Overtly disobeying the Nazis

 

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.