Research Symposium

BIO

Berto Andino is a sophomore majoring in Political Science and Theatre at Florida State University from Jacksonville, Florida. He is currently a research assistant for the Rosenstrasse Foundation with instructors Liam Wirsansky and Nathan Stoltzfus as a part of Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP). After undergraduate school, Berto aims to go to Law school.

Civil Courage in Nazi Germany: Telling the Stories of the Rossenstrasse Protestors

Abstract

The Nazi regime is often characterized by its systemic persecution of Jewish people, but its policy relating to Jewish intermarriage and Mischlinge, children of these intermarried relationships, was inconsistