Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany - Hardcover

Stoltzfus, Nathan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393039048 ISBN 13: 9780393039047

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 1996

Synopsis

Drawing on previously unknown Berlin records and interviews with survivors, a study of the 1943 Rosenstrasse protest explains how hundreds of Gentile spouses of Jews rounded up by the Nazis faced down Hitler's genocidal policy and the SS to secure the release of their loved ones.

About this title

About the Author

Nathan Stoltzfus, Ph.D., teaches twentieth-century European history at Florida State University.

Reviews

In early 1943, the Gestapo rounded up most of the Jews remaining in Berlin, the majority of whom were married to German gentiles, and interred them in a facility on Rosenstrasse, a street in the heart of the city. In the following days, their non-Jewish spouses congregated spontaneously on Rosenstrasse and demanded the return of their mates. Despite threats from the SS to shoot anyone gathering around the building, the spouses held their ground, and eventually Joseph Goebbels agreed to release the 1700 intermarried Jews. Stoltzfus, who teaches history at Florida State University, has written a powerful, exhaustively researched report on that rare episode of open, successful resistance to the regime and reaches a telling conclusion: the Nazi state was so concerned with popular acceptance that public protest could have stopped many of its murderous policies. For a significant example, he cites the Catholic Church's successful opposition to the Nazi's euthanasia program: "[I]t seems beyond any doubt that if the churches had opposed the killing... of the Jews as they opposed the killing of the congenitally insane and sick, there would have been no Final Solution." Interwoven here are the poignant, compelling histories of couples from mixed marriages who opposed the Nazis?and survived the regime.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Stoltzfus draws on archival research and oral history in a study of the 1943 Rosenstrasse protest--a week of street demonstrations by German Gentile spouses (primarily wives) of Jews interned at the Jewish Community welfare administrative center in Berlin before deportation to concentration camps. Attempting to finesse the intermarriage issue by encouraging divorce, the Nazis "temporarily exempted" intermarried Jews and their Mischlinge children from the Final Solution, an ideological compromise whose roots Stoltzfus finds in Hitler's theory of power and his fear of social unrest. Stoltzfus focuses on specific couples in sketching courtship, marriage, and parenthood in pre-Nazi and Nazi Germany, as intermarried families were, like other Jews and "enemies of the state," progressively isolated from the larger community. But the Rosenstrasse protest "worked": this "singular instance of mass German protest against the deportation of German Jews" protected the demonstrators' family members and, by war's end, "intermarried Jews constituted 98 percent of the surviving Jewish population." A careful exploration of what this often ignored event implies about the potential for resistance in Hitler's Germany. Mary Carroll

Stoltzfus (history, Florida State Univ.) has written about an unusual and striking episode of the Holocaust. In February 1943, the remaining 10,000 Jews of Berlin were rounded up by the Gestapo; of these, about 2000 were married to non-Jews. These 2000 were herded to a collection center on the Rosenstrasse, the street that was a former center of Jewish life. Word spread quickly among the Christian spouses and relatives, and a public protest ensued, lasting a week. The author's work is groundbreaking in documenting the sensitivity of the Hitler regime to public opinion. After initial vacillation, a decision was made to release the prisoners. Stoltzfus has done an impressive job of presenting this unusual episode. He emphasizes that if the church had protested against the treatment of the Jews as it did, successfully, against the euthanasia program, the Holocaust would not have occurred. He examines issues pertaining to, among other things, intermarriage between gentile and Jewish Germans and adds an extra dimension to his account with poignant, compelling interviews with survivors, which provide the backbone of the book and make it very readable for generalists. Highly recommended for large public and academic libraries.?Paul Kaplan, Lake Villa Dist. Lib., Ill.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393039048
• ISBN 13: 9780393039047
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 386