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

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

by NathanStoltzfus (Author), WalterLacqueur (Foreword)

Synopsis

In February 1943, the Gestapo arrested approximately 10,000 Jews remaining in Berlin. Most of them died within days in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Two thousand of those Jews, however, were locked into a temporary collection centre on a street called Rosenstrasse, in the heart of Berlin. These two thousand had non-Jewish, German husbands, wives, and children. As news of the arrest spread, hundreds of Gentile spouses, mostly women, hurried to the Rosenstrasse in protest. For a week the Berlin police and uniformed SS dispersed the women with threats to shoot them down, but they advanced again and again until the Gestapo backed down and freed their loved ones. Who were these intermarried Germans who dared to disobey history's most ruthless regime? Why did they choose to suffer the stigmas of intermarriage? And why did Hitler and Goebbels give in to the protesters and release two thousand Jews? If more Germans had protested, might the Holocaust have been slowed or even stopped? This work is a response to these questions. The history of the Rosenstrasse protest demonstrates the courage - and compromise - of self-protective resistance. Using interviews with survivors and Nazi records, this text reconstructs the Rosenstrasse story.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 416
Edition: New edition
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: 30 Apr 2001

ISBN 10: 0813529093
ISBN 13: 9780813529097
Book Overview: This title won the Fraenkel Prize of the Institute of Contemporary History and Weiner Library and was selected as a Book of the Year by The New Statesman .

Media Reviews
Stoltzfus is the first to investigate the events leading to the protest systematically and in depth, not only on the basis of archival material but, more importantly perhaps, on the basis of interviews with surviving participants and eyewitnesses ... and it is to Dr. Stoltzfus's great credit that he has saved from oblivion some of these unsung heroes ... Their memory, not least owing to Dr. Stoltzfus's study, will live on ... Fascinating and moving.