WI: Rosenstrasse protests turned violent?

HISTORY LESSON

Chicago Tribune, David Molner, Nov. 28, 1993

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1993-11-28-9311280473-story,amp.html

‘ . . . an unarmed group of 1,500 women waged an eight-day street protest within range of Nazi machine guns, winning the release of their Jewish husbands. . . ’
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‘ . . . Many of them first tried the police station in Grolmanstrasse, off the central commercial boulevard, the Kurfurstendamm. At the police station, these "Aryan" relatives were directed, even amiably so, to inquire in Rosenstrasse 2-4.

‘Most of the women, knowing their husbands had been snatched from work without clothes or food, hurried home, packed bundles and immediately headed toward eastern Berlin. Women who worked days heard the news upon coming home and left at once for the Jewish Quarter, known as the Scheunenviertel (literally "shed" or "barn" district).

‘Though estimates vary, a crowd of at least 1,500, mostly women and children, had gathered by sundown, swarming the guards outside the building and clamoring for their husbands' release.

‘Many women hounded guards by demanding their husbands' house keys. The guards, hoping to calm and disperse the crowd, obtained keys for many of the protesting relatives. This only fortified the women's resolve, for no doubt then remained that their husbands were inside. . . ’
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Against as ruthless and hardcore opponent as the Nazis, how could something as simple as this work?
 
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Against as ruthless and hardcore opponent as the Nazis, how could something as simple as this work?

A dictatorship is a political system as much as an electoral democracy.

The dictator cannot personally coerce the entire population to do his will; he needs henchmen. Nor can he personally coerce all his henchmen to coerce all the people. The henchmen obey because he is the dictator; he is the dictator because the henchmen obey him. Note the circularity - if the loop breaks, the leader can fall instantly, e.g. Ceaucescu in Romania.

At some level, the regime needs the willing cooperation of at least some of the population, and the submission of the rest.

Nazi Germany, despite its fearsome reputation, was nowhere near as complete a police state as the Soviet Union. The Gestapo simply did not have the numbers to hunt down every dissident or manage ubiquitous networks of informers, as the Cheka did. In the Soviet army, every unit had a zampolit - a political officer who monitored everyone for signs of dissent. There were no such operatives in the Wehrmacht.

What kept the Nazis in power was:

- physical suppression of political opposition (definitely an important part of the system)

- control of all mass media to control what the people heard and bombard them with propaganda

- popularity for what they had delivered (end of the Depression, glorious victories, food and other loot)

- inertia; as noted in the US Declaration of Independence, "... all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."

But their power was fragile. If the people in general became disillusioned, that would weaken the loyalty of the henchmen. An American President has a formal, constitutional mandate to exercise power for four years. Hitler ruled because he did a Magic Dance and the people all said "Ahhh... Fuhrer!!! You are the Man of Destiny!"; the Enabling Act was mostly window dressing. If enough people woke up from the Magic Dance spell, he could be deposed instantly.

So the Nazis had to be careful about what they did, especially to Germans, lest they disrupt the Magic Dance spell.

I will note that the Nazis were often constrained by things that should have made no difference. For instance, in occupied Budapest in 1944-1945, Raoul Wallenberg protected thousands of Jews by hanging Swedish flags on buildings and proclaiming them annexes of the Swedish embassy. SS murder squads were deterred from entering by such symbols; apparently they feared Diplomatic Consequences. But it is very hard for me to see what harm they would have incurred by ignoring the symbols.
 
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Okay so everyone here seems to agree that this doesn't bring about a collapse of the regime, correct?

Well can someone answer to me how much is the war shortened? By a few days, maybe a couple weeks?

No, nobody can. It's entirely imponderable, unlike a question based on military strategy or logistics. It's possible the war last exactly the same length, even though with some additional Nazi morale failure and disorganization, simply because these will affect the Western front, but the end of the war depended on the other front.
Or maybe the main effect is that Hitler decides he has to bolster the Gestapo, increase the politicization of the armed forces, raise more SS etc., and the war lasts a month longer. Or it lasts the same but with many more German civilians killed at the last minute for hanging a bedsheet at their window.
 
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Okay so everyone here seems to agree that this doesn't bring about a collapse of the regime, correct?

Unlikely and impossible are two different things. In 9 of 10 TLs with this PoD it just leads to more internal dissent, but there still is a non-zero chance of attempting to supress the protests resulting in some "friendly fire" incidents. Word spreading, some other small chances aligning just the right way and all of a sudden the Rosenstrasse protests become the thread that once pulled unravel the regime, with future historians talking about how the Nazis were a House of Cards "inevitably" doomed to collapse to internal dissent and how if it hadn't been the Rosenstrasse protests it would have been something else.

The First Qin Dynasty successfully crushed a lot of rebellions, chances were Liu Bangs would barely even make a footnote in history. But well the stars aligned themselves just right for him to become the first Han Emperor.
 
