Top Photo: Nathan Stoltzfus, Courtesy of Nathan Stoltzfus.

During World War II, the Nazi regime deliberately and systematically terrorized and devastated Jewish families across Europe. The prospect of what Theodor W. Adorno, a Marxist intellectual who got out of Nazi Germany in 1938, termed, simply and unforgettably, “harrowing death” hovered over everything. Prodigious amounts of research have accumulated about how Jews attempted to hold their family units together under unimaginably arduous circumstances. In other cases, parents hid their children with non-Jewish friends or acquaintances, grasping at any hope to keep sons and daughters alive. Inside Germany, non-Jews stood by their Jewish spouses, refusing to abandon or divorce them despite fierce pressure to do so. In Berlin in late February and March 1943, women in these marriages even dared to openly protest against the Hitler dictatorship over the looming deportation of their Jewish husbands. To throw more light on these extraordinary stories of resilience and resistance, the Institute for the Study of War and Democracy reached out to Nathan Stoltzfus. He has undertaken crucial and innovative research on what are usually called the “Rosenstrasse protests,” on intermarriage in Germany during the interwar and war years, and on the limits of Adolf Hitler’s power.

Nathan Stoltzfus is a historian and the Dorothy and Jonathan Rintels Professor Emeritus at Florida State University. He is author, co-author or co-editor of nine books including Hitler’s Compromises: Coercion and Consensus in Nazi Germany (Yale, 2016). Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest (WW Norton, 1996) was a Wiener Library’s Fraenkel Prize winner and a New Statesman Book of the Year. The book’s German translation, with a foreword from German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, received a Bestenliste prize (1999). His work has been published in The Atlantic Monthly, Der Spiegel, The Jerusalem Post, Die Zeit, The Daily Beast, and The American Scholar. He is co-founder with Mordecai Paldiel of the Rosenstrasse Civil Courage Foundation. Jason Dawsey conducted the interview with Professor Stoltzfus via email over the winter of 2024-2025.

Your 1996 book, Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany, did so much to chronicle and explain the Rosenstrasse demonstrations in Berlin in February and March of 1943. Could you provide an overview of these protests for our audience?

On February 27, 1943, subordinates of Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler launched what they intended to be the removal of the last Jews in Germany, code-named the “Elimination of Jews from the Reich Territory.” The focal point of these “Elimination” arrests was Berlin, the Reich Capital, where the Jews to be eliminated included some of those the Nuremberg Laws defined as “full Jews” who were married to non-Jews. Over the course of a week, the Gestapo arrested Berlin Jews from their places of work and from their homes. They also arrested persons on the street seen wearing the yellow star identifying them as Jewish.1 

This was what the Berlin Gestapo called the “Final Roundup,” and became known as the “Factory Action” a decade after World War II. But with Himmler and Reich Minister and Nazi leader for Berlin, Joseph Goebbels, the goal was to clear Germany of all Jews, beginning in Berlin. On February 18, 1943, Goebbels resolved to strip Berlin not just of Jewish factory workers but of everyone wearing the yellow star. On December 6, 1942, he had received Hitler’s permission to deport all nonprivileged Jews—including intermarried “full Jews” who were not privileged and thus wore the star. Intermarried Jews who were “privileged” by Hitler’s decree of December 1938 did not wear the star.2 

As news and sights from this massive arrest pulsed through the city, the Aryan (Gentile) wives of arrested Jews discovered that their family members were imprisoned at Rosenstrasse 2-4. Meeting each other there the evening of February 27, some resolved to return to protest. Early the following morning as she neared Rosenstrasse in search of her imprisoned husband, Annie Radlauer heard the calls of women grow louder as she drew closer. Already wives of imprisoned Jews had gathered and were calling out together, “Give Us Our Husbands!” Over the course of the following week, day and night, women continued to meet on the street, calling out their demand in unison to be reunited with their family members.

Many ask how many protesters gathered on Rosenstrasse. A common answer now is several hundred, approximately the number of responses the publication, Jüdische Allgemeine, received to a 1955 call by Heinz Galinski for protest participants to identify themselves. In her diaries, Ruth Andreas Friedrich wrote that 6,000 persons protested.  German Jew Gad Beck thought this was a reasonable estimate --not as the number protesting at one time, but as the sum total of all those who protested at one time or another. Beck was imprisoned but, as a Jewish Ordner, was allowed to go outside and inside of the improvised prison. For him alone, he said, not just his mother but also her four sisters were among the protesters. Friedrich’s estimate accounts for about three persons protesting at one time or another for each prisoner.3 

Gerhard (Gad) Beck and his twin sister, Margot (Miriam) Beck. Their father was Jewish, while their mother was deemed an “Aryan” by the Nazis (though she had converted to Judaism). After Gad, Miriam, and their father were imprisoned in Berlin in 1943, their mother took part in the Rosenstrasse Protests with her four sisters. The Becks were released in March 1943. Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Jizchak Schwersenz.

There were some who protested on their own street rather than Rosenstrasse, when the Gestapo carried away their loved ones during this Elimination of Jews arrest,  Gerhard Lehfeldt reported riotous public protests miles away on Berlin’s Münchenerstrasse. Following a week of protest, the Gestapo sent home the ca.-2,000 intermarried Jews held at Rosenstrasse—except for 25 who had been deported to the Auschwitz Buna work camp. 

Auschwitz records show that in early March 1943, as up to 2,000 arrested intermarried Jews awaited deportation in a building at Rosenstrasse, SS officials were expecting the promised arrival of 9,000 to 15,000 Jewish laborers from Berlin, a number that could only be reached by including intermarried Jews. In line with this, the 25 intermarried Jews were deported from Rosenstrasse directly to Auschwitz-Buna. Within two weeks they, too, were released and sent to labor camps closer to Berlin where their wives were allowed to visit them, one remembered, mitigating reasons for further protest.

The further decisive importance of this demand in Auschwitz for laborers is what German historian Joachim Neander identified as a “push-and-pull” constellation: there was a push from Berlin, which wanted to get rid of its Jews, together with a pull from Auschwitz, which needed Jews urgently as slave workers.” 4 

Map depicting the deportation of Jews from Berlin. Rosenstrasse (Rosen Street), where the 1943 protests took place, is shown. Courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

What would you want people to understand about marriages between Jews and “Aryans” in Germany prior to 1943?

