Authors: Roger Moorhouse
the market places people are behaving just like on any other workday.’48
That veneer of normality concealed an oppressive atmosphere. The
SS and Gestapo had begun to round up all those connected to the
plotters, dragging in families and acquaintances as the net was cast
ever wider and ever more individuals were implicated by the interro-
gation of their fellows. As a result, people were nervous, lips were
sealed and faces adopted an inscrutable mask. One diarist wrote in
the aftermath: ‘It is dangerous to show a sorry expression. Many have
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already been arrested, just because they said “shame”.’49 Berliners with
contacts, however tenuous, to those involved in the conspiracy soon
began to fear the inevitable Gestapo dragnet, the knock at the door.
Ruth Andreas-Friedrich wondered who had already been arrested, and
prepared herself not to ‘so much as think’ of the names of those she
knew who might be involved.50 Ursula von Kardorff, meanwhile, who
had also had contact with some of the plotters, wrote: ‘one day they
will come for me too. Every time the doorbell rings, I think that the
time has come.’51
For the majority, however, the dominant reaction was one of indif-
ference, even relief. Theo Findahl described Berliners as ‘apathetic’,
an assessment borne out by contemporary SD mood reports, which
evinced little popular sympathy for the plotters around Stauffenberg
and even claimed to discern an improvement in public morale and a
‘deepening’ of the faith in the Führer.52 Diarist Hans-Georg von Studnitz
explained the reflexive display of loyalty:
The public reaction to the plot is less violent than one would have
expected, although July 20 brought home to the masses the crisis in
our national leadership, it has not reduced their readiness to follow that
leadership. Since no one has a comprehensive view of the situation
that has arisen or can see any way out, and since everyone fears that
any display of disloyalty might well contribute to a deterioration of
the situation, the regime can continue to rely on the further support
of the people . . . The morale of the nation is unimpaired.53
Whatever reservations the people of Berlin may have had about the
Nazi regime, they were clearly even less enamoured with the prospect
of a palace coup by the old elites, a process in which they had played
no part and had been permitted no voice.
14
Against All Odds
The first arrivals came alone or in pairs. With collars turned against the
chill of a February afternoon, they converged outside a nondescript
building in the very heart of Berlin. They were mainly women, pre -
dominantly middle-aged, though a few brought with them their
young children and older siblings. They all wore the determined
frowns of those who had endured much and had learned self-reliance.
They did not, at first, converse too much with their fellows, except
for a few whispered exchanges to confirm what most of them already
suspected. A few dared to approach the solitary guard, in a vain
attempt to elicit some precious information. In time, that afternoon,
their number grew to over one hundred individuals. It would continue
to grow.
Unremarkable though it was, Rosenstrasse 2–4 was a building that
would have been familiar to many of those congregating outside it
that cold afternoon. A solid Wilhelmine-era block of four storeys,
with a fifth squeezed beneath a saddle roof, it had formerly been a
welfare office for the Berlin Jewish community. It had been there that
Berlin Jews ‘had clothed their destitute, fed their hungry, healed their
sick’.1 It was there that the relations of the deported had gathered to
find information and solace, where medical care had been provided
and where the bereaved had been comforted. Yet, for that week at
least, Rosenstrasse would assume a much wider importance; indeed,
it would be pushed to the very forefront of events.
That morning – Saturday 27 February 1943 – had witnessed the final
round-up of the capital’s remaining Jews. In the so-called
Fabrik-Aktion
, or ‘Factory Action’, Gestapo and SS personnel had raided a number
of factories across Berlin arresting Jewish labourers. Others were picked
up off the street or at their homes. Those arrested – around 10,000 in
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all – were taken by lorry to a number of locations across the city, where
they were processed and held prior to their planned deportation.
The prisoners in most of those makeshift camps – such as the ‘Clou’
concert hall or the Levetzowstrasse synagogue – were all so-called
Voll-Juden
, ‘Full Jews’, those who constituted the last remaining Jews
in the city, and who would, in due course, be deported to Auschwitz.
The 1,800 prisoners now huddled within the building on Rosenstrasse
were rather different. One of them, Hans Grossmann, quickly realised
when he was picked up that morning that he was being singled out
for special treatment:
The SS were very precise. Everyone had to enter an office and was
questioned on his name, birth date and address. The information was
evidently compared with a card, because in my case, the Gestapo-man
called out ‘Mischling of the first degree!’ – ‘Any Aryan relatives?’ he
then asked me. I nodded. ‘Off to Rosenstrasse!’2
Siegfried Cohn had also been picked up that morning. After a brief
interview at his place of work – the Osram factory in Wilmersdorf –
he had been taken to a barracks in Moabit, where the prisoners were
sorted. As the husband of an Aryan spouse, he was separated from
the others, and a white pass was hung around his neck. He was then
taken to Rosenstrasse.3
Rather than
Voll-Juden
, therefore, the Jews taken to Rosenstrasse
that day were those who fell into various marginal categories; those
who were
Mischlinge
(part-Jewish), or were living in a
Mischehe
(a racially mixed marriage), as well as ‘privileged’ Jews, such as decorated veterans
of the first World War and so-called
Geltungsjuden
, those cases – such
as Christian converts – who were legally deemed Jewish, even if they
did not consider themselves so. The women who had converged on
the pavement outside, therefore, were predominantly the Aryan wives
of Jewish husbands. And they had come to show support for their
captured menfolk.
Conditions inside the building were unpleasant but not intolerable.
