- On February 28th, 1943, 200 women gathered,
desperate to save their husbands from Auschwitz.
One German housewife named Elsa stood with her fellow wives.
She was scared.
She was freezing cold, and she was about to participate
in the only open protest of the Holocaust in German history.
(dramatic music)
In 1935, the Nazis banned intermarriage
between Jews and non-Jews in Germany.
Ironically, Nazi propaganda celebrated marriage
and so, in an effort to keep up appearances,
the Nazi's permitted pre-existing marriages to continue.
Luckily, Elsa Holzer had married her husband Rudi
six years earlier in 1929.
Elsa met Rudi when the skinny, young Jewish man
with round glasses asked her to dance.
She hated dancing.
It took Rudi months to convince her to go out,
but Rudi was patient, and kind.
Once, when Elsa yelled at him, he just smiled and said,
"We can talk about things.
We don't need to shout."
They married soon after.
Germany's secret police, the Gestapo, put enormous pressure
on non-Jews to divorce their Jewish spouses.
And, once the divorce paperwork went through,
the Nazis shipped the Jewish spouses to concentration camps.
While most intermarried couples got divorced,
nearly 1,700 non-Jewish women in Berlin
refused to abandon their husbands.
Elsa's position was clear: "I married my husband
because he is supposed to be my husband.
What we have would never happen again."
After a brutal defeat in Russia at Stalingrad,
the Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels,
decided it would help Nazi morale
to finally get rid of the last of the intermarried Jews.
Just before dawn on February 27, 1943,
Hitler's bodyguard regiment arrested Rudi,
along with 1,700 Jewish men and their children.
They locked the prisoners in a former community center
on "Roses Street" or Rosenstrasse,
to process them for deportation to Auschwitz and death.
When Elsa Holzer discovered Rudi had been taken,
she convinced a guard to deliver the pumpernickel
and butter sandwich to Rudi: "Dear Rudi, all the best.
I love you forever, your Elsa."
That simple note was a promise that,
even in these dangerous times, she would not abandon him.
When the Nazis took over Germany,
they violently destroyed dissent.
They dismantled political parties,
they took control of the press, and banned protests.
Just a week before arresting the intermarried Jews,
Nazis brutally executed a group of students
called the "White Rose" for distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets.
Armed resistance fared no better.
When the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto revolted,
the Germans slaughtered 13,000 people,
burning half of them alive.
On February 28, at 6:00 AM,
women began arriving to Rosenstrasse.
The weather was so cold their tears froze to their faces.
Their chants started slowly, softly,
"Give our husbands back."
More women picked it up, "Give our husbands back."
They grew louder, 100 voices in unison,
"Give our husbands back!"
They had no training and no weapons.
As news of the protests spread, the crowd grew.
Public sentiment embraced these brave women.
It was a public relations nightmare for the Nazis.
And with public morale low after the defeat in Russia,
Goebbels couldn't afford a scandal.
After seven days,
the group of housewives had grown to over 1,000 women.
Desperate, the Nazis called in Germany's most ruthless
and feared organization, The SS.
These special forces set up mounted machine guns
and aimed them at the protestors.
The women refused to back down.
The SS shouted, "Go now, or we'll shoot!"
But the women surged forward chanting,
"Murderers! murderers!" ["Murderers!" Echoing]
They were so loud that nothing could be heard
but the chants.
An SS officer gave a command to his machine gunners,
and the women braced for death,
the ultimate sacrifice for their love.
But the guns didn't fire.
It was a bluff.
The SS disassembled their weapons and disappeared.
Silence reigned.
The next day, Joseph Goebbels ordered the release
of the 1,700 Jewish men and their children.
The women had won!
On March 6, 1943, Elsa Holzer walked home with Rudi.
The husbands of Rosenstrasse lived out the war safely
in Berlin with their families.
They survived because a group of women refused to quit
in the face of insurmountable odds.
Reflecting on the protest, Elsa described her thinking,
"If you had to calculate whether you would do any good
by protesting, you wouldn't have gone.
But we acted from the heart.
We wanted to show that we weren't willing to let them go."