Lessons from Nazi past for our present

" ... Which heroes we choose would be crucial. Here too Germany serves as a model from which we all could learn. It has chosen its resistance heroes, and it has chosen them wrong. Every child here knows the names of Hans and Sophie Scholl, college students who were guillotined for distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets. Most German cities have streets or schools named after them. Tom Cruise has added his fame to a new film about Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, the oft-sung leader of a group of officers executed for their failed attempt on Hitler's life.

The courage of such people should not be forgotten, but the message their stories convey is grim: Their deeds accomplished nothing. It's a message that comforts the millions of Germans who didn't try to oppose the regime.

By contrast, one of the most successful acts of resistance in the Third Reich is not well known. In 1943, when the Nazis were undecided about whether to deport and murder Jewish spouses of non-Jews, they tested the waters by rounding up nearly 2,000 Jewish men whose non-Jewish wives had already withstood considerable government pressure to divorce them. These wives spontaneously gathered in front of the building in the Rosenstrasse where their husbands were being held. For one long week they refused to leave the little square in central Berlin, despite the Gestapo machine guns trained upon them.

It's often said that nonviolent resistance worked for Gandhi and Martin Luther King because their oppressors were civilized, while totalitarian regimes would simply have shot them. This not only underestimates the evils of racism, but also our possibilities of combating them.

For in Berlin's Rosenstrasse, the police backed down. The men were released. They and their families survived. And in a country that devotes so much time and energy to commemorating the victims, these brave women remain anonymous; all that really marks their story is a small clay-colored memorial in a park that few Berliners know. ... "

~ From To resist Hitler and survive ~