Adversity and Courage 

First let’s recognize their courage, which is all the more remarkable considering the innumerable calamities they had to endure.  Every day they needed tremendous courage and strength, not just for noncompliance with Nazi terror, but also for nonconformity to the Nazi-adhering society surrounding them. I agree with U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Senior Curator Edna Friedberg, speaking at a conference on the 80th anniversary of the protest, that we “pay tribute to the bravery of those who stood in the freezing cold on the Rosenstrasse, fighting only with that they had: their courage and their voices. And they offer inspiration to us 80 years on.”

It is also valuable to recognize that without their marriages, these Aryan women too probably would not have resisted as they did. With motives unique in their society, they defied Hitler to rescue their family members.5  Many abhorred intermarried unions that were now causing trouble in a new way. Their unique circumstances created possibilities for effective defiance. a continuing respect for marriage and family that Hitler’s regime had not yet undermined. The Churches still claimed marriage as a sacrament although the regime sliced away at church traditions just as it was shredding respect for marriage when it crossed Jewish-Aryan lines. Thus, due to their unique motivations and circumstances, they do not necessarily represent a reproach to those whose very different circumstances did not push them into defiance.

Yet it is certain that these Jewish family members would have also been murdered, had the vast majority of their partners abandoned them instead of making it clear that they were willing to share their fate. On Rosenstrasse in 1943, one protester remembered, the common intention was to create a scene that would clash with the regime’s effort to create a sense of normality and consensus for Hitler. Their loud cries of protest were a tiny flame that might have ignited into a wider uprising had Germans joined in, wrote intermarried Jew Georg Zivier just after the war. He had been imprisoned at Rosenstrasse as his wife protested.

It is crucial to recognize that these intermarried Aryans were not following their self-interest or merely doing what married persons do. A key perspective here is that of Hitler’s regime. It was precisely their self-interest which Hitler and the Gestapo counted on to quickly lead these Aryans away from their marriage partners. Remaining married led them through innumerable risks, unending uncertainties and terrifying experiences. Some have thrown their partners overboard for less, and in their case the simple act of requesting divorce would have relieved them of escalating Gestapo pressures and a growing social code that they should be cast out. Just saying the words would have opened the door to them of belonging rather than scornful ostracism. It promised a sense of security and support through acceptance into Hitler’s history-making ‘people’s community’ of unparalleled superiority and domination.

To be sure, these Aryans did not protest for all Jews but only for their family members. But this limited scope of defiance enabled their limited rescue—which stands out relative to other resistance. Aiming for total revolution is often simplistic, wrote Albert O. Hirschman, in contrast to the continuing, resilient commitment to modest achievements: “It is the poverty of our imagination that paradoxically produces images of ‘total’ change in lieu of more modest expectations,” In any case, a glance at even the story of just one of these Aryan women shows how utterly overwhelming and exhausting was the rescue of family members alone.

From Courage to Rescue: The Primacy of Intermarriage as Context

Intermarriage is the key to understanding the rescue of the overwhelming majority of the German Jews who did survive, in my opinion.6  How are we to explain the ongoing Nazi deferral of these intermarried—and thus most offensive--Jews for years, except for the refusal of their wives to separate? The power of the continuing defiance of these Aryans—mostly women-- is shown vividly, if in reverse, by the fate of German Jews whose Aryan partners divorced.  The Gestapo’s practice was to deport intermarried Jews if their partners separated and “very many (schon viele) single Jews from intermarriages that no longer existed were deported.” 7 

Intermarriage is the primary context for understanding the Rosenstrasse events—both from the side of these couples and the regime’s response to their defiance. It was the hothouse for a growing capacity to defy the Gestapo and swim against the stream. Some Germans in Jewish-Christian intermarriages had become accustomed to the costs of going against norms well before Hitler took power. Their continuing defiance created the limited context for the regime to make a series of temporal compromises in persecuting intermarried Jews as they treated other German “full” Jews, in the sense of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws. By building up strength and courage day by day over a decade they were able to put their lives on the line in protest on the Rosenstrasse.  

Similarly, the growing number of Nazi concessions paved the way for regime leaders to make yet one more concession in a series of deviations from the Nuremberg Laws, releasing instead of deporting intermarried Jews imprisoned on Rosenstrasse.8 For the regime, the bedeviling position of intermarriage began with its roots in society spanning the Jewish-Aryan, master-subhuman line. Hitler’s rule rested critically on the appearance of universal German acclaim, which paradoxically constrained the regime from drawing attention to such glaring exceptions as Aryans vowing to share the fate of their Jewish partners.9  Hitler’s division of intermarried couples into “privileged” and “nonprivileged” is a critical example of the regime’s concessions to the recalcitrance of their defiance.

Beyond their undaunted courage in tremendous adversity, these intermarried Aryans rescued more than 10,000 Jews of the German Reich (which did not include the “Protectorate” in Czechoslovakia).10 Their defiance forced Hitler’s subordinates to either deport both partners together, or forcibly separate and deport the Jewish partner alone. The course of deporting both partners was taken in German occupied eastern territories. But within the Reich, popular opinion mattered because Hitler’s image was the plaster that kept Germans together behind the Führer, and because Hitler was attempting to Nazify rather than alienate society. Deporting both partners from the German Reich ran the real risk of erasing the clear line showing that Aryan Germans were all exempt from the deportations of German Jews (victimizing just one member of a family had been the prime cause of the anger about ‘euthanasia’ a few years earlier). Deporting just the Jewish partners could well draw more attention, sparked by the partner left behind, about what was really happening to deported Jews in contrast to the official story. It would also attract attention to the propaganda-refuting fact that intermarried couples continued to exist with Aryans willing to entwine their own fate with that of their Jewish partners.

Hitler’s Key Distinction between Intermarried Jews of Privileged and Non-Privileged 

In December of 1938 Hitler divided Germany’s intermarried German Jews into two categories, one “privileged,” the other “nonprivileged.” “Privileged” Jews were not required to move into “Jewish Houses,” for example, and, unlike “nonprivileged” intermarried Jews, the “privileged German Jews were not required to wear the yellow star in public. This signaled the regime’s intention to continue persecuting nonprivileged “full” Jews in the same way that all other German Jews were persecuted, while putting that further off for those Hitler had “privileged.”

