Resistance of the Heart
Resistance of the Heart
Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany
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..."
Stoltzfus has written a powerful, exhaustively researched report on that rare episode of open, successful resistance ... Interwoven here are the poignant, compelling histories of couples from mixed marriages who opposed the Nazis – and survived the regime.
Gripping. . . Stoltzfus persuasively argues that the Rosenstrasse protest contradicts the standard German claim that they could do nothing to stop their government, and indeed most of the German Jews who married non-Jewish Germans survived.
Here is human interest interwoven with scholarship.
Stoltzfus is a careful and subtle historian and the result of his labours is no less sensational and thoughtprovoking.
Stoltzfus has created a cogent account, made all the more compelling by the often gripping personal stories of the participants. He pays glowing tribute to their superhuman tenacity ... moreover, he builds a convincing argument.
An event buried in the past is resurrected here to shed light on the nature and character of the Nazi regime, the Holocaust, and the German people themselves ... An important work that refracts larger political issues and ethical questions through the prism of a unique event.
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.
II. Stories of Jewish-German courtship
III. The politics of race, sex, and marriage
IV. Courage and intermarriage
V. Mischlinge: "A particularly unpleasant occurrence"
VI. Society versus law: German-Jewish families and social restraints on Hitler
VII. Society and law: German-Jewish families and German collaboration with Hitler
VIII. Kristallnacht: Intermarriages and the lessons of Pogrom
IX. At war and at home: Mischlinge in Hitler's army
X. Racial hygiene, Catholic protest, and noncompliance, 1939-41
XI. The Star of David decree: The official story and the intermarried experience
XII. The price of compliance and the destruction of Jews
XIII. Plans to clear the Reich of Jews, and the obstacles of women and "total war"
XIV. Courageous women of Rosenstrasse
XV. Protest, rescue, and resistance
