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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Thursday, March 6, 2003

ISLAND VOICES
Never forget what they did

By James Dannenberg
Retired state judge and free-lance writer

Consider this grim scenario: It is 1943 in Berlin, still more than two years from war's end. Germany is far from defeated.

The last 2,000 Berlin Jews, those married to Christians, along with their "mischlinge" (mixed) children, have been arrested and await deportation. A few have already been taken to the death camps, and the rest are temporarily incarcerated in the former Jewish Community Center on Rosenstrasse.

As was true for the approximately 150,000 German Jews who weren't fortunate enough to escape, these remainders had only one fate to contemplate: murder at the hands of their countrymen.

What hope could there be for them at this late date? Yet this week marks the 60th anniversary of one of the most courageous, most unlikely and least-known examples of civil disobedience in modern times. During the first week of March 1943, the Christian spouses and parents of those last 2,000 Berlin Jews decided they would not — could not — stand idly by while their families were torn asunder by the Nazis. Remember that this was the Third Reich at its evil zenith.

The "gauleiter" — political boss — of Berlin was none other than the loathsome Josef Goebbels, the chief Nazi racial propagandist. It was Goebbels himself who decided that these last few holdouts against Nazi racial laws had to be dealt with. The "final solution" of Germany's Jewish "problem" could not be impeded by family sentimentality. Berlin must be free of Jews.

In the history of the Third Reich, there had never been a single organized protest about the treatment of Germans' Jewish fellow citizens and neighbors. Not one. Political violence and death had been the Nazis' calling cards since the 1920s, and by 1943 they had at their disposal the power to destroy any resistance. It would surely have been summarily and brutally crushed.

All this went through the minds of the spouses — mostly women — of those last few Berlin Jews, but something compelled them to seek out their mates and their children. Each day for more than a week, they gathered outside the building on Rosenstrasse. With each passing day, the crowds got larger, and eventually Goebbels and the Nazis decided that they had to be dispersed.

Finally, when the crowd numbered in the thousands, the Nazis set up machine guns and threatened to shoot anyone who did not leave. Nobody considered this an idle threat.

Then something amazing happened. The women did not leave. They continued to clamor for release of their families, even if it would surely cost them their lives. Incredibly, Goebbels and the Nazis relented. They did not shoot. In fact, on March 6, 1943, they released every one of the Jewish spouses and family members, including most of those who had already been sent to the camps. They would live, as would a few thousand of their counterparts in other German cities, including my cousin, Hermann Dannenberg, and his family in Hamburg.

It seems hard to believe that even at the height of their power, the Nazis were worried about public opinion, even that of the Christian relatives of the last few thousand Jews in the Reich. But they did worry about public opinion, and they were willing to back down at Rosenstrasse in the face of a little toothless opposition.

More important, it is hard to believe that in the 12 years the Nazis held power, they were never forced to confront any other protest about the treatment of the Jews. Imagine what might have happened if they had.

Sixty years ago, a few thousand Germans decided that they would try to make a difference even if it meant confronting the terror of the Third Reich.

They did what they did, and they should never be forgotten.