This most basic criterion for understanding the fate of intermarried Jews has eluded some analyses that use the category of “privileged” to explain the survival of all intermarried German Jews, including those Hitler designated as “nonprivileged,” and who thus wore the yellow star marking them for murder in the Holocaust.11 Scholars and memorials alike have repeated that all intermarried Jews were “privileged” and thus survived for the moment because the regime never intended to deport them.12  They may even simultaneously cite the most famous case from literature scholar Victor Klemperer’s classic diaries of a nonprivileged Jew and the survival this enabled for him because his wife refused to separate. However, some scholars have questioned whether Klemperer and his diaries survived for some other reason.13

Overlooking Hitler’s division of intermarried German Jews may not be surprising, given how these categories disturb our neatly drawn categories. It may be tantamount to heresy as well as too complicating to point out that some intermarried Aryan women must have suffered more due to Nazi persecution of Jews than did some Jewish wives of Aryan men. Jewish women with Aryan husbands lived under the shelter of a so-called Aryan Household. Generally, they could avoid public association with the yellow star marking persons as Jews and criminals for persecution.

Meanwhile, nonprivileged Aryan women married to a Jewish man lived in households the regime identified as Jewish Households--with their front doorways marked by a yellow star indicating a Jewish house. These intermarried non-Jews along with their partners were subject to the same house searches as full Jews, and, like them, without police protection. Their circles knew them to be married to a Jewish man whom they accompanied in public as he wore the star. They were the ones on the edge of the knife as of late 1938 when the Gestapo begin calling in intermarried Aryan women to persuade them to divorce, with threats, humiliations and incentives. With so many still today unaware of this major discrepancy in the experiences of the two categories of intermarried German Jews and their partners, they may well also not realize how enormously hard the lives of intermarried couples of nonprivileged Jews were.14  

We cannot understand Hitler’s special categorizations and of these intermarried Jews and their families without taking account of the defiance of their Aryan partners. The churches may have played a role and some have argued that this was the dominant factor, while others in my view have successfully challenged claims that the churches were decisive.15  Probably very important, however, was the suicide of Joachim Gottschalk, one of Germany’s most beloved actors. Gottschalk’s suicide in November 1941, right at the outset of the deportation of German Jews to their deaths in the East, had a big impact on Hitler and Goebbels.

Goebbels had given Gottschalk a choice between divorcing his Jewish wife and ending his career on stage and in films.  Instead, Gottschalk committed suicide along with his wife and their “half Jewish” son. Goebbels’ wager that Gottschalk would divorce was an official miscalculation of the kind that Goebbels and Hitler loathed, and it resulted in what both feared-- an erosion of Nazi authority when Gottschalk’s fellow actors disregarded official orders by publicly attending his funeral.16 Within a couple weeks in late November, probably at their next in- person meeting, Hitler instructed Goebbels to pursue the deportations energetically while paying special attention to intermarried Jews, particularly those in “artists’ circles.”

Memorial Plaque to Joachim Gottschalk, on Joachim-Gottschalk-Weg, Berlin, 2019. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The regime was caught between leaving a remnant of Jews –due to enduring traditions like marriage and respect for it—and ridding Germany of what to the Nazis were the most odious of all German Jews. Intermarried couples were openly committing what the regime called Rassenschande (‘racial treason’ of Jewish-Aryan sexual relations). Their Mischlinge (mongrel) children, by contradicting black and white Nazi racial ideology, were causing extended disagreements among Nazi officials. Their continuing presence contradicted basic Nazi ideology. The temporary exemption of intermarried Jews from the Holocaust was done to prevent drawing attention and protest as indicated by the Gestapo decree of  the “decree regarding the removal of Jews from Frankfurt/Oder factories, February 24, 1943.”17

“Noncompliance and protest forced the regime into a conflict between fulfilling its basic ‘racial’ ideology and its basic political principle of maintaining domestic quiescence,” as I saw it in 2001. Hitler wanted real authority based in mass consent, requiring the appearance of quiescence, protected by a façade of consensus and normality.18

Understanding Hitler’s Rule within the Reich: The Wider Meaning of Intermarriage History 

In my reading, the Rosenstrasse protesters’ limited demands, combined with having started defiance at the beginning, show the importance of a resistant stance and restraint. The repetition by women hundreds of miles away of the Rosenstrasse protesters’ collective cry “Give us our Husbands (Männer) back” reveals why Hitler’s regime wished to suppress rumors which it did not start. Just one month after Rosenstrasse, women in Dortmund who rescued a soldier from an army captain’s arrest also shouted, “Give us our Men (Männer) back.” As also reported in the German weekly Der Spiegel --already in 1965-- three hundred women successfully pushed their demands in the city of Witten about food rations. In this case, however, their verbal assaults were not so constrained: according to an SD report: “insults against official and foremost persons [from Witten protesters] were the order of the day.”19  

Goebbels’ diary entry of November 2, 1943, following the women’s Witten Protest a few weeks earlier, sums up his appraisal of the impact of recurring popular street protests: The regime had given in to the demands of Aryans on the “street” so often that ordinary German people had learned to protest as a way of asserting their will. This pattern of compromises, made to sustain Hitler’s image and win the war, was sapping the regime’s authority, Goebbels wrote.20  This indicates that Hitler’s response to civil courage defiance has been too frequently overlooked.

The history of dissent and defiance by intermarried couples is the one most suited to showing Hitler as a strategist. One implication concerns Hans Mommsen’s “cumulative radicalization” model for understanding the escalation of persecution into genocide. This is a model better suited to explaining developments in the East than at home where Hitler remained laser-focused on protecting his image This “cumulative radicalization” model of Hitler following the most radical satrap who tried to please him adhered less within the Reich. Hitler actually prevented his Gauleiter from using force against the Aryans to prevent them from following traditional patterns of uniting with family, an order which was still in effect in late 1944. 21 

Fraenkel’s Dual State and the continuing impact of German Traditions 

Before the war, Hitler’s key focus was on transforming German society into a vast machine behaving according to his will. This would take time, he reckoned, since he began with Germany’s Christianized culture and a society which had learned to live with or trust the German judicial system. In 1941 with his Dual State concept, German-Jewish political scientist and lawyer, Ernst Fraenkel, revealed how the influence of German legal and legislative traditions continued during Hitler’s dictatorship. This “normative state” co-existed with Hitler’s “prerogative state” which was unrestrained by the normative state and came into conflict with it. The history of intermarriage provides a strong argument for the continuing influence of social and cultural customs, as Hitler worked to fit them for a totalitarian Nazi society.

Hitler’s imagined forever Reich—like the Volksgemeinschaft of those Hitler considered his very people--was a real goal that Hitler kept in mind and worked toward day by day, policy by policy. Hitler’s aim was first to create consensus in appearance and, working with that, to create its reality eventually. Respect for the German legal code rooted in the nineteenth century continued to have some influence. Guidelines of established customs also continued, while Hitler never thought he could erase them and internalize Nazi attitudes and behaviors primarily with force.22 Rather, while shutting down organized resistance to his rule, he worked to convince the people that National Socialism offered a better way. It is frightening to contemplate how much progress Hitler made during his first eight years in power.

The continuing influence of old norms and values is the focus of Hitler’s Compromises.  The public survival of intermarried Jews is the strongest evidence of how resilient traditions could be, especially when studied together with the continuation of other habits of private and religious spheres. Intermarriage sculpted a history that has a role to play in arguments about which models help us best understand the Nazi dictatorship. In making his case for the somewhat overlooked importance of Fraenkel, Jens Meierhenrich cites Hitler’s Compromises to show that “a subset” of legal norms and concomitant cultural values carried on, leaving its mark on Hitler’s rule longer than that supported by conventional interpretations

Fraenkel’s ‘Dual State’ model is more nuanced than simpler explanations.  While murdering millions according to ideology, “Hitler managed his relationship with the Germans of the Reich in ways that place him among those whom scholars now identify as ‘soft’ dictators, who prefer the tactics of persuasion, enticement, cooptation, and compromise to work their will.” Hitler was willing to compromise with the people temporally, “particularly when the people were drawing upon their traditions, [which] continued up until some point very late in the war when he became convinced that Germany would be forced to surrender unconditionally.” The reasons that remnants of German Jews survived corresponds with Meierhenrich’s observation that remnants of the rule of law “survived and structured authoritarian politics.” This was due not just to considerations of “means and ends, but [was conditioned] also with norms and values.”

Political scientist Ernst Fraenkel. Credit: Ernst Fraenkel: studio portrait, Leo Baeck Institute, F 9461.

Strange Survival: Jews Registered with the Gestapo at Home Addresses Survived in Hiding?

The postwar German myth about resistance is that no German could openly oppose the Nazis without being gruesomely punished, perhaps along with friends and family members. This is a much less egregious myth than those about resistance in Italy and France, and it is convincing once Hitler had established a police state and control of the media, together with the enticing sense of revived prosperity and nationalism that mollified many.

Fitting within this German myth are the German actions acknowledged as resistance, either because the regime did not discover them or because the resisters were executed. The White Rose and the July 20 military conspiracy illustrate this. Nevertheless, the arduous work spanning the course of decades to have these heroes acknowledged as resisters is impressive. Moreover, this work was done largely if not exclusively due to private initiatives rather than the German federal government.

Any acknowledgement that intermarried Germans rescued Jews openly, in the course of everyday public life, faces a more mountainous challenge, as the moral philosopher Susan Neiman has noted. Yet to demonstrate that Germans had no agency to openly oppose the Nazis without “being put up against the wall,” it is not just necessary to show that the Rosenstrasse Protest had no impact at all (since the Gestapo shared the wives’ goal of reuniting the Rosenstrasse Jews at home with their non-Jewish partners).  It must also be shown that no Jews were rescued openly with Gestapo knowledge (keep in mind as I argue above --that Aryans who were not married to Jews deserve a different standard for resistance given their different motivations and circumstances).

For long postwar decades up until this century the statistics used by Bruno Blau to show that virtually all German Jews who survived had survived due to non-Jewish partners who remained by their side, were accepted as fully reliable.   Even as he first wrote in 1988 that intermarried Jews had survived in hiding rather than openly, German historian and Holocaust expert, Wolfgang Benz, rightly praised Blau for salvaging statistics from destruction, including those of the Reichsvereinigung (Central Association of German Jews). 23 

In those postwar decades of the twentieth century, experts like Benz cited Blau’s statistics from the Reichsvereinigung as definitive. This was for good reason. In his Statistical Report on the "Final Solution," known as the Korherr Report of March 23, 1943, Chief SS statistician Richard Korherr wrote that the Gestapo used the Reichsvereinigung statistics for keeping track of the addresses of German Jews who had not yet been deported because the work retrieving them was thorough and dependable.24  There was no need for further registrations of German Jews imprisoned at Rosenstrasse and in fact the Gestapo had never imprisoned German Jews for a week to register them either before or afterward.

Blau went beyond statistics to lavish praise from his own experience on intermarried Germans who openly kept German Jewry alive.25  Citing Bruno Blau and the Reichsvereinigung statistics Raul Hilberg wrote that as of November 1944 there were 12,930 intermarried Jews surviving openly as registered Jews in Germany. Very few intermarried Jews from the Reich were deported thereafter. This is indicated not just in deportation statistics but in orders from high executives in charge of murdering Europe’s Jews --—the Jewish people had to be deported not only as the worst of Nazi racial enemies but also as ‘fifth column’ political enemies feared to be plotting resistance with forced laborers. Two months after the Rosenstrasse Protest, Himmler’s Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) gave two key orders regarding intermarried Jews of the Reich.  On May 21 1943 Himmler’s deputy, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, ordered police headquarters to deport all Jews still living in the Reich to Theresienstadt or Auschwitz –with one exception: “I expressly state that Jewish partners in mixed-marriages are not to be dispatched under any circumstances. . . Insofar as Jewish mixed marriage partners have been arrested for general (underlined) reasons, they are to be successively released.”  Sound arguments have been made that anxiety about non-Jewish partners could have convinced the regime to release Jews already deported to Nazi camps.26

Ernst Kaltenbrunner pleading “Not Guilty” before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, December 10, 1945. Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park.

This order remained in effect until the Kaltenbrunner decree of January 19, 1945, ordering the deportation to the Theresienstadt camp of German intermarried Jews. This was a mere week before the liberation of Auschwitz, and as failed plans to deport the remaining intermarried Jews of Berlin illustrate, the centralized government structures necessary for carrying out deportations were collapsing. Jews deported to Theresienstadt mostly survived, particularly those deported as of the end of January 1945. With Germany’s defeat looming, opportunist Nazis were less interested in following Berlin’s orders than in escaping and creating alibis. What caused the regime to delay deporting intermarried Jews until it was too late if not the tremendously stubborn loyalty of the non-Jewish partners?

