Women of the Rosenstrasse protest challenged the Nazi regime for their detained Jewish husbands’ freedom – and won
(The Conversation) — On the cold evening of Feb. 27, 1943, Charlotte Israel gathered with a small crowd of women on the Rosenstrasse, a narrow street in central Berlin. They were not Jewish, but their husbands were, and the men had just been arrested in a sweeping roundup of more than 9,000 Berlin Jews. Heinrich Himmler, leader of the SS and an architect of the Holocaust’s murder of 6 million Jews, called this arrest a “de-judaization of the Reich.” Nearly 2,000 of those arrested had non-Jewish wives and were crammed together in a building on the Rosenstrasse. Israel and the other women who had gathered outside resolved to return the next day. Early the next morning, as she approached Rosenstrasse in search of her husband, Annie Radlauer heard a chorus of voices growing louder as she drew nearer: “Give us our husbands back!” The vigil, which sometimes grew into collective protests, continued off and on until March 6. This protest still raises questions about how Hitler ruled and about attempts to rescue German Jews. Families …
