One wonders, although the husbands were released then, how many actually survived until the end of the war.
You could have just read the link to the wikipedia page. According to that, not only did the Rosenstrasse husbands survive the war, but the protest also meant that many other Jews in mixed marriaged were not murdered.
I mean, it is a wikipedia page, but here's what it says:
wikipedia said:
Despite his promise to Hitler, Goebbels did not try to deport the men of the Rosenstrasse to Auschwitz again, saying the risk of protest was too great, and instead ordered the men of the Rosenstrasse to stop wearing their yellow stars of David on 18 April 1943. Without knowing it, the women who protested on the Rosenstrasse had also saved the lives of other Jews. On May 21, 1943, in response to a question from the chief of the Security Police in Paris, Rolf Günther, who was Adolf Eichmann's deputy at the Jewish Desk of the RSHA, stated that French Jews married to Gentiles could not be deported until the question of German Jews in mixed marriages was "clarified". As half of the Jews living in mixed marriages in the Reich were living in Berlin, the question could not be "clarified" until Jews living in mixed marriages in Berlin were deported, which thus led Günther to rule no deportations of French Jews in mixed marriages at present. On 21 May 1943, Ernst Kaltenbrunner of the RSHA issued a memo ordering the release of all German Jews in mixed marriages from concentration camps except those convicted of criminal offenses. The same memo listed four categories of Jews who until now had been spared deportation, including those considered "irreplaceable" by the arms industry; the memo ordered the first three categories deported, but spared the fourth, namely those in mixed marriages as it stated a repeat of the Rosenstrasse protests was not desirable. The men imprisoned in the Rosenstrasse survived the Holocaust. The protests on the Rosenstrasse were the only time that there was ever a protest against the "Final Solution" in Nazi Germany.
But all the same, SS leadership and Goebbels feared something.
wikipedia said:
The Nazis keenly remembered how the November Revolution of 1918 had brought down the monarchy, and any public crack in the volksgemeinschaft was viewed with extreme trepidation. In the aftermath of the Battle of Stalingrad, a defeat which had gravely shaken German morale and led to the first signs of defeatism amongst the German people, Goebbels had proclaimed a policy of Total War. Goebbels argued that there was no way the regime could massacre thousands of unarmed women in the middle of Berlin and keep the massacre secret, and the news of the massacre would further undermine German morale by showing that the German people were not all united in the volksgemeinschaft for Total War.
Against as ruthless and hardcore opponent as the Nazis, how could something as simple as this work?
Well, again, if you read into how the Nazis reacted to the protests, you can see it's pretty simple:
1) The Nazis profited from a sense that they had popular support from the general population. So they wanted to avoid any appearance that there were cracks in the wall.
2) WW1. Specifically how Germany fell apart during it. If the Nazis looked like they were going the same way as Wilhelmine Germany, lots of bad memories come bubbling up in both the minds of ordinary people and also the minds of the Nazi leadership. Doubt and chaos start making things difficult for the regime.
This is also why they held off from instituting a war economy and cannibalizing the living standards of racially pure Germans to feed their war machine - it would bring back memories of the wasted sacrifices made during WW1 and get the people wondering if their sacrifices would be wasted this time as well?
Based on the "deep background" section on the wikipedia page, I think there are two main ways a massacre of the women could go:
1) German morale is lowered as rumours get out, but not in a way that leads to a big difference in the regime's stability or the army's battlefield performance. The voices urging a more complete commitment to mass murder gain ascendancy, and hundreds of thousands more Jews are butchered. Obviously, this means less resources are available for fighting the war, and the Nazis are defeated some months ahead of schedule (likely break-points might be if Vichy France decides to rebel near the time that the WAllies are ready to land in France, Italo-German relations degrading faster, Hungary or Romania betraying Germany, and Bulgaria betraying Germany earlier).
2) German morale is lowered as rumours get out, shattering the
volksgemeinschaft, further protests, especially by wives and mothers wanting their husbands and sons to come home from the battlefield, further weaken the legitimacy of the Nazi regime and undermine the morale of the troops at the front. Germany front-line numbers decline as young men put increasing effort into dodging the draft. The voices urging a more complete commitment to mass murder gain ascendancy, and hundreds of thousands more Jews are butchered. Obviously, this means less resources are available for fighting the war... And it all combines to the war ending much sooner - perhaps even a year earlier. The faster end of the war likely means
more Jews survive though, since the death rate in the camp was ramping up at an exponential curve. Even with the Holocaust having a higher priority, less time for that curve to ramp up probably more than compensates for the higher death toll in '43 and early '44.
Or subtle variations on these two themes. Either way, I think it will have a major impact, if a subtle one.
fasquardon