May 4



GERMANY:

Germans examine rare protest against Nazis


Fearing civil disorder, the Nazis once unexpectedly bowed to a public
protest in Berlin and freed 2,000 Jewish husbands of Aryan wives, a U.S.
historian says.

The 1943 "Rosenstrasse" (Rose Street) uprising outside a detention centre
succeeded because the Nazi regime feared it would spread, Florida State
University historian Nathan Stolzfus told a Berlin conference on Friday.

"The Nazi power was extremely sensitive to the popular morale and the
events in Rosenstrasse underline aspects of the Nazi power structure,"
Stolzfus said of the only known public protest against the deportation of
Jews during the Third Reich.

Laws enacted in 1933 by the Nazis banned open gatherings other than those
they organised.

"The Nazis feared the way they were fighting for their families...was
something that could unravel the system around Hitler," he added. "We are
deeply indebted to the protesters."

After nine days and even though some of the Jewish husbands had been
deported, propaganda minister Josef Goebbels, also governor of Berlin,
ordered them freed and even had 25 men sent to Auschwitz returned to their
wives in Berlin.

A film called "Rosenstrasse" about the poorly organised, non-violent
protest by thousands of women, who shouted from the streets for the
release of their Jewish husbands, won an award at last year's Venice Film
Festival.

It's been screened in many nations, including the United States, and had a
successful run in German theatres.

It is based on the true, but little-known, story about the thousands of
Berlin women whose Jewish husbands were rounded up from their homes and
jobs as part of Hitler's "Final Solution" and taken to detention at an
office building on Rosenstrasse.

Before then, Jews married to Germans had been exempted from deportation.
But as attacks on Aryan women married to Jewish men increased, some 2,000
Jews in "mixed marriages" were arrested.

In the early 1930s there were 35,000 marriages between German-Jewish and
German-Aryan couples. After 1935 the marriages were forbidden. Many Aryan
men had abandoned their Jewish wives.

"That it took a film to move historians to discuss the issue is sad,"
Stoltzfus told the conference of about 150 people, including children of
parents from the Rosenstrasse showdown.

"No historian here in Germany had written about it because it did not fit.
Until now they dismissed Rosenstrasse as a fluke, not as an important
example of resistance but as just an example of what married people do to
fight for loved ones."

It also dispels the notion harboured by many Germans that they had no
choice in the Nazi dictatorship, he added.

(source: Reuters)



THE NETHERLANDS:

Dutch records of dead German soldiers 'found'


Claims that the Ysselsteyn cemetery archive records of 32,000 German
soldiers and civilians who died on Dutch soil in World War II have
gone missing were dismissed on Tuesday.

The archive which totals 100,000 pages was handed over in 1976 by the
Dutch military to the German war graves foundation, Volksbund Deutsche
Kriegsgrberfrsorge, news agency ANP reported.

And a spokesman for the German foundation, Fritz Kirchmeier, dismissed
concerns that the records were lost and said the archive was still in the
cabinet on Tuesday morning where it usually is.

Dutch public broadcaster Radio 1 had earlier reported that the archive had
been lost, but Kirchmeier said that only the record of one soldier was
missing.

He said a couple of historians had gone in

search in recent weeks for the records of the soldier, but discovered
that the details were missing. The historians thus assumed that the entire
archive was lost, Kirchmeier explained.

The war archive contains the details of 32,000 deceased German soldiers,
6,000 of whom were never identified. The Dutch military had compiled
identification records where possible and the site of death, age and
details of the deceaseds details.

Since 1946, the German military cemetery in the southeastern Dutch town of
Ysselsteyn has contained the remains of all Germans who were killed in the
Netherlands during the war.

Kirchmeier said the fact that 6,000 Germans cannot be identified does not
mean the details are missing. Instead, he said the soldiers and civilians
had never been identified and identification is no longer possible.

The German invaded the Netherlands on 10 May 1940 and the Dutch
capitulated five days later. The entirety of the Netherlands was not
liberated until 5 May 1945. A total of 107,000 Dutch Jews were murdered in
concentration camps during the Nazi occupation.

(source: Expatica News)