In the image and likeness of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina or the Ladies in White In Cuba, in the heart of Nazi Germany, there was also a group of women, wives and mothers, who staged the only public protest to prevent the deportation of the Jews... and they succeeded .
On February 27, 1943, during the operation Fabrikaktion (Final Raid), SS and Gestapo members scoured the streets, houses and factories of Berlin to clean up the city of Jews and deport them to the camps in Poland. About 1,700 Jews were separated from the rest and locked up in the Jewish Community Center on Rosenstrasse in the Berlin district of Mitte... they were Jews married to non-Jewish Germans . When the mothers and wives learned of the whereabouts of their loved ones, they gathered around the Rosenstrasse Street Center to request information and ask for explanations. They decided to stay there shouting:
Give us back our husbands!
Rosenstrasse Jewish Community Center
On the second day, there were already more than 600 women protesting the detention. By the third, they already exceeded 1,000 and, in addition, German women of non-mixed marriages had joined to support their relatives, friends or neighbors. That protest was getting out of control and the German authorities ordered the SS members guarding the Center to shoot into the air to dislodge the demonstrators. The women dispersed through the adjacent streets... but returned when the shooting stopped. The next time they fired, no one moved... Joseph Goebbels , propaganda minister, knew that killing German women, who were not Jewish, in the center of Berlin would raise the city against the Nazis. Other measures were tried, such as closing the nearest tram station so that the women had to walk... nothing helped and the protest grew.
Still from the film Rosenstraße
Goebbels began to relent and ordered 35 Jews who had already been sent to Auschwitz to be brought back to the Center. Goebbels could be very cruel but he was not stupid … the Germans had just been defeated at Stalingrad and things were not looking to lose another battle… in Berlin itself . So, after a week of protest, he ordered the release of all the Jews held in Rosenstrasse. Those women had managed to confront Nazi barbarism... and defeat it.
Almost all the Jews of Rosenstrasse managed to survive the war.
In 1995 the Block der Frauen monument was erected (Women's Block) by the sculptress Ingeborg Hunzinger as a tribute to the women of Rosenstrasse.
Sources:The Holocaust Chronicle, A Force More Powerful, Facts of World War II