A group of housewives took on the Nazis – and won. Here’s what we can learn

A few years ago, my husband and I went on a walking tour in Berlin. It was January, the snow was falling, and we were the only people who turned up for a tour exploring the city’s Jewish history. But it proved to be an advantage. Berlin in winter is full of atmosphere and empty of tourists.

My advice? Remember the Rosenstrasse women and take to the streets.Credit: iStock

Towards the end of the tour, our guide took us to Rosenstrasse, a very ordinary street in what used to be East Berlin. He told us we were standing on the site of the old Jewish community centre, which, in a cruel twist, was where people who had been rounded up for transportation to death camps, including Auschwitz, under the Nazis were processed before being deported. Needless to say, most of those people were Jewish. (Rosenstrasse’s original buildings had been destroyed by Allied bombers towards the war’s end.)

Our guide told us that Berlin was never a Nazi town. The Nazi stronghold, he said, was Munich. Cosmopolitan, progressive Berliners regarded the Nazis as vulgar, he said, and as a result they tended to tread more carefully. Nonetheless, by 1943, most of the Jews in Berlin had been rounded up and deported.

Apart from those in hiding, one group remained: the approximately 2000 Jewish men who were married to non-Jewish German women. According to our guide, the Nazis were nervous about arresting these men because of the respectable German hausfraus they had married. Nevertheless, on February 27, 1943, the Gestapo rounded up the men and took them to the notorious Rosenstrasse address.

Their wives, once they’d realised what had happened, sprang into action. They rushed to the site and demanded their husbands be returned. They sang and chanted and sometimes stood in silence, but they refused to leave. Over the next week, in the bitter cold, the crowd of protesters swelled from a few hundred to thousands. The Nazis demanded they disperse and surrounded the women with soldiers armed with machine guns. The women stood their ground and yelled even louder. The soldiers and the guns were the ones who withdrew.

Protests were unheard of in Nazi Germany, so news of the women’s stand quickly spread, including internationally. The publicity embarrassed the German high command. On March 6, Joseph Goebbels ordered the prisoners be released and returned to their wives. The 25 men who had already been sent to Auschwitz were extricated from the death camp and sent to labour camps. Most of them survived the war. The women had saved their husband’s lives.

The moral I took from the story is that people have power, even in the face of murderous regimes.

JANE CARO

Our next stop on the tour was the Rosenstrasse Monument, a moving memorial to the protest created by sculptor Ingeborg Hunzinger in the 1980s. Yet I could not help wondering, as we stood where those courageous and indomitable women had 70-odd years before, why I had never heard about their protest. When I researched it, I saw it was sometimes referred to as “the forgotten protest”. Why? Was it because it showcased women’s courage?

The moral I took from the story is that people have power, even in the face of murderous regimes. I was reminded of the Rosenstrasse protest after 2021’s March 4 Justice across Australia, triggered by the Morrison government’s response to sexual assault in general, and an alleged rape in Parliament House in particular. Infamously, then-PM Scott Morrison responded to the many thousands of women who marched by saying it was a “triumph of democracy” that their protests had not been “met with bullets”.

The Rosenstrasse women got a lot closer to being shot than we ever did, but maybe there is a power in the kind of sexism that hesitates to rain bullets on a crowd of women. So-called respectable white women, anyway. It doesn’t fit with the patronising claims made by right-wing leaders that they will “protect” us.

Since the second election of Donald Trump as US president, I have thought about the Rosenstrasse women again. My social media feed has exploded with progressive Americans reeling in shock and horror at the actions of Trump 2.0. Many are wondering how best they can resist, and to stop the reversal of hard-won human rights, the deportation of millions of immigrants and the persecution of trans people. As the far right flexes its muscles globally, this resistance to persecution is something we must all consider, whether we are likely to be the victims of it or not.

My advice? Remember the Rosenstrasse women and take to the streets. If German housewives could defeat actual Nazis, surely the rest of us can take on the bullies.

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