But if intermarried German Aryans did in fact openly defy the regime and succeeded in openly rescuing family members who were Jewish. How could this be squared with the wisdom postwar Germans across society learned growing up, namely that this was not possible? In 2008, Berlin’s official German Memorial to Resistance opened a new Silent Heroes Memorial Center to honor those who had secretly rescued Jews by hiding them. Located originally on Rosenthalerstrasse (a five minute walk from Rosenstrasse), it is a permanent exhibit to these richly deserving persons who rescued Jews conspiratorially.27  Moved due to an expansion in 2015 to the official German Resistance Memorial on Stauffenbergstrasse, it is now billed as “the very first comprehensive overview of the resistance against the National Socialist persecution of the Jews.”

But would there be a place for the Rosenstrasse Protest in the memorial to silence—a protest so strikingly obvious that Goebbels by March 6 ordered the release of intermarried Jews because of them? If so, it would have to fall in line with standard interpretations and the keepers of German memory.

Since the Silent Heroes memorial was established, estimates of the number of persons said to have survived in hiding has been moving significantly upward according to the count of the Silent Heroes Center...  This could be clarified by the claim shortly after the memorial opened on the website of Germany’s Federal Center for Political Education: “15,000 German Jews survived in hiding, that is, as a partner or child of an intermarriage,”  The 15,000 figure again, closely approximating the 14,574 German Jews Bruno Blau and the Reichsvereinigung statistics indicate, survived Hitler. The critical difference is that Blau’s statistics show that these Germans were surviving in the open exactly where the Gestapo knew where to find them.28  

The Silent Heroes’ new finding that intermarried Jews survived in hiding comes to the aid of Benz, who indicated this in 1988. But it radically alters the numbers of Jews who survived in hiding, which experts had cited up until its founding. Vienna Jews were not part of Blau’s statistics, but they are indicative of how many survived openly due to intermarriage, since they survived under the same Gestapo directives. Evan Bukey, the expert on Austrian history, found that in the city of Vienna alone 5,564 Jews survived openly due to intermarriages that remained intact, which corresponds with Raul Hilberg’s documentation of 5,799 intermarried Jews officially registered in Vienna as of December 31, 1944. The intermarried Jews, who survived in the open in Austria, also represented the vast majority of the country’s Jewish survivors.29    

In Germany the accounting for Jewish survivors now seems to be somewhat up in the air. In 1991 Benz wrote that around 15,000 German Jews had survived either in intermarriage or in the underground. The ratio of those in hiding versus those in intermarriages was clarified by his conclusion that probably less than 2,000 had survived in hiding in Berlin. It has long been held that Berlin, with its size and various hideouts, was the location of at least half of the German Jews who survived in hiding. In 2005, Gruner cited the commonly accepted figure that had endured throughout postwar decades, that 1400 Berlin Jews survived in the underground.30

While the 15,000 number for survivors number remains firm, its usage has varied widely. Most use that figure to indicate survivors who had not been sent to camps. In 2021, however, Shani Rozanes wrote for Deutsche Welle that "about 15,000 German Jews were liberated by the Allied forces after the war; most of them had survived in hiding, others in concentration camps.” Survival due to intermarriage is not mentioned except that “many” Jews who “remained” in Germany had a “non-Jewish spouse or partner.”  

Meanwhile, as the number of surviving intermarried Jews is merged into those who survived in hiding, the total number of German Jews who are said to have survived at all is dropping dramatically. Some German websites indicate that German Jewish survivors numbered only several thousand as does Volume 11 of Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden durch das nationalsozialistische Deutschland 1933–1945 (The Persecution and Murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933-1945). It states--as the beginning of two sentences which comprise the ‘overview’ of the entire volume--that “as of spring 1943, only several thousand Jews still lived in the German Reich, most of them in ‘mixed marriages’ or in hiding”—also melding of intermarried Jews with those in hiding.31

It is hard to tell how all of these newly discovered Jews who survived in hiding are found. They are recorded in the catalog of the Silent Heroes Memorial, which has been updated frequently but I have been unable to access. The Silent Heroes Memorial does not list its catalog on its publications page the last I checked. By email I was told that the 2018 edition recorded a ”significant increase” in that count and there have been updates since.32  Worldcat.org indicates that the Leo Baeck Institute has a copy of the 2009 catalog edition, and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum has a copy published in 2010. Amazon recently listed a 2009 edition for sale, while the online bookstore Bookfinder listed no copies.

We are left to wonder whether the definition of “hiding” has changed in the category for survivors in hiding. I have heard experts say that Victor Klemperer survived in hiding, and he did seek a suitable place to live following the bombing of his home city Dresden. But this was in mid-February, 1945 weeks after Auschwitz had already been liberated and might be compared to seeing the runner who finished a marathon by rolling across the finish line as having rolled all the way. It is well known that Germans led the way in dealing with a horrendous past, although as an Australian-American historian has pointed out, it remains incomplete (although still far advanced over the record of the United States, as Susan Neiman has documented).

Still, in my opinion, the label of “silent” to commemorate Jews who survived in intermarriage stands the reality of the Rosenstrasse Protest and the scene it made to convince Berlin’s Gauleiter Goebbels that the best way to get rid of the scene it was making was to release the cause of the protest, as Leopold Gutterer, his primary deputy at the time, told me in interviews in 1987. Another Nazi from Eichmann’s office, Otto Hünache also told me in line with written documentation from 1942-43 that Himmler had intended to deport intermarried Jews with his Elimination of Jews from Reich Territory arrests. As survivor and scholar Henry Friedlander said, the only way sense can be made of what occurred is that the scene the protesters made interrupted those plans. Indicating the reluctance to recognize the Rosenstrasse protests at all is the identification of traditionally accepted acts of resistance (Widerstand) as civil courage, even as only silence is awarded the once-loud women of Rosenstrasse.

“Block der Frauen” (Block of Women), designed by the East German sculptor Ingeborg Hunzinger and erected in 1995 in Berlin to honor the women who participated in the Rosenstrasse protests. Credit: Florida Center for Instructional Technology.

What have you learned about writing history from your experience?

