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    Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany
    Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany
    Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany
    Ebook693 pages10 hours

    Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany

    By Nathan Stoltzfus

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    In February 1943 the Gestapo arrested approximately 10,000 Jews remaining in Berlin. Most died at Auschwitz. Two thousand of those Jews, however, had non-Jewish partners and were locked into a collection center on a street called Rosenstrasse. As news of the surprise arrest pulsed through the city, hundreds of Gentile spouses, mostly women, hurried to the Rosenstrasse in protest. A chant broke out: "Give us our husbands back."

    Over the course of a week protesters vied with the Gestapo for control of the street. Now and again armed SS guards sent the women scrambling for cover with threats that they would shoot. After a week the Gestapo released these Jews, almost all of whom survived the war.

    The Rosenstrasse Protest was the triumphant climax of ten years of resistance by intermarried couples to Nazi efforts to destroy their families. In fact, ninety-eight percent of German Jews who did not go into hiding and who survived Nazism lived in mixed marriages. Why did Hitler give in to the protesters? Using interviews with survivors and thousands of Nazi records never before examined in detail, Nathan Stoltzfus identifies the power of a special type of resistance--the determination to risk one's own life for the life of loved ones. A "resistance of the heart..."

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRutgers University Press
    Release dateFeb 1, 2001
    ISBN9780813586618
    Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany

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      Book preview

      Resistance of the Heart - Nathan Stoltzfus

      HEART

      I

      Hitler’s Theory of Power

      The regime encouraged the social isolation of Jews, but only the German people could accomplish this. The Holocaust built on earlier phases of anti-Jewish measures achieved only with popular compliance and assistance. Genocide was not the only possible result of Nazi race ideology, but popular participation in racial identification, denunciations, and expropriations encouraged the regime to introduce further more radical anti-Jewish measures. German Jews whose non-Jewish spouses died or divorced were sent to death camps along with other Jews. German Jews the regime could not isolate socially, however, generally survived.

      Intermarried Germans rescued their partners with noncompliance and protest, defenses that seem extremely weak in the face of Nazi terror. The regime did not use physical force, as part of any general policy, to control or punish intermarried Germans. Why?

      Both the Nazi leadership’s theory of power and its interpretation of Germany’s military defeat in World War I are basic sources for understanding the regime’s fear of noncompliance and public protest in this case. The role of simple terror to explain both the consensus the Nazis achieved and the lack of resistance they encountered has been overemphasized, as Robert Gellately has indicated in his groundbreaking work showing that the regime needed the everyday cooperation of the people in order to enforce its racial policies.¹ The arbitrary use of police force, the Gestapo, and the concentration camps were always the backdrop of the Third Reich, yet the regime sought (and received) noncoerced mass support as the best means for achieving its ambitious goals. Brutality and repression, in fact, increased Hitler’s domestic popularity if they seemed to promise peace and order.² A diminished reliance on coercive terror to explain Hitler’s domestic control reduces the expectations that the dictatorship would use force against all types of

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