The Magazine

Germany and the Jews

What did ordinary Germans know and when did they know it?

Jun 5, 2000, Vol. 5, No. 36 • By JAMES ROSEN
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Nazi Terror

The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans

by Eric A. Johnson

Basic, 600 pp., $ 35


"Murderer! Murderer! Murderer!" more than a thousand German women shouted at the Nazis outside the Berlin building that held their recently arrested Jewish husbands. It was late February 1943 and the prisoners' deportation, which would ensure their deaths under Nazi Germany's "Final Solution," was imminent.


But after a week of demonstrations, Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister and gauleiter of Berlin, had heard enough. On March 6, seventeen hundred imprisoned Jewish men were released and the deportation of German Jews in "mixed" marriages was suspended. Though many such Jews were soon re-incarcerated, some survived the war.


Other books more fully document the "Rosenstrasse protest" -- perhaps the only street demonstration ever conducted against the deportations of German Jews during the Holocaust -- but historian Eric A. Johnson vividly recreates this surprising episode in Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans, a long and unrelenting attack on the widely held misperceptions of the Third Reich as an unrestrained police state and the German people as its prostrate victims. The picture he presents is far more complex and, ultimately, far more damning of the German people.

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