I relate here merely a surface of how I have read the evidence and arguments about what happened. Going against common interpretations, I see Hitler’s role as the people’s Führer as requiring him to make decisions on whether to use force to compel obedience from his own Volk if they were habitually following old customs. Judging timing and tactics to preserve his image was a key task for him as the Führer, and he greatly preferred to make the right judgment in advance to avoid disturbing the popular quiescence that was his ally as he sought to transition the people to socio-cultural Nazism. Nothing reveals this more fully than the way Hitler responded to the courage of those from the “super race” who refused to separate their own fate with family members who were Jewish, the social and political outcasts, the lowest of all.  

Even during the last year of war, he instructed his regional satraps, the Gauleiter, to achieve compliance by education rather than coercion, when it came to dissuading the people from old patterns conflicting with Nazism.33  Germans who continued, despite the contrary Nazi direction, to follow old habits were to be convinced that following Hitler’s new Nazi way would serve their self-interests better.

Different historians viewing the same sources arrive at different conclusions-- as it should be in our search to refine knowledge. Yet we live surrounded by history and how we interpret it does matter. Beginning research on mixed marriages, I was unsophisticated enough to not, in my opinion now, deal well with the social codes surrounding my research and interpretations. I became acquainted with these primarily after publication of Resistance of the Heart.  In retrospect I would have been more careful to try to frame my claims in ways to promote discussion and avoid offense.

I launched my study of intermarried couples living within the Nazi crucible—naively in retrospect—without thinking of it in any way as a Gordian knot. One sign was the immediate question I encountered about why it was an American and not a German who wished to investigate this history. At the time I had no idea that an American writing an initial full account of the political impact of intermarriages on Rosenstrasse might cause resentments.  

After all, prominent American historians Sybil Milton and Raul Hilberg had urged me on and I followed their advice about sources and contexts (for example, that it would not be possible to relate the impact of intermarried protest without determining how the regime made decisions, within varying contexts).   I also began with the work of the Jewish lawyer Bruno Blau, a lawyer and the most eminent statistician of German Jews of the first half of the twentieth century. His statistics, based on those the Gestapo used, were widely cited as authoritative right up until recent years, when an effort began to identify Jews who survived in intermarriage as having survived in hiding.

Blau wrote in 1948 that the “mass (Menge) of intermarriages, which one earlier saw rightly as a big danger for the Jewry of Middle Europe, saved Central European Jewry from almost complete annihilation.” The protest of the intermarried Aryan women on Berlin’s Rosenstrasse in the late winter of 1943 was the critical inflection point for this rescue, in my arguments.

Perhaps Blau was referencing a reluctance to count Jewish assimilation or integration as an aid in survival when he wrote that “strange as it may seem, the fact that a small number of German Jews were saved from liquidation is due almost entirely to mixed marriages.”34  I was well aware that leaders of Judaism frowned on intermarriage. Yet it was not until my Jewish agent reported that a Jewish publication would not be reviewing my book because it was about intermarriage that I realized that a history that had evolved under very specific circumstances could be seen as off-bounds, as an Israeli acquaintance at the time explained.

Although I was wide-eyed, I never intended to be offensive. My goal was never to merely challenge but only to construct a useful history. From my perspective, the opposing arguments that the protest did not change Gestapo plans to deport the Jews imprisoned at Rosenstrasse makes me question whether it has something in common with our early twenty-first century quagmire: you have your facts and outdated methods for interpreting history and we have ours. When it comes to Holocaust history, historians contend with political decision-makers, including curators of Holocaust history, who have much greater positions of authority and power to influence opinion.35   Later, while writing Hitler’s Compromises: Coercion and Consensus in Nazi Germany, I was told to continuously identify Hitler as evil lest readers think I was making moral rather than tactical judgments about his rule. Nevertheless, I characterized some of his tactics as what has become known as “soft power,” while of course rejecting one expert’s advice to include the phrase in the book’s title.36

• 1

  Hildegard Henschel, „Aus der Arbeit der jüdischen Gemeinde Berlin während der Jahre 1941 - 1943 : Gemeindearbeit und Evakuierung von Berlin 16. Oktober 1941 - 16. Juni 1943,” Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden 9 (1972): 33 – 52.

• 2

  For a concise overview of some of the key sources and arguments on these events see Ben Hett, et. al., “Forum: Authority, Sovereignty, Interpretation … Subtext? Controversies in Recent German Historiography,” Central European History 57 (2024): 223–244, here pp 227ff.

• 3

  See my Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany (New York: WW Norton, 1996), 302, n. 24. Inge Unikower wrote in East Germany’s Neues Deutschland that “London Radio” reported four to five hundred but searching in London I did not find this. Given common practices, the title of her article “Silent Protest” was assigned by editors and not by Unikower herself, who reported, as many eyewitnesses had, that the women cried out together Give Us Our Husbands Back!”  This did not indicate ambivalence on her part, as some say, although it has been striking to me that German processions commemorating the Rosenstrasse have been strictly silent—and also paired with commemoration of the massive Elimination of Jews from Reich Territory. This does fall in line with categorizing intermarried Jews as having survived in silence like those in hiding.

• 4

  Joachim Neander makes this argument in “Auschwitz, the Fabrik-Aktion: A Plea for a Change of Perspective,” in Nathan Stoltzfus and Birgit Maier-Katkin eds., Protest in Hitler’s ‘National Community’: Popular Unrest and the Nazi Response (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015), 125-142, here 130-132. In late 1942, the telegrams show in Neander’s arguments that intermarried Berlin Jews imprisoned at Rosenstrasse were needed to fulfill the quota promised in the telegrams. Himmler had induced industries to relocate factories to Auschwitz by promising to send slave laborers there. Nevertheless, a pronounced shortage of laborers at Auschwitz had dragged on. Moreover, the urgency mounted in the weeks leading up to the deportations of Berlin Jews for Auschwitz, since the SS, fearing a rebellion among 6,000 forced laborers from Poland, had dispersed them across different labor camps and were expecting instead Berlin Jews. The 25 men sent to Buna followed the Gestapo’s original, pre-protest plans to send Berlin’s intermarried Jews there.

• 5

  This begins in 1995 with my article “Widerstand des Herzens. Der Protest in der Rosenstraße und die deutsch-jüdische Mischehe,“ Geschichte und Gesellschaft 21 (April - June 1995): 218-247. See also Hitler’s Compromises, 78, 140, 208, 237, 260.

