Women Defying Hitler

Rescue and Resistance under the Nazis

Nathan Stoltzfus, Mordecai Paldiel, Judy Baumel-Schwartz, Nathan Stoltzfus, Mordecai Paldiel, Judy Baumel-Schwartz

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350201576
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia europea

This timely volume brings together an international team of leading scholars to explore the ways that women responded to situations of immense deprivation, need, and victimization under Hitler's dictatorship. Paying acute attention to the differences that gender made, Women Defying Hitler examines the forms of women's defiance, the impact these women had, and the moral and ethical dilemmas they faced. Several essays also address the special problems of the memory and historiography of women's history during World War II, and the book features standpoints of historians as well as the voices of survivors and their descendants. Notably, this book also serves as a guide for human behaviour under extremely difficult conditions. The book is relevant today for challenging discrimination against women and for its nuanced exploration of the conditions minorities face as outspoken protagonists of human rights issues and as resisters of discrimination. From this perspective the voices being empowered in this book are clear examples of the importance of protest by women in forcing a totalitarian regime to pause and reconsider its options for the moment. In revealing so, Women Defying Hitler ultimately foregrounds that women rescuers and resisters were and are of great continuing consequence.

Chapter 1

Cumulative Radicalization

“Mixed-Race” Marriages Under Hitler and Remembrance

Nathan Stoltzfus

I declare that in the year 1943 I also took part in the demonstrations on Rosenstrasse. . . . After we demonstrators were threatened with pistols by the Gestapo, we first quickly dispersed but then a short while later gathered together again and protested more.

—Gertrud Blumenthal, March 6, 1955, in response to German-Jewish Leader Heinz Galinski’s call for “participants in the Demonstration March on Rosenstrasse” to register for reparations.¹

Sepp Dietrich . . . offers to put a company of the Leibstandarte [elite SS Troops serving Hitler] at my disposal so that I can reach my goal with brute force, which at the moment, given the current state of affairs, would not be the appropriate means to get my way.

—Joseph Goebbels, Diary entry for February 2, 1943²

Ruling the people in conquered territories is a psychological problem. One cannot rule them by force alone. True, force is decisive, but it is equally important to have that psychological something which the animal trainer needs to master his beasts. They must be convinced that we are the victors.

—Adolf Hitler, Address to Higher Leaders of the Eastern Army, evening of July 1, 1943³

Following his order to release the intermarried Jews imprisoned at Berlin’s Rosenstrasse 2–4 recorded on March 6, 1943, Joseph Goebbels retreated to Hitler’s lair to make sure the Führer had his back. Goebbels knew ways to get Hitler’s approval and wrote on March 9 report that “the Führer has the greatest understanding for the psychological questions of the war. . . . In the Jewish question [Hitler] approves of my actions and specifically gives me the mandate to render Berlin free of Jews . . . I describe my actions to the Führer as generous toward the people, hard toward the wrong doers. The Führer also considers this completely correct.” Capitalizing on this smaller victory to receive absolute power over his Gau, greater Berlin, Goebbels continued: “He confirmed to me once again that in such cases only I lead the command of the Reich Capital. Here as well the ministries must obey my mandate. The entire public life is subordinate to me. In catastrophes only one person can give orders.” Already in 1926, at the outset of Goebbels’ ascent to power as Gauleiter of greater Berlin, Hitler’s “absolute trust” in Goebbels gave him a degree of control which “no other Gauleiter” possessed.⁴

German intermarriages of Jews and non-Jews and their protest illustrate characteristics of Hitler’s rule that are difficult to reconcile with common images, and have opened debates about the way the regime made decisions within the Reich. There is general agreement that Hitler was responsible for the Holocaust but disagreements about how Hitler got what he wanted. Agreement that the protesting women were totally vulnerable is also common by now. Without their protest it would be easier to believe that open opposition inevitably led to punishment.

