Cold Open

It’s February 27th, 1943, in Berlin, Germany.

44-year-old Julius Israel shivers in his thin jacket as he steps outside the gates of a large armaments factory. Once a tailor, Julius is now being forced to work on an assembly line, churning out weapons for the Nazi war machine.

After his latest exhausting shift in the factory, Julius begins the long walk home to his wife. But he barely makes it ten yards… before a tarp-covered truck skids to a halt in front of him. Armed police jump out… and bark at Julius to get inside. Julius doesn’t resist. And during a volley of insults and slurs from the police, he climbs into the back of the truck, which then roars off down the street.

Julius has seen many others taken in raids like this ever since Adolf Hitler came to power, though he’s never been the victim before. He is Jewish, but he’s been partly protected from the Nazis by his marriage. His wife is what race theorists call “Aryan”, and it’s her status that has kept Julius out of concentration camps. Until today.

Sitting next to him in the back of the truck, Julius recognizes other “intermarried” men like him. And as the vehicle rumbles down the streets of Berlin, Julius grows terrified that the fragile protection their marriages have afforded them is finally at an end.

Julius Israel is right to be worried. Regardless of their marriage status, all Jews are now marked for removal from Germany and are being sent to concentration camps, as part of Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution.” But not everyone in Berlin will stand aside and let Hitler and his followers erase the city’s Jewish population. A protest movement, the first of its kind, will begin just hours after Julius Israel and other men were arrested on February 27th, 1943.

Introduction

From Noiser and Airship, I’m Lindsay Graham and this is History Daily.

History is made every day. On this podcast—every day—we tell the true stories of the people and events that shaped our world.

Today is February 27th, 1943: The Rosenstrasse Protests.

Act One: Resistance of the Heart

It’s February 27th, 1943, in Berlin, Germany, an hour after Julius Israel was rounded up by the Gestapo, the Nazis’ secret police force.

In the small kitchen of her townhouse, 32-year-old Charlotte Israel stares at two dinner plates of boiled potatoes and cabbage that are now growing cold. Her husband Julius should have been home by now, and her heart races with anxiety. Eventually, Charlotte can’t take it anymore. So leaving the food on the table, she exits her front door and crosses the street to the grocery store opposite her home. They have a working telephone, and Julius and Charlotte have an arrangement: if he ever gets into trouble, he will try to call the store. But when Charlotte asks, the shopkeeper just shakes his head. He hasn’t heard a thing. Unsure of what to do, Charlotte returns home but finds she can’t relax, her eyes constantly check the door for any sign of her husband, who she loves deeply.

Many might think Charlotte and Julius are an unlikely couple. Charlotte is Blonde, tall, and athletic, a perfect specimen of the “Aryan race” of Nazi propaganda. But her husband Julius is the opposite. Stricken by polio as a child, Julius is a foot shorter than his wife and has always been sickly but what he lacks in physical strength, he makes up for in creativity.

His musical talent was evident even in childhood. And when he grew up, he moved to Berlin, where he taught piano before opening a tailoring shop. He hired Charlotte as an assistant, and the two fell in love. Despite Charlotte’s mother’s fierce opposition to the idea of a Jewish son-in-law, Charlotte and Julius got married in 1933.

But that very same year, Nazi Party leader, Adolf Hitler, became Chancellor of Germany. And once he seized power, his cruel antisemitism became official state policy.

In September 1935, Nazi Germany passed the Nuremberg Laws, which deprived Jews of German citizenship and barred marriages between Jews and non-Jews.

But Jews who were already married to German men or women received some protection. The Nazi regime was cautious about antagonizing non-Jewish Germans. But as Charlotte and Julius’ Jewish friends in Berlin either fled, or were rounded up by authorities, the couple lived in growing fear that the rules would be changed, and Julius would be left in danger.

Now, it seems their worst fears have been realized. Charlotte is soon joined at home by a neighbor, the wife of another Jewish man, and she tells Charlotte that both their husbands have recently been arrested by the Gestapo. Charlotte grabs onto the kitchen counter, as a wave of nausea floods through her. The neighbor goes on to tell Charlotte that their husbands have been taken to a building on Rosenstrasse.

