Think speaking out against Trump won’t help? A 1943 protest in Nazi Germany says you’re wrong.
The Rosenstrasse protest against the roundup of husbands and sons provides an inspiring example for today’s resistance
A person holds up a sign in the colors of the American flag with a swastika. Photo by Getty Images
Under Donald Trump, America has become a nation marinated in malice and fear. Migrants who arrive for routine immigration hearings brace for the possibility that masked federal agents will suddenly arrest them. Green card holders, despite their legal status, worry they’ll be booted out of the country. Elected officials attempting to safeguard due process for migrants face intimidation, physical assault and wrongful detention.
The brutal assassination of Minnesota state legislator Melissa Hortman and her husband, along with the attempted murder of another Democratic lawmaker and his wife, marked a chilling escalation in our nation’s ongoing crisis. The alleged assassin, Vance Boelter — a known Trump supporter — had compiled a hit list of 45 elected officials, all Democrats.
With the nation in such turmoil, it’s easy to fall into despair. But there’s a growing protest movement in the U.S., as shown by the 5 million people who took to streets across the nation in the “No Kings” protests. That’s an impressive number. Yet, there are tens of millions more who stayed silent.
It’s possible, if not probable, that there are many Americans who dislike Trump but think that demonstrating against him will change nothing. But there was an event in Nazi Germany 82 years ago that shows how a small, but vocal and persistent, segment of society can sway even the worst of despots.
It’s called the Rosenstrasse protest.
In the predawn hours of Feb. 27, 1943, a force of Gestapo officers, SS men, and police raided factories and homes in Berlin, the start of an operation to cleanse the city of its remaining Jews. About 2,000 of the captives, most of them Jewish men married to non-Jewish women and the couples’ male children, were taken to a makeshift Gestapo jail set up at a Jewish Community administration building on Rosenstrasse.
When the men failed to return home after work, their wives telephoned each other to find someone who knew what happened. About 200 of them rushed to the Jewish Community building when they learned their husbands and sons were being held there. According to historian Nathan Stoltzfus, some brought bread, cheese, razors and toiletries for their loved ones. Standing face-to-face with armed guards, the wives shouted in unison “Let our husbands go” and “We want our husbands back!” SS men threatened to shoot the women if they didn’t disperse, but they stood their ground. The vigil lasted for six more days. Incredible as it may seem, the Jewish men were freed. They were later taken to forced-labor camps in Berlin and elsewhere in Germany, but at least they escaped near-certain doom at Auschwitz.
Details of exactly what happened during the time the captives were being held at Rosenstrasse have been the subject of dispute among historians. Some credit the wives’ protest for the Nazis’ decision to release their loved ones, while others say that Jews in “mixed marriages” had already been exempted from deportation to death camps. However, there is consensus that Hitler’s concerns about spreading unrest among the populace granted Jewish men in “mixed marriages” at least a temporary respite.
In their research, Stoltzfus and Holocaust specialist Mordecai Paldiel found other moments when Nazi officials conceded the demands of women protestors. One of them occurred in Dortmund-Höede, where up to 400 women successfully protested the arrest of a soldier, according to the two researchers. To be clear, Nazi officials did not make such concessions out of kindness. They were trying to avert potential citizen unrest and preserve morale as the Soviet army was pushing back the German invaders.
Which brings us to America under Donald Trump.
After his victory over Kamala Harris last November, Democrats were left stunned and demoralized. Many went weeks, if not months, choosing not to talk about their dashed hopes. It was just too painful. Slowly, Democrats began coming out of their political comas. But there were arguments over who was to blame for the devastating loss to Trump — Joe Biden for not getting out of the race sooner, or Harris for decisions made during her campaign. The bitterness began to fade. Pockets of resistance were already beginning to form before Trump began his second term. The resistance grew and coalesced as Trump issued a barrage of legally dubious executive orders, and used extortionist tactics against elite law firms and universities, launched assaults against the non-MAGA news media, rounded up foreign students for deportation, and disobeyed court orders.
Now resistance groups are spread are across the U.S. One of the largest is Indivisible, which has hundreds of local chapters across the country and was an organizer of the “No Kings” protests on the day of the Washington, D.C., military spectacle on June 14, Trump’s $45 million birthday present to himself. Other major players in the anti-Trump protest movement include the No Kings Coalition, which helped coordinate the June 14 protests, and the 50501 Movement, which also synchronizes national demonstrations.
There is every reason to be optimistic that these organizations will keep up the heat on Trump. They may not change many MAGA minds, but they could help the Democrats win back at least one chamber of Congress in next year’s mid-term elections.
Speaking in the U.S. Senate this past Tuesday, Sen. Alex Padilla of California exhorted Americans who don’t like Trump but have been sitting out protests to get involved. It was Padilla who was shoved, hauled off into a corridor and handcuffed while trying to ask Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem a question during a press conference in Los Angeles.
“No one is coming to save us but us,” Padilla told his Senate colleagues. “And we know that the cameras are not in every corner of the country. But if this administration is this afraid of just one senator with a question, colleagues, imagine what the voices of tens of millions of Americans peacefully protesting can do.”
This is also a lesson that can be drawn from the courageous women of Rosenstrasse.