• 6

  Those arguing that the protesters had no role in the rescue of their Jewish family members follow arguments that place the protests in the context of Nazi forced labor rather than intermarriage. The forced labor context for explaining the Rosenstrasse events is derived almost exclusively from events in 1943, with a few references to Gestapo directives from 1942 and 1941. This explanation helps to support a broader statement that the protest has nothing to instruct us about how Hitler ruled and relies on literal interpretations of often-deceptive Nazi documents, as I have argued in response since 2005. See Wolf Gruner, “The Factory Action and the Events at the Rosenstrasse in Berlin: Facts and Fictions about 27 February 1943: Sixty Years Later,” Central European History, 36, no. 2 (2003): 179-208. Perhaps to stick to his claim in his book Widerstand in der Rosenstraße. Die Fabrik-Aktion und die Verfolgung der “Mischehen” 1943 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2005). See for example the American Intelligence (OSS) report of April 1, 1943, Gerhard Lehfeldt’s important memo on “The Situation of the ‘Mischlinge’ in Germany, Mid-March 1943,” Margarethe Sommer’s reports from 1943 on the efficacy of protest. See Antonia Leugers, „Der Protest in der Rosenstrasse 1943 und die Kirchen,“ in Antonia Leugers, ed., Berlin, Rosenstrasse 2-4: Protest in der NS-Diktatur : Neue Forschungen zum Frauenprotest in der Rosenstrasse 1943 (Anweiler: Plöger, 2005),47-80., in particular references to Margarete Sommer, pp. 55-74.  Hardly mentioned in the historiography but perhaps illustrating the resolve to attack in every way the arguments that protesters had any influence are claims that Goebbels,  probably Hitler’s closest confidant at the time, not to mention  Berlin’s  Gauleiter, was fabricating his diary entries regarding the Rosenstrasse events. "Goebbels had nothing to do with the Rosenstrasse and could never have done anything there," [German historian Wolfgang] Benz claims, saying facts were purposely ignored by those who made the film.’” This backs the hypotheses that the women had no influence, but it is in contradiction to what Goebbels wrote at the time. Understandably, historians who agree with Benz and his student Gruner do cite Goebbels’ diaries plenteously, including from the time of the protest, but only when it backs their perspectives. Leugers writes „Immer, wenn es für seine Sicht der Dinge eine "sperrige" Aussage gibt, lässt er sie entweder ganz weg oder interpretiert sie nach eigenem Ermessen: dieser oder jener Zeuge erinnere sich nicht richtig, habe die "Legende" internalisiert und erzähle, was dort schon als Narrativ zum Rosenstraßenprotest stehe usw. Leugers, „Widerstand gegen die Rosenstraße. Kritische Anmerkungen zu einer Neuerscheinung von Wolf Gruner,“ online in theologie.geschichte: Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kulturgeschichte 1.2006, particularly the section “Aufbau und Inhalt der Neuerscheinung von Wolf Gruner.“

• 7

  Wolf Gruner, Widerstand in der Rosenstrasse (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer Verlag, 2005), 189.

• 8

  The pre-protest history of the struggle between families and the Gestapo over the fate of intermarried Jews resulted in a series of regime concessions, summarized in my chapter of Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany (2001),  “The Limits of Policy: The Social Protection of Intermarried Jews in Nazi Germany,” in Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany, eds. Robert Gellately and Nathan Stoltzfus (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 117-144. That chapter is summarized from my Resistance of the Heart.

• 9

  Antonia Leugers, “Introduction,” Frauen Protest.

• 10

  Raul Hilberg, citing Bruno Blau’s sources, reports that as of November 1944 there were 12,930 intermarried Jews surviving openly as registered Jews in Germany. Blau who was right there on the spot with relevant data and keenly observing, like the superb statistician he was, concluded that these Jews survived. Any who were deported to Theresienstadt almost certainly survived in any case. Their survival, however, was due to the aggregate effect of the over ninety percent of intermarried Aryans who refused to divorce, setting a pattern of careful treatment for all intermarried Jews.

• 11

  In 2003, expert scholar on the Holocaust, Wolf Gruner, wrote that Jews imprisoned at Rosenstrasse were “part of a privileged group.” But all the eyewitnesses I have interviewed remember seeing only prisoners wearing the yellow star—marking them as “nonprivileged” –and in line with the logic of Hitler’s order.  

• 12

  Beate Meyer cites directives for withholding intermarried Jews from deportation as definite rather than “temporary,” adding that Goebbels, “in his position as Gauleiter of Berlin, pushed action intended to include mixed marriage Jews in the policy of extermination—after the Wannsee Conference had declined to do this. Beate Meyer, Jüdische Mischlinge": Rassenpolitik und Verfolgungserfahrung 1933-1945  (Dölling und Galitz, 1999), 57. For years the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s description of the Rosenstrasse Protest reiterated that the Jews imprisoned at Rosenstrasse were not facing deportation because the Wannsee Conference had decided to exempt intermarried Jews, adding that the Gestapo— despite Himmler’s November 1942 order to clear all camps of Jews including Mischlinge—“fully intended to incarcerate these [intermarried] Jews in forced-labor camps in the Reich.” Another USHMM article, “The Wife who sent her Husband to Auschwitz,” takes the protest more seriously, while stating that the Jews imprisoned at Rosenstrasse were “protected under ‘privileged marriages’ in the parlance of Nazi law.” But these Jews were in non-privileged intermarriages—rather than privileged intermarriages—according to Hitler’s regulation of December 1938. Abigail Hartley, https://us-holocaust-museum.medium.com/the-wife-who-sent-her- husband-to-auschwitz-e2a97ad02993 (accessed July 30, 2020).

• 13

  American historian Henry Ashby Turner wrote in 1999 that the “full Jew” Victor Klemperer survived “openly” for “whatever” reason, possibly because of his “military record,” or his “non-Jewish wife, although their marriage was not, under Nazi racial laws, ‘privileged.’” Turner, “Victor Klemperer's Holocaust,” German Studies Review 22, no. 3. (October 1999): 385-395, here 385.

• 14

  A recent emphasis on the luck these intermarried German had which allowed them to survive could detract from the way they and their partners forged their own luck. In my opinion it takes away from their record of defiance, agency, and rescue. This is what Victor Klemperer’s diaries do brilliantly and what I attempted to get across by use of everyday life accounts in Resistance of the Heart.

