‘Give us back our men!’
You could hear them three streets away—a large and angry crowd of women—and as we turned the corner of Rosenstraße I felt my jaw slacken. I hadn’t seen anything like this on the streets of Berlin since Hitler came to power. And whoever would have thought that wearing a nice hat and carrying a handbag was the best way to dress when you were opposing the Nazis?
‘Release our husbands,’ shouted the mob of women as we pushed our way along the street. ‘Release our husbands now.’
There were many more of them than I had been expecting – perhaps several hundred. Even Klara Meyer looked surprised, but not as surprised as the cops and SS who were guarding the Jewish Welfare Office. They gripped their machine pistols and rifles and muttered curses and abuse at the women standing nearest to the door and looked horrified to find themselves ignored or even roundly cursed back. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be: if you had a gun, then people were supposed to do what they’re told. That’s page one of how to be a Nazi.
— Philip Kerr, A Man Without Breath
Today’s Rosenstraße is not very attention-grabbing. For those on the main tourist highway from the Brandenburg Gate along Unter den Linden to the TV Tower and Alexanderplatz, it appears as just a gap between the tall, concrete GDR buildings that line Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse, functioning as an entryway for delivery vans and UberEats drivers.
Behind that gap is a really short street, more of a lane in fact, that runs down to Anna-Louisa-Karsch-Street and is lined by restored nineteenth-century Gründerzeit buildings that now house digital agencies and offices on one side, and a small park and more Plattenbauten on the other. Only the notably red Litfaß column on Karl-Liebknecht-Street gives any indication that the nearby street was once the site of the largest public protest against the Holocaust in Nazi Germany.
Before the war, Berlin’s Jewish community was the biggest in Germany—160,000 according to the 1933 census—comprising more than 30 percent of all Jews in the country. Some of the most important Jewish sites in the city were located in and around Rosenstraße, including the Old Synagogue on Heidereutergasse, which was consecrated in 1714, and a mikveh ritual immersion bath. The Jewish Welfare Office, where social work according to synagogue districts was coordinated, could be found at Rosenstraße 2-4.
In the face of increased Nazi persecution after 1933, many Jews emigrated in the years following, and their number fell to about 80,000 by 1939. The first deportation from Berlin occurred in October 1941, when 1,000 Jews were transported to the ghetto the Nazis had created in Łódź. By January 1942, about 10,000 Jews had been sent from Berlin to ghettos in eastern Europe, mainly Łódź, Riga, and Minsk, with elderly Jews deported to the Theresienstadt camp in occupied Czechoslovakia. Also beginning in 1942, Jews were deported from Berlin directly to extermination camps, primarily to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
At the beginning of 1943, 35,000 Jews were still living in the capital, about half of them working as forced labourers. All of them were then targeted in what the Gestapo euphemistically named the Große Fabrik-Aktion (Large Factory Action), part of a plan by SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt—the Nazi security office and planning centre of the Shoa—to deport and murder the remaining Jews in Germany.
The roundup began on February 27, 1943. Gestapo and SS organised manhunts across the city, often arresting people at their places of work, and interned about 11,000 Jews at makeshift prison camps, among them the Clou Concert Hall (formerly Markthalle III), the Jewish retirement home on Große Hamburger Straße, and the Jewish Welfare Office on Rosen…