Not easy?
The price of civil disobedience would have been very high.
Was Hans Elder’s “Heil Edler!” enough?
There are stories of ordinary German citizens taking white handkerchiefs
out of their pockets as allied aircraft flew overhead. How brave would you have
to be to show resistance?
Something defiantly went on in Stuttgart. How that little
special class for the disabled, special needs children and children with learning
difficulties, survive?
The Rosenstrasse protest
The Rosenstrasse protest of February 1943 was the only open, collective
protest for Jews during the Third Reich. It was sparked by the arrest and
threatened deportation to death camps of 1,800 Jewish men married to non-Jewish
women. They were "full" Jews in the sense of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws
and the Gestapo aimed to deport as many as it could without drawing attention
to the Holocaust or alienating the "racial" public. Before these men
could be deported, their wives and other relatives rallied outside the building
in Rosenstrasse where the men were held. About 6,000 people, mostly women,
rallied in shifts in the winter cold for over a week. Eventually Himmler,
worried about the effect on civilian morale, gave in and allowed the arrested
men to be released. Some who had already been deported and were on their way to
Auschwitz
were brought back. There was no retaliation against the protesters, and most of
the Jewish men survived.
Waitstill and Martha Sharp
In 2016 Artemis Joukowsky an author, filmmaker, and socially
conscious venture capitalist, the grandson of Waitstill and Martha Sharp has
spent decades researching his grandparents’ heroic rescue missions in Europe. In
1939, the Reverend Waitstill Sharp, a young Unitarian minister, and his wife,
Martha, a social worker, accepted a mission from the American Unitarian
Association: they were to leave their home and young children in Wellesley,
Massachusetts, and travel to Prague, Czechoslovakia, to help address the
mounting refugee crisis. Seventeen ministers had been asked to undertake this
mission and had declined; Rev. Sharp was the first to accept the call for
volunteers in Europe.
Armed with only $40,000, Waitstill and Martha quickly learned the art of spy
craft and undertook dangerous rescue and relief missions across war-torn
Europe, saving refugees, political dissidents, and Jews on the eve of World War
II. After narrowly avoiding the Gestapo themselves, the Sharps returned to
Europe in 1940 as representatives of the newly formed Unitarian Service
Committee and continued their relief efforts in Vichy France. They were a little
on the perimeter and couldn’t have quite the same experience as those living an
ordinary daily life under the Nazi regime.
Everyday people
Yet there were also all those small acts by ordinary people,
living normal lives who:
Refused to make the Nazi
salute Missed their Jewish doctors,
lawyers and shopkeepers Wished their own sons and daughters
didn’t need to be part of the Hitler Youth or the BDM Were brave enough to
grumble about what the Nazis were doing would offer a place in an air
raid shelter to a young Jewish boy
Even here there was the opportunity for humanity to offer
tis finest.