‘It was not a concentration camp’, wrote one of those held there. ‘There
were doors that opened and closed. Occasionally someone shouted down
“Hey, can’t we get some water in here!” There were people moving
about. One should not imagine it as just Nazis standing around with
against all odds
287
whips . . . It was peaceful.’4 Even so, violence was not altogether absent.
Another prisoner, Hans Bloch, recalled that the SS personnel there
‘worked on him with their fists’ in the basement of the building, in an
attempt to glean information about a fellow Jew, who had escaped into
the Berlin underground. Bloch told them nothing.5
Even for those who did not directly experience physical abuse at
the hands of the SS, conditions were far from agreeable, with count-
less men – they were mostly men – crammed into rooms that were
entirely lacking in creature comforts. Siegfried Cohn was allocated to
a room containing about fifty or sixty others ‘packed together like
canned sardines’. ‘There are maybe ten straw sacks’, he wrote, ‘so that
most of the inmates have to lie on the bare ground.’6 Toilet facilities
too were quite inadequate. ‘If one has the need to relieve himself’,
Cohn complained, ‘he has to wait in line for about three hours, and
the most degrading part is that the men and women have to use the
same toilet, without it being possible to close the door to the room.’7
The few women in the building were generally kept together, but
conditions for them were not much better. Inge Unikower remem-
bered that ‘the small, empty office rooms were packed so full that those
imprisoned had to stand and could only squat down for a short time,
with their backs to the wall and their knees pulled in tight’.8 Another
female inmate, Erika Lewine, remembered that the sanitary conditions
left much to be desired. Her room did not have a toilet, she recalled,
‘only a bucket, in a sort of closet’. To make matters worse, the extreme
stress of the day had caused many of the women to menstruate. ‘We
couldn’t wash ourselves’, she wrote, ‘we had nothing there; we were
totally covered with dirt.’9
The food supply in the building was similarly insufficient, amounting
to little more than an occasional ration of boiled cabbage, sausage
and a little bread, which was supplied by the Jewish Hospital. Ruth
Bileski remembered the meagre fare: ‘Nothing to eat. They served . . .
one meal a day. I remember the sauerkraut. No spoon, nothing. We
still had an old ticket from the streetcar. It was made from cardboard.
My sister and I used it as a spoon.’10 Most of the prisoners at
Rosenstrasse, therefore, depended on food supplied by their families
outside.
In the street, meanwhile, the crowd continued to grow and the
event began to take on the characteristics of a spontaneous yet largely
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passive protest. Hans Grossmann, who arrived there as a prisoner that
afternoon, recalled:
As we turned onto Rosenstrasse, I couldn’t believe my eyes! I saw so
many people, many women. A real gathering. I saw policemen. But
not that many. I saw SS men.
The truck couldn’t even be driven up to the office building. It was
immediately surrounded by women. We had to climb down and the
SS men cleared us a path through the crowd.11
The women outside were initially most concerned to get basic
information – to ascertain whether their menfolk were indeed being
held in the building, and enquire after their condition. With increasing
desperation, they demanded to know what was going on, why their
husbands were being held and what would happen to them. As the after-
noon wore on, the crowd grew larger. Some of them had been alerted
by the Berlin grapevine – the so-called ‘mouth radio’, or
Mundfunk
, a
pun on the German for radio,
Rundfunk
– others had been alarmed when
their husbands and sons had failed to return home that afternoon, had
made enquiries and had managed to track them down. They tended to
have little luck demanding information of the guards posted at the
entrance, who simply told them to move on. Charlotte Friedmann, who
was looking for her husband Julius, resorted to a simple ruse:
Through a trick I determined that my husband was there . . . I asked
the guard for the potato ration cards, which Julius had. Then I received
them. On the back he had written very lightly, so that I could read
it when I held it up to the light, ‘I’m fine!’ Other women demanded
a house key, or food rations cards, to confirm that their husbands
were there.12
Later arrivals came with food, toiletries and other essentials that
they hoped to be able to pass on. Ruth Gross brought food for her
father. Each time she visited, she handed a small package of bread to
a civilian orderly, giving her father’s name. She initially doubted
whether it was getting through to him, until she glimpsed him at an
upper window. ‘He saw me too’, she recalled, ‘and waved with the
little note from the package we had sent him. So he had received it!’13
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289
Despite such minor successes, the mood of the crowd grew
increasingly agitated as time wore on and the guards at the door were
reinforced by additional SS men. Though the women were repeatedly
warned to move away, they began to articulate their demands more
vociferously, chanting: ‘
Gebt uns unsere Männer wieder!’ –
‘Give us our
husbands back!’ The chant would soon grow to a cacophonous din.
When Annie Radlauer arrived at the nearby railway station the
following morning, she could hear the noise of the Rosenstrasse protest
from fully three blocks away.14
The stand-off continued for the rest of that week. The numbers
outside on the pavement grew steadily. Though some contemporary
accounts were prone to hyperbole – one diarist, for instance, estimated
the number of protesters at 6,000 – the real numbers were compara-
tively modest, being reckoned at around 600 at any one time, and
about 1,000 in total. Yet the women were determined. And, as rumours
reached them of the deportation of the other Jews seized at the same
time and held elsewhere, their determination grew. Day after day they
returned and stood arm in arm in small groups outside the building,
chanting and shouting. Others paced the pavement, or craned their
necks in an effort to catch a glimpse of a loved one at an upper window.
Occasionally, the chanting was interrupted when the barked orders of