Historians who view the Rosenstrasse Protest as an act of rescue have argued that Nazi genocide planners were trying to remove as many intermarried Jews who wore the yellow badge as possible during Himmler’s “Elimination of Jews from the Reich” arrests, which triggered the Rosenstrasse Protest. (The postwar neologism for this massive wave of arrests which the Berlin Gestapo knew as the “Final Roundup” of Jews is “Factory Action”). As the regime reached toward its self-assigned historic mission of removing all Jews from German soil along with Goebbels’ resolve as Berlin’s Gauleiter to declare the city “free of Jews” by March 1943, it proved willing to temporarily defer fulfilling this ideological goal in order to sustain Hitler’s image and increase German commitment across the Reich to the war. Defiance in the form of a street protest reveals regime strategies for keeping Germans fully committed to war while protecting Hitler’s popular prestige at the expense for the moment of banishing some Jews marked with the yellow badge. Critical for the women’s rescue of family members was the regime’s experience of their defiance over the previous decade. Given their refusal to cooperate from the beginning with regime propaganda and demands, the regime knew these women had tied their fate to that of their husbands, illustrated by their continued protest on Rosenstrasse in the face of repeated threats from armed guards to “clear the streets or we will shoot.”

In this perspective, the Naz i ideology of power, grounded in German popular perceptions, sometimes conflicted for the moment with the Nazi ideology of “racial cleansing.” Governing required balancing the two in order to reach Nazi goals quickly. Attending to popular backing was especially crucial when the regime undertook policies that would alienate many Germans and thus had to be done in secret (i.e., genocide and “euthanasia”). Preserving secrecy itself added vulnerability to the demands of maintaining Hitler’s image since secrecy had to be guarded from public scrutiny as well as the controversial program it was hiding.⁵

The cult of personality—the Hitler myth—was a cornerstone of the Führer’s power operating inside the Reich, an imperative for sustaining basic mechanisms of Nazi rule. This included “working towards the Führer,” the radicalizing process of satraps competing with each other to write Hitler’s vaguely stated ideas into policy. In the face of conflicting imperatives, when sustaining the Hitler myth conflicted with Nazi policies, Hitler, Goebbels, and others were willing to make temporary, strategic compromises. The history of intermarried couples and their Rosenstrasse Protest, as they temporarily reversed plans to deport at least the Jews from Rosenstrasse, reveals these compromises particularly well.

Hans Mommsen’s oft-cited concept of cumulative radicalization posits that Nazi authorities competed for Hitler’s approval by radicalizing the persecution of Jews, in a metaphorical ratcheting effect that escalated persecution into the genocide of Jews across Europe.⁶ The concept works better to explain the murder of the Jews East of the Reich than it does to explain processes in the belly of the beast. Deporting Jews from the Reich required managing German perceptions by secrecy and camouflage. In the East, non-Jews married to Jews were deported with the Jews if they refused to divorce. But within the Reich, the Gestapo hesitated to deport intermarried Jews until their non-Jewish partners abandoned them (when an “Aryan” partner divorced, the Gestapo assumed they could deport the divorced Jew without causing objections).⁷

Authorities seeking Hitler’s approval within the Reich were constrained to accomplish Hitler’s ideological goals and at the same time to promote Hitler’s popular image and the forward momentum of his mass movement. Within the Reich, his lieutenants not only had to do what Hitler wanted but also do it in the way that did not arouse notable popular opposition. Their policies and programs had to protect the Führer’s image, in all its camouflage, the glue that held popular consensus in place. Inside the Reich and among Hitler’s own race the processes of “cumulative radicalization” were tempered by these specifically domestic conditions. The theory becomes less persuasive as an explanation for the regime’s decision-making regarding cases further toward the margin, at the edge. This edge occurred where Hitler’s ideology of mass movement power conflicted with the ideology of race, relevant only inside the Reich. This edge, where one ideological imperative conflicted with another, emerged with cases that interrupted the ideologically driven flow of processes with concerns about how they played in the popular mood.⁸

