On February 27, 1943, the Gestapo launched the "Factory Action" — a massive roundup of the last Jews remaining in Berlin, most of whom had been protected because they were married to non-Jewish Germans or were classified as Mischlinge (of mixed ancestry). Approximately 2,000 Jewish men were taken from their workplaces and held at an administrative building at Rosenstrasse 2-4 in central Berlin, awaiting deportation to Auschwitz.

Their wives found out where they were being held. And they did something that nobody expected: they went to Rosenstrasse and demanded their husbands back.

The Protest

For a week, several hundred women gathered in the street outside the building — sometimes as many as 600 at a time. They chanted: "Give us our husbands back!" They refused to disperse despite threats from armed SS guards. At several points, machine guns were set up and aimed at the crowd. The women did not leave.

Goebbels was furious but also apprehensive. A public massacre of German women in the heart of Berlin would have been a propaganda disaster. The regime, which worked hard to maintain the fiction of civilian normalcy, could not afford the spectacle.

The Result

On March 6, 1943, Goebbels ordered the release of the detained men. Approximately 1,700 to 2,000 men were freed. Even 25 men who had already been sent to Auschwitz were returned — one of the only known instances of people being brought back from a death camp.

The Rosenstrasse protest remains one of the only successful public demonstrations against the Nazi regime's persecution of Jews. It raises a haunting historical question: what might have happened if more Germans had protested?

Most of the Rosenstrasse men survived the war. The women who saved them received no formal recognition for decades. A memorial sculpture now marks the site on Rosenstrasse in Berlin.