- 388 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
Resistance of the Heart
About This Book
In February 1943 the Gestapo arrested approximately 10, 000 Jews remaining in Berlin. Most died at Auschwitz. Two thousand of those Jews, however, had non-Jewish partners and were locked into a collection center on a street called Rosenstrasse. As news of the surprise arrest pulsed through the city, hundreds of Gentile spouses, mostly women, hurried to the Rosenstrasse in protest. A chant broke out: "Give us our husbands back."
Over the course of a week protesters vied with the Gestapo for control of the street. Now and again armed SS guards sent the women scrambling for cover with threats that they would shoot. After a week the Gestapo released these Jews, almost all of whom survived the war.
The Rosenstrasse Protest was the triumphant climax of ten years of resistance by intermarried couples to Nazi efforts to destroy their families. In fact, ninety-eight percent of German Jews who did not go into hiding and who survived Nazism lived in mixed marriages. Why did Hitler give in to the protesters? Using interviews with survivors and thousands of Nazi records never before examined in detail, Nathan Stoltzfus identifies the power of a special type of resistance--the determination to risk one's own life for the life of loved ones. A "resistance of the heart..."
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword
- Acknowledgments
- Epigraphs
- Introduction
- I: Hitler’s Theory of Power
- II: Stories of Jewish-German Courtship
- III: The Politics of Race, Sex, and Marriage
- IV: Courage and Intermarriage
- V: Mischlinge: “A Particularly Unpleasant Occurrence”
- VI: Society versus Law: German-Jewish Families and Social Restraints on Hitler
- VII: Society and Law: German-Jewish Families and German Collaboration with Hitler
- VIII: Kristallnacht: Intermarriages and the Lessons of Pogrom
- IX: At War and at Home: Mischlinge in Hitler’s Army
- X: Racial Hygiene, Catholic Protest, and Noncompliance, 1939–41
- XI: The Star of David Decree: The Official Story and the Intermarried Experience
- XII: The Price of Compliance and the Destruction of Jews
- XIII: Plans to Clear the Reich of Jews—and the Obstacles of Women and “Total War”
- XIV: Courageous Women of Rosenstrasse
- XV: Protest, Rescue, and Resistance
- Epilogue
- Notes on Sources and Discovery
- Endnotes
- Bibliography
- Index