. . . Nazi Germany, despite its fearsome reputation, was nowhere near as complete a police state as the Soviet Union. The Gestapo simply did not have the numbers . . .
Point well taken, there were big gaps in Nazi surveillance.

But if you or I were teleported back in time and doing even run-of-the-mill political activism, as well as being careful about it, there'd still be very much a luck of the draw aspect about it. We may end up getting a medium amount of good luck and surviving and even being successful at our endeavor, but then again, we may not.
 
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. . . with future historians talking about how the Nazis were a House of Cards "inevitably" doomed to collapse to internal dissent and how if it hadn't been the Rosenstrasse protests it would have been something else. . .
And amazing how often we make that mistake,

at times, even here at AH ;)
 
And remember, people didn't even believe in the Holocaust until after the liberation and news crews went to the camps.

1) People may more fully believe earlier that the Nazis are actually engaging in the Holocaust, and

2) and with the Nazis more visibly the bad guys—by machine gunning women in the streets, and in Berlin at that!—corporations who had continued business relations with the Nazis, may be a damn sight more careful.

AP0102210556.jpg

http://www.apimages.com/metadata/In...UST-IBM/5392a99fb7e0da11af9f0014c2589dfb/11/0

For example . . . IBM may be a damn sight more careful!
 
Hitler's Willing Business Partners

The Atlantic, Jack Beatty, April 2001.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/hitlers-willing-business-partners/303146/

' . . . raises the important if ultimately unanswerable question of whether Hitler's destruction of the Jews would have happened as rapidly and claimed as many victims without the harvest of deadly information recorded by the Hollerith machines, on IBM punch cards, by IBM/Dehomag employees working for the Nazi death bureaucracy. On the efficiency question, he provocatively contrasts Holland and France. The Nazis ordered censuses in both countries soon after they were occupied. In Holland, a country with "a well-entrenched Hollerith infrastructure," out of "an estimated 140,000 Dutch Jews, more than 107,000 were deported, and of those 102,000 were murdered—a death ratio of approximately 73 percent." In France, where the "punch card infrastructure was in complete disarray," of the estimated 300,000 to 350,000 Jews in both German-occupied and Vichy zones, 85,000 were deported, of whom around 3,000 survived. "The death ratio for France was approximately 25 percent."

'Black gives evidence to qualify the implied claim that the Hollerith technology made the decisive difference. In Holland the Nazis installed a zealous bureaucrat to take the census. France had a moral hero in charge who frustrated German efforts to find Jews—and paid with his life. Holland had a long and innocent tradition of recording religion on all manner of official documents. France "lacked a tradition of census taking that identified religion." The historian has to provide the material to unmake his case in order to be true to the shagginess of history. In this example, Black passes the test of historical candor. . . '
Okay, did the IBM machines and tech make a difference?

In Holland, the Nazis installed a gung-ho bureaucrat to take the census. France had a moral hero who paid with his life. Holland had a long tradition of including religion on all manner of official documents; France did not.

But it seems like IBM's complicity probably made some difference.
 
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Yes, that's Henry Ford in the middle, receiving the Grand Cross of the German Eagle in July 1938, probably stateside here in America.
https://jalopnik.com/how-henry-fords-anti-semetic-newspaper-is-still-shaping-1832158216
See also... https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/daily/nov98/nazicars30.htm?noredirect=on

Embarrassing to say the least.

Americans want to believe in Henry. They want to believe that he learned from early mistakes, made a complete break, and is a true-blue American patriot.
 
Ford and GM Scrutinized for Alleged Nazi Collaboration

Washington Post, Michael Dobbs, Nov. 30, 1998

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/daily/nov98/nazicars30.htm?noredirect=on

' . . . When American GIs invaded Europe in June 1944, they did so in jeeps, trucks and tanks manufactured by the Big Three motor companies in one of the largest crash militarization programs ever undertaken. It came as an unpleasant surprise to discover that the enemy was also driving trucks manufactured by Ford and Opel -- a 100 percent GM-owned subsidiary -- and flying Opel-built warplanes. (Chrysler's role in the German rearmament effort was much less significant.) . . '
And then the average GI Joe, and the average American here stateside, finds out that a clean break on the part of Henry Ford may, or may not, be the whole story.

(and to the credit of Chrysler, a much less significant role in German rearmament before the war)
 
Yo guys, could you stay on topic. This thread is not about how the Nazis got the help of Henry Ford and IBM for their bureaucracy and industry. It is about what if the Rosenstrasse protests turned violent.

So far this thread seems divided on that issue.
 
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
 
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. . . This thread is not about how the Nazis got the help of Henry Ford and IBM for their bureaucracy and industry. It is about what if the Rosenstrasse protests turned violent. . .
If the Nazis are still receiving indirect help from American corporations as late as March ‘43 (which I consider a medium if),

then if the Nazis do something as visceral and emotional as machine-gunning women in their capitol city,

IBM, Ford—esp. GM—and perhaps others will either stop, or be a damn sight more careful (pause and slow their help). Either way the Nazi war machine is significantly affected.
 
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