Talk:Rosenstrasse protest

message: I saw a documentary once about World War 2 which showed a peaceful mass protest one one of the occupied countries, perhaps Denmark. The German forces did not break up the protest. The narration said the Germans viewed the inhabitants of that country as of "good racial stock" and would not have tolerated a similar protest in most of the occupied countries. Thus this may not have been the only such protest. But the other incident needs documentation. Edison (talk) 21:32, 3 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Other peaceful protest

message: Was the Rosenstrasse protest covered by either the Allied media or the Axis media? This is a pretty important detail left out of this article.--gwc (talk) 07:09, 3 December 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, it was reported in American and British newspapers at the time. German newspapers mentioned the protests, but claimed the women were protesting against the British bombing of Berlin.--A.S. Brown (talk) 00:10, 7 February 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Media coverage 

message: Just to expand on the above points, this article should mention that the memory of the Rosenstrase protests were blotted out for a long time in Germany. I have always maintained whatever happened in history happened, but what changes over time is the memory of the past. For an example, Winston Churchill in his final volume of his History of the English-speaking Peoples published in the 1950s described the end of Reconstruction in the United States in 1877 as a positive good as it was a stupid idea for the U.S government to try to make black people the equals of white people. No historian today would write about the end of Reconstruction and the triumph of white supremacy in the South that way, especially given the Reconstruction was ended as a result of a shameful political bargain, where Rutherford Haynes agreed to sacrifice the American blacks so he could get the votes of the Southern electors. Getting on with the topic on hand, the Rosenstrasse protests of 1943 were erased from German memory of the Nazi era until 1993, when somebody discovered the dramatic story of a group of gentile women successfully protesting in March 1943 to save their Jewish husbands from being deported to Auschwitz. It is rather odd that the Rosenstrasse protests were forgotten in Germany for over 50 years as Germans like stories of Germans saving Jews during the Holocaust. The reasons why are as follows. The first is during the Nazi period, gentiles married to Jews came under considerable pressure from the state to divorce their Jewish spouses, and those who stayed faithful towards the ones they loved were ostracized for the most part by the rest of the Germans. The women of the Rosenstrasse by standing by their Jewish husbands were people considered social outcasts in Nazi Germany, and after the war, a great many Germans did not want celebrate the heroism of women whom they had spurned during the war. Second, almost all of the popular historical writing and much of the scholarly writing on the subject of resistance in Nazi Germany focuses on conservatives opposed to the Nazi state, pretty much to the exclusion of all the other resistance groups. The story of ordinary women resisting the Nazis has no role in these histories. Furthermore, a great many of these accounts are frankly more of a hagiography rather than history. I don't deny that there were people both good and brave involved in July 20th bomb plot, but nobody can be as pure and virtuous in the way that some accounts portray them as. Most of the people involved in the July 20th bomb plot had started out as supporters of the Nazi regime and became disillusioned over time, and some of them had blood on their hands. Take for example, SA Obergruppenführer Count Wolf von Helldorf, the police chief of Berlin from 1935 to 1944. Helldorf as one might gather by his rank in the SA was an ardent Nazi active in völkische groups from his teenage years on who was appointed police chief of Berlin in 1935 because he was a vicious anti-Semite. Goebbels thought the current police chief, Admiral Magnus von Levetzow was not anti-Semitic enough for his tastes, and so had Helldorf, a well known hardcore anti-Semite appointed as his replacement. Unlike Levetzow, Goebbels was not disappointed with Helldorf. As police chief of Berlin, Helldorf spent a disproportionate amount of his time harassing the Jews of Berlin and played a prominent role in arranging the deportations of Jews to be exterminated. Yes, Helldorf was involved in the putsch attempt of July 20th, 1944, for which he was executed, but he also had blood on his hands, an aspect of his career that the more hagiographic accounts of the July 20th putsch pass over in silence. Moreover, the hagiographic accounts of widerstand tend to portray the men involved in the July 20th bomb plot as larger than life figures, as almost superhuman in their courage and goodness. In comic books and films based on comic books, it takes a super-hero to defeat a super-villain, and likewise, these sort of accounts often seem to imply it took people who were the moral equivalents of super-heroes to take on the Nazis, thereby implicitly suggesting that ordinary people could not take part in this struggle. A number of these books make statements along the lines that it took someone "extraordinary" to be in the resistance, suggesting somebody ordinary could not be in the resistance. Another reason for why the Rosenstrasse women were ignored was that they were well aware of what "resettlement in the East" really meant. The women did not know about Auschwitz, but they did know that "resettlement in the East" meant extermination. In the decades after 1945, a great many in Germany insisted that they had no idea of the "Final Solution" was occurring during the war, and only learned about what was happening after the war. An especially egregious example of the tendency to claim ignorance of the Holocaust was Albert Speer, the minister of armaments and the chief of Todt organisation who was taken seriously for a time (including by British and American historians who really should had known better) with his ludicrous claim he had no idea of the "Final Solution" was going on during his time as a cabinet minister. A strange country where a cabinet minister who as chief of Todt organistation was deeply involved in using slave labor from the death camps and who was extremely close to Hitler had no idea of the "Final Solution" was going on, yet a group of ordinary German women married to Jewish men did. How was this possible? Finally, the Rosenstrasse women were ignored because they were successful. A group of ordinary women without guns took on the Nazi state and won, which puts to the lie the often repeated claim that ordinary people could do nothing to stop the "Final Solution". Now, if the Rosenstrrasse women were shot down in a massacre, I might agree with that, but that is not what happened. What happened instead was the women won. Their husbands were released and not sent to Auschwitz. So, ordinary Germans, if they were enough of them and they were brave enough to stand up, could take on the Great Leviathan and win. So, for all these reasons, the story of the Rosenstrasse women was ignored it was discovered in 1993. This article should talk about all that. --A.S. Brown (talk) 01:29, 4 February 2017 (UTC)
thread_title: Blotted out

