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In Nazi Germany, Some Non-Jewish Women Saved Their Jewish Husbands

(Jerusalem Post) Nathan Stoltzfus and Mordecai Paldiel - Eighty years ago, hundreds of non-Jewish women married to Jewish men risked their lives protesting in front of a Gestapo prison where their husbands were being held on Berlin's Rosenstrasse. They kept protesting continuously for a week until they convinced Hitler to release the men. As Hitler took power in 1933, Nazis confidently reckoned that intermarried non-Jews - Aryans - married to Jews would divorce, but that proved not to be the case. Choosing to entwine their fate openly, every day with Jewish family members, they lived in constant uncertainty about their own lives. On Feb. 18, 1943, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels resolved to make Berlin judenrein - entirely free of Jews - and their roundup began on Feb. 26. On Feb. 27, Charlotte Israel, married to a Jewish man, recalled meeting other intermarried women in front of the Rosenstrasse building while Nazi authorities were imprisoning their husbands. On Feb. 28, the women in chorus demanded: "We want our husbands back." Wisely, these women demanded only their husbands. They did not denounce the Nazi regime. On March 6, fearing an ever-growing public protest, Goebbels received Hitler's consent to release the intermarried Jews. On the 80th anniversary of the Rosenstrasse protest, ceremonies will be held in Berlin and Washington to mark this unique event of human courage in the face of a totalitarian regime. Nathan Stoltzfus is head of the Rosenstrasse Foundation and teaches at Florida State University. Mordecai Paldiel is former director of the Righteous Among the Nations Department at Yad Vashem.
2023-03-09 00:00:00
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