest
https://hmd.org.uk/resource/27-february-1943-the-rosenstrasse-protest/
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