The defiance of Jewish-“Aryan” couples that culminated after ten years in the Rosenstrasse Protest brought the conflict between the imperative for governing and the imperative for “racial purification” to its apogee and shows in sharp relief some contours of decision-making in Hitler’s regime that are less apparent elsewhere. Was the regime a monolithic machine carrying out hide-bound orders flawlessly from Berlin to the farthermost peripheries over which Hitler ruled with an eagle eye, crushing any opposition in his predetermined course? Or did Hitler lead more by controlling his image than dictating, bent on changing German attitudes which in turn influenced the way he responded to defiance at home, as he presided over a flexible decision-making process that made room for his influence in the wide range of matters that show his fingerprints? Germany could not rule even the inferior races of the eastern occupied territories “by force alone,” Hitler told military leaders.⁹ The same axiom held for Hitler in other domains: inside the Reich, with a goal of forging a society that thought as he did, Hitler used targeted force to crush opposition but sought to “educate” Germans and draw them into his mass movement with positive incentives.

The view here is that Hitler identified goals in basic terms and waited for opportune circumstances to move toward them, much as the Nazi Party was organized to take advantage of a crisis when the Great Depression struck.¹⁰ It was easy for Nazi leaders to agree on black and white cases, especially when this proceeded smoothly. The half “Aryan,” half- Jewish “mongrels” (Mischlinge) of intermarried children ruffled the exacting bureaucrats converting categorical ideology into political policy. Their intermarried parents, however, one “Aryan” and the other a “full Jew,” posed a different problem and defined a sharper edge of what happened when a fringe group, publicly visible, refused to fall in line. The history of intermarriage is especially well positioned to disclose facts and patterns. The one charge Goebbels leveled against operations managers when he intervened to order the release of Jews from Rosenstrasse was that they were working slavishly according to orders rather than adjusting to the unplanned circumstances of the protest.¹¹

The response of the regime to the rare popular protests of Nazi Germany does not fit the common conceptions that the regime set its course strictly according to its ideology and crushed anyone in its way. Persons who hid Jews are rightly honored but survival in intermarriage doesn’t fit the common model that open rescue was impossible and severely punished (even the military failed to kill Hitler). For a country that can pride itself in dealing with its reprehensible past Germany has certainly made the Rosenstrasse protesters fight for their commemoration, as discussed here later. After decades of overlooking intermarried Germans—their protest and their decisive influence on the survival of German Jews—German commemorations and histories have now reached a consensus that the women protesting were courageous, historian Suzanne Heim argues in these pages, and we should rest on this certainty of agreement, commemorating their courage without delving into the matter of rescue since we will never know for sure how the regime responded to the Rosenstrasse protests.

There is power in consensus although the quest for certainty does stand out brilliantly against the grueling day-to-day uncertainty the regime forced upon the intermarried “Aryans” as a terrible punishment for not choosing the certainty of divorce; divorce and the comfort of conformity appeared to be in their self-interest, not loyalty to Jewish partners. The historian might also wish to know why the women were not punished for open defiance. How did the Gestapo respond differently to different forms of rescue? We want to know where the protesters got the courage to stand out against the common social pattern, in their day-to-day stand. But we also want to know how Hitler concentrated so much power in his own hands and convinced so many that he really was a very great man. The fate of intermarriages offers a basis for judgment. Even if tomorrow we unearthed a recording of Hitler mumbling that the Jews at Rosenstrasse were released because of the protest, we would still want to know how and why. We would want to know what it said about Hitler’s power and the way that the regime made decisions. The history of intermarriages offers valuable insights.

The Hitler Myth and Discontinuous “Cumulative Radicalization” Inside the Reich

There are several critical contexts for examining the impact of the Rosenstrasse Protest and this open form of rescue by women, beginning with the strategic side of Hitler’s rule that led him to make compromises to masses of Germans who were openly upset when Nazi policies curtailed traditions.¹² Consider the phase-by-phase, case-by-case method characterizing decision-making regarding the deportation of German Jews. This indefinite “system” maximized the genocide as Hitler’s agents “worked towards the Führer,” making decisions to imitate how they imagined Hitler would act. Within the Reich, however, quickly evolving challenges such as an unwelcome gathering of women on the street that took the side of Jews during a massive deportation to clear all Jews from the Reich, set otherwise united authorities against each other, with some ...