Both women are familiar with it—it’s a four-story townhouse that was once a community center. More recently, though, the Nazis have used the building to detain Jews ahead of deportation.

Fearing for her husband, Charlotte immediately leaves her home and heads for Rosenstrasse. When she arrives, she finds there is already a crowd of other women outside the townhouse, and Charlotte recognizes many of them. Like her, they want answers—they want to know what's happened to their husbands. But the women receive no answers from the guards standing outside. Instead, they are ordered to disperse at once.

But Charlotte knows if she abandons Julius now, she may never see him again. So, thinking on her feet, she pushes her way to the front of the crowd and desperately pleads with a guard for her husband’s ration card. She says that without that, her family will starve. It’s a ruse to check whether Julius is inside—and still alive. A few minutes later, the guard returns with the ration card, and scratched lightly on the back are the words ‘I’m fine’. Charlotte breathes a sigh of relief. Because Julius is safe. For now.

But her example encourages other women to confront the guards too. And despite louder and louder calls for them all to return to their homes, the women stand firm. They are not going anywhere without their husbands.

Such acts of defiance are almost unheard of in Nazi Germany. Normally, dissent would be met with rapid and brutal violence. But since the guards are facing German women, they’re unsure what they should do.

And soon, this stand-off will grow into a prolonged public protest. For Nazi officials in Berlin, it will be an embarrassing thorn in their side. But for the women and their detained husbands, it will be a matter of life and death.

Act Two: The Final Solution

It’s March 6th, 1943, in Berlin, Germany, eight days after Julius Israel and other Jewish men were rounded up by Nazi authorities.

From the safety of his chauffeur-driven car, German Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels peers along the street, watching with his dark and calculating eyes as hundreds of women and children protest outside number 2, Rosenstrasse.

They repeat the same chant over and over: “Give us our husbands back.” There’s no violence on display. There’s not a hint that the women will try to push past the guards or storm the building. But Goebbels still doesn't like what he sees.

For him, the most remarkable and worrying aspect of this protest is the sheer number of people daring to take part. It isn’t just the wives or family members of those detained inside the Rosenstrasse building, but their friends and neighbors too. Even passers-by have joined in. The guards standing outside the townhouse occasionally manage to clear the protestors. But it never lasts. No matter how often the street is emptied, the protestors return, and the same familiar chant echoes down Rosenstrasse once again.

After only a few moments, Goebbels gestures impatiently to his driver. He’s seen enough. Deep in thought, he’s taken back to his office on the other side of Berlin. If he can’t stop this protest, he needs to think of a way to spin it.

As minister of propaganda, it's Goebbels’ job to maintain the German people’s morale and keep them in line through a constant diet of misinformation. And by dehumanizing the Jewish people, he’s created conditions where most Berliners don’t bat an eyelid at the deportations of their former neighbors, coworkers, and friends. But the so-called “mixed marriages” between Jews and non-Jews have always been problematic. Over the years, there’s been huge social pressure on Germans married to Jews to divorce their partners and many have. But by 1943, if someone has stayed loyal to their partner for this long, then no amount of propaganda will convince them to turn on their loved ones now.

That’s what makes this protest so difficult for Goebbels. And it’s just one of many growing problems. The tide of the war is turning against Germany. On the Eastern Front, the 6th Army has surrendered to the Soviets at Stalingrad after taking staggering losses. In North Africa, German forces and their Italian allies are being pushed back by the British and the Americans. And the fighting is increasingly coming to Germany itself, with the capital Berlin suffering attacks by Allied bombers.

The last thing Goebbels needs now is for a protest by women in Berlin to continue—or even to spread.