• 15

  Antonia Leugers, „Der Protest in der Rosenstrasse und die Kirchen,“ in Leugers, ed., Berlin, Rosenstrasse 2-4: Protest in der NS-Diktatur: Neue Forschungen zum Frauenprotest in der Rosenstrasse 1943 (Answeiler: 2005), 47-80. Cf.  Pascal Prause, “Juden in Mischehe und Jüdische Mischlinge“ in Leugers, Berlin, Rosenstrasse 2-4, 19-46. 

• 16

  Stoltzfus, Hitler’s Compromises, 248. For an example of Goebbels’ scorn for such a   miscalculation as a “crazy mistake,” see his condemnation of Gauleiter Carl Röver’s “crucifix decree,” because it resulted in popular uprisings, as a “crazy mistake.” Hitler’s Compromises, 99.

• 17

  See also Antonia Leugers, “Einleitung,“ in Leguers, ed., Berlin, Rosenstrasse 2-4: Protest in der NS-Diktatur: Neue Forschungen zum Frauenprotest in der Rosenstrasse 1943 (Answeiler: 2005), 9-17.

• 18

  “The Limits of Policy: The Social Protection of Intermarried Jews in Nazi Germany,” in Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany, eds. Robert Gellately and Nathan Stoltzfus (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 117-144, here 118.

• 19

  Stoltzfus, Hitler’s Compromises, 231, 236.

• 20

  Public, collective protests were rare, but the regime generally preferred to quietly relent rather than draw further attention to them. "The state may never, against its better insight, give in to the pressure of the street,” Goebbels recorded in his diary of November 2, 1943. "If it does this the second time, it will be still less strong than it was the first time and gradually lose its entire authority. Referring to the regime’s compromises in response to street protest by “Aryan" Germans—almost all women-- Goebbels added: “The people know just exactly where the flexible spot of the leadership is and will always exploit this. Should we firm up this spot where we have been soft up until now, then the will of the people will bend to the will of the state. Currently we’re on the best path to bending the will of the state to the will of the people.”

• 21

  Stoltzfus, “Cumulative Radicalization,” in Women Defying Hitler.

• 22

  Hitler felt obligated to be respectful of German President Hindenburg in 1932 because the people would resent anyone who took their “gods” from them without offering an accepted substitute. “One should never deprive the people of their gods.” He did not expect Germans to depart from Christianity until they were offered a substitute that was visibly better. Hitler’s Compromises, 14, 43.

• 23

  Wolfgang Benz graciously acknowledges Blau for salvaging statistics we would otherwise not have. See his chapter in Benz, ed., Die Juden in Deutschland 1933-1945:Leben unter nationalsozialistischer Herrschaft (Munich: Beck Verlag, 1988), 694.

• 24

  Report by SS statistician Richard Korherr, April 19, 1943, ND NO-5193.

• 25

  Blau, “Die Mischehe im Nazireich.“ In survey after survey the Reichsvereinigung painstakingly combed the population for German Jews. Unsurprisingly, in the weeks leading up to the Elimination of Jews arrests in Berlin which led to the Rosenstrasse protests, the regime had ordered it to make sure they had the address of every German Jew. In November 1942 the Reichsvereinigung was ordered to make several consecutive surveys, giving German Jews “one last summons.” In mid-February, ahead of the Elimination of Jews arrests in Berlin, the Gestapo ordered the churches to verify and update its list of intermarried Jews. This was a duplicate effort to be as certain that all German Jews were already registered, since the Reichsvereinigung had already collected this information divided into “privileged” and “nonprivileged.” Resistance of the Heart, 188, 206, citing records of the Reichsvereinigung.

• 26

  Following this Kaltenbrunner order, Jewish persons, who had been exempted from deportations hecause they were working for the Reichsvereinigung, were deported. Thereafter the organization of German Jewish authorities was comprised of intermarried Jews.

• 27

  Gedenkstätte Stille Helden, Widerstand gegen die Judenverfolgung 1933 bis 1945 (Berlin 2018), 6ff. 

• 28

  Blau, The Jewish Population of Germany, 1939-1945, 166.

• 29

  Evan Bukey, Jews and Intermarriage in Nazi Austria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 95, 148-156.  

• 30

  Gruner, Widerstand in der Rosenstrasse, 189.

• 31

  The index of volume 11 miscasts one of the key documents for understanding the history of the survival of intermarried Jews, which I mentioned to the editors several years ago. The May 21, 1943 order from Himmler’s Reich Security Main Office to all Gestapo offices is identified in the volume thus: “the Reich Security Main Office orders Gestapo control centers to deport all Jews living in the Reich to be deported to Theresienstadt or Auschwitz.”  The order itself states among other things: that the regime is getting to the place where it will declare the regime “free of Jews.” All Jews who have been temporarily held back from deportations are now to be deported by June 30, 1943—including the sick and fragile—with the exception of those in intermarriages. Point 5 of the memorandum states: “I explicitly order that Jews in mixed marriages (underlined) are in no case to be sent off. In addition, security police measures may be taken against them only in the case that incriminating material can be shown. If Jews in mixed marriages have been deported in line with general [deportation] guidelines, they are to be successively released.” 

• 32

  Gedenkstätte Stille Helden, Widerstand gegen die Judenverfolgung 1933 bis 1945, 6ff. 

• 33

  Hitler’s Compromises: Coercion and Consensus in Nazi Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 240.

• 34

  Bruno Blau, “The Jewish Population of Germany 1939-1945,” Jewish Social Studies 12, no. 2 (April 1950): 161-172, here 166. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4464869.

• 35

  For example the Topography of Terror museum’s website (accessed February 3, 2025) https://www.topographie.de/veranstaltungen/detail/gedenkort-rosenstrasse-2-4-internierung-und-protest-im-ns-staat. It ignores the rich historiography on intermarriage and their defiance including protest by stating that all the public needs to know is in a “new book.” The book, long for sale at the museum’s front counter, was new in 2013 although its arguments and sources were those from the author’s 2005 book, which did not take account of all the evidence and interpretations. Also, 2013 is no longer so new and has preceded significant additional publications, some cited here. No mention is made of the cogent challenges to the 2013 book in a scholarly review, not to mention those of the 2005 book from which it derives.  For a broader questioning of “recent German historiography” along these lines see the article from Central European History from 2024 by Ben Hett, et. al., “Forum: Authority, Sovereignty, Interpretation … Subtext?”

• 36

  Hitler’s Compromises, 6ff.  Shortly after Hitler’s Compromises was published Benjamin G. Martin used the phrase more extensively to describe the Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture (Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press, 2016).