Day and night for a week in early 1943, hundreds of unarmed German women did something that was unheard of in Nazi Germany.
They stood toe-to-toe with machine gun-wielding Gestapo agents and demanded the release of their Jewish husbands from Adolph Hitler’s murderous grip. The men were locked up in the Jewish community center in the heart of Berlin, victims of Hitler’s "final roundup" of German Jews.
The women's courage and passion prevailed: As thousands of other Berlin Jews were crammed into cattle cars and transported to Auschwitz, the Jews married to “Aryan” German women were set free. 
But even today, more than 50 years after the Nazi reign of terror, few Germans acknowledge the significance of protest on Rosenstrasse, the street where the dramatic showdown took place. To admit that unarmed women saved 1,700 Jews from deportation would be to challenge postwar Germany's consensus that ordinary citizens were powerless to curb Hitler's anti-Semitic rampage.
It is an amazing story.
ReplyDeleteWithout the internet... we would never have known the sacrifice of German women.
Mozart
Yes and more-so.
ReplyDeleteRAPE OF GERMAN WOMEN: After Germany lost the Second World War
http://freenorthcarolina.blogspot.com/2011/06/rape-of-german-women-after-germany-lost.html
I read the article.
ReplyDelete"By early 1943, millions of German Jews had been murdered." Sigh...
A little research will show that there were only 525,000 "German Jews" total in Germany, making it somewhat difficult for "millions" to have been murdered.
And the US Holocaust Museum's website lists the German Jewish death toll at approximately 130,000, not "millions"...
The rest of the article contains similar inaccuracies... FYI.
Makes sense, although I didn't see the 130,000 figure I did see that there were only 214,000 on the eve of WWII.
ReplyDeleteIn January 1933, some 522,000 Jews by religious definition lived in Germany. Over half of these individuals, approximately 304,000 Jews, emigrated during the first six years of the Nazi dictatorship, leaving only approximately 214,000 Jews in Germany proper (1937 borders) on the eve of World War II.
In 1933, the Jewish population of Europe stood at over nine million. Most European Jews lived in countries that Nazi Germany would occupy or influence during World War II. By 1945, the Germans and their collaborators killed nearly two out of every three European Jews as part of the "Final Solution," the Nazi policy to murder the Jews of Europe.