The Making of ‘The Rosenstraße Foundation:’ An Interview with Dr. Nathan Stoltzfus
The mission of the Rosenstrasse Foundation is to commemorate, encourage, and educate civil courage--concrete actions in opposition to injustice and human rights violations that defend the values of a pluralistic society. The Foundation takes its name from the Rosenstrasse Protest in central Berlin in early 1943, in which non-Jewish women married to Jewish men defied Hitler’s regime to protest the capture of their husbands, leading to the men’s release. The foundation is dedicated to the development of knowledge about this and other acts of women-led defiance in addition to acts of civil courage more generally.
The RSF was established by Dr. Nathan Stoltzfus and Dr. Mordecai Paldiel in 2018 with the help of Dr. Olivia Mattis, President and COO of the Sousa Mendes Foundation. Its intellectual origins trace back to Dr. Paldiel’s work as head of the Righteous Among the Nations Department at Yad Vashem from 1982-2007 and Dr. Stoltzfus’ research on political violence and nonviolence, as well as the Holocaust. In conjunction with FSU’s College of Law and Professor Richard Benham’s clinical class, the Foundation has achieved 501(c)(3) nonprofit status.
What is the ‘Rosenstrasse’ event?
The Jewish survivor and statistician Bruno Blau wrote in 1950 that 99 percent of German Jews who survived—more than 12,000, were married to non-Jews. These intermarried couples, beginning with the first days of Hitler’s rule, refused to comply with official and social pressures to divorce. The most critical intervention in the rescue of these “full” German Jews was a street protest by their non-Jewish wives, who publicly demanded the release of their husbands during a massive arrest of Berlin’s Jews in February and March of 1943. The arrests of some 10,000 of the last Jews in Berlin included up to 2,000 intermarried Jewish men, who were imprisoned in the heart of Berlin at Rosenstrasse 2–4, around the corner from Gestapo headquarters. Heinrich Himmler’s men considered this massive arrest as part of the “elimination of Jews from Reich territory.” This coincided with Berlin Gauleiter Joseph Goebbels’ resolve to clear the Reich capital of Jews by mid- or late-March 1943, and the urgent promise from Berlin to industries at Auschwitz for a quota of skilled workers that could be met only with Berlin’s intermarried Jews. Instead, the Gestapo released intermarried Jews as thousands of others tragically were sent to death in Auschwitz. Former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer wrote in a preface to the book by Stoltzfus based on his dissertation, that the protesting women were “a special thorn in the flesh of those in power,” an action that calls for “present and future action . . . Today’s message from these courageous women is never to give up and not to bow to the supposedly inevitable when faced with violence and oppression, no matter how hopeless a situation may seem.”
What is the RSF concerned with doing?
The RSF illuminates and seeks to demonstrate solidarity with those who risk their personal freedom and sometimes life itself in the struggle for the marginalized and persecuted. The foundation aims to bring attention to the relatively underdeveloped history of women-led defiance in Nazi occupied Europe, as well as acts of civil courage more generally against human rights violations. According to Dr. Stoltzfus, such resistance represents “grassroots, bottom-up responsibility for the kind of society we have, and for democratic values.” It aims to illustrate that it is the responsibility of ordinary people to work towards upholding democratic values, and that this needs to be an integral part of everyday life.
The Foundation is focused initially on building a website (Rosenstrassefoundation.org) to bring together descendants of intermarried Jews rescued under the most extreme pressures in the belly of the Nazi beast. FSU students working within the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program have been building family pages of descendants of these intermarried couples, with outstanding supervision from Danielle Wirsansky, a PhD student working with Stoltzfus, and Liam Wirsansky, FSU graduate student in Library Science. We anticipate their ongoing commemoration of the rescue of German Jews, and a reunion of descendants in person. A number of UROP students have also returned as volunteers for a second or third year to continue their work, making history relevant for everyday life today. This follows the model Vaclav Havel called “the attempt to live within the truth,” Stoltzfus said, “the effort to live with integrity that can become everyday resistance in various forms. This idea that individuals can make a meaningful difference follows the concept that dictatorships themselves are based on masses of persons who conform in everyday life to the dictator’s demands and its totalitarian society.”