So back in his office, Goebbels tries his best to twist the events taking place in Rosenstrasse. Using all the power of the state media, he starts spreading the lie that the protests have nothing to do with detained Jewish men at all. He plants the story that they are in fact just the people of Berlin taking to the streets to show their defiance at the British bombers who dared to attack the capital of the Third Reich. Goebbels himself then takes to the radio to call for greater commitment to the war from the German people and to reiterate that they can only be victorious over the Allies if the country’s entire Jewish population is removed.

But despite all Goebbels’ efforts to undermine the protests, it continues day after day. Some in the German government suggest ignoring the women and deporting the men to the concentration camps anyway. But Goebbels fears that will start a riot. Others, such as SS commander Heinrich Himmler, favor ending the protest violently, by simply shooting the women. But Goebbels argues strongly against this too. There is no way even the Nazis could massacre hundreds of German women in the heart of the capital without the news getting out. Goebbels believes such an act would be devastating to the already fragile German morale and would shatter his carefully constructed image of a united people, fighting for total victory together.

But Goebbels can’t just do nothing. The protests themselves are damaging to morale. And Adolf Hitler has made it clear that he wants all Jews to be deported and sent to the camps without delay, and without exception.

Goebbels knows something must be done and quickly. The longer these protests go on, the more they will spread. But if he can’t remove the protestors, and he can’t deport their husbands, there will soon be only one thing left he can do.

Act Three: The Last Stand

It’s March 6th, 1943, in Berlin, Germany, just over a week after the start of the protests on Rosenstrasse.

The crowd outside the townhouse is now larger than ever. Among them still is Charlotte Israel. She knows her husband Julius is somewhere in the building in front of her. And she’s not leaving until he's free. Stamping her foot and pumping her fist in the air, Charlotte continues the chant that has reverberated around this street in Berlin for the past eight days: “Give us our husbands back!”

Then, suddenly, without warning the doors of the townhouse swing open, and two soldiers step out. Charlotte recognizes them—after days of protest, they’re familiar faces. But today the soldiers are carrying something—a large machine gun.

The men begin mounting the weapon on the ground in front of the crowd. There are screams of fear. But after a few moments, that terror turns to rage. Charlotte and her fellow protestors begin to shout louder and louder, pushing back against the barrier between them and the armed men. But now, instead of chanting “Give us our husbands back,” the women begin to shout “Murderers, Murderers.” The guards yell back at them, telling them if the women don’t move right now, they will open fire.

But this threat only enrages Charlotte and the others further. They continue to scream, “Murderers, Murderers!” over and over again with such fury that the soldiers don’t know what to do. They make a show of loading their weapons, but the women can see the soldiers' hearts aren’t in it. A few moments later, an officer hurries out from the townhouse and tells the soldiers to stand down. He's just been informed by Joseph Goebbels that the Jewish men held in Rosenstrasse are to be released. This is how Goebbels has decided to solve the problem of the protests—by giving in to them.

There are tears of joy and relief among the crowd as they realize what's happening, that they’ve won. And later that day, the Gestapo begins to free the prisoners. It takes several weeks but eventually, all 1800 men, including Julius Israel, are released back to their wives.

The protests end, and Joseph Goebbels’ is forced to be content that they did not spread further, but his attempt to preserve German morale doesn’t change the course of World War II. The Nazi regime is doomed. But the horrifying extent of the crimes discovered in concentration camps like Auschwitz will only be revealed with the defeat of Germany in 1945. By then, the ruthlessly organized brutality of Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution will have taken the lives of millions—but there will also be more than a thousand men in Berlin who survived the Holocaust thanks to the courageous protests led by their wives, protests that began on February 27th, 1943.  

Outro

Next on History Daily. February 28th, 1972. British miners win victory in their labor dispute with the government, further weakening the power of Prime Minister Edward Heath.
From Noiser and Airship, this is History Daily, hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsay Graham.

Audio editing by Muhammad Shahzaib.

Our supervising Sound Designer is Matthew Filler.

Music by Thrumm.

This episode is written and researched by Owen Paul Nicholls.

Edited by Dorian Merina.

Managing producer is Emily Burke.

Executive Producers are William Simpson for Airship, and Pascal Hughes for Noiser.