message: I would like to delete all of the references to Dr. Stoltzfus' book because they are all coming from a very specific portion of the book and it is excessive to cite every piece of information to the same book. Just wanted to put this out here on the talk page to hear from others on the matter. Taylor6644 (talk) 18:02, 3 April 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree that the current abundance of citations seems a bit off-putting. On the other hand, I understand that Wikipedia:Verifiability requires just that. A good start would be to consolidate a large number of identical references per WP:NAMEDREFS. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 05:01, 4 April 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Excessive References 

message: FYI, that book that is cited isn't very good. It frequently cites Wikipedia as a source. (t · c) buidhe 23:37, 15 July 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: The book is pretty much a pure tertiary source, which makes it less valuable. Appears that Paldiel what has to say on the protest is derived from two other authors, Kulka and Stoltzfus. These writers should be cited directly. (t · c) buidhe 23:46, 15 July 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  On Mordechai Paldiel 

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thread_title:  A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion 

message: The fatal shortcoming of the article as it stands is the failure to discuss the conclusions reached by the most eminent Holocaust historians regarding the Rosenstrasse protests. Their conclusions, based on more credible evidence than the article draws on, clearly undercut the thrust of the article as presented in the opening paragraph.
doorsbows Saul Friedlander in The Years of Extermination (2007) wrote  "Such unusual gatherings certainly demanded a measure of courage, but they were relatively modest and completely nonaggressive.  They did not bring about the release of the detainees, as deportation had not been planned at any time for these Jews.  the event turned into a legend, however: A demonstration of thousands of German women brought about the liberation of their Jewish husbands. It is an uplifting legend, yet a legend nonetheless."
Peter Hayes in Why?: Explaining the Holocaust< (2017) wrote "The Rosenstrasse protest...was limited to a few hundred relatives of the rather small number of men affected, not joined by other so-called Aryans, and not accompanied by any popular resistance to the deportations of thousands of other Jews from Berlin and the Reich at this time...the protest accomplished little in protecting men whom the SS intended to use in the near term and dispense with later...Far from demonstrating what greater popular resistance might have accomplished, the Rosenstrasse incident showed that overt protest had little impact on the direction or pace of the regime's relentless course.  2603:7080:2701:579A:C445:EBA3:ED00:536 (talk) 17:54, 7 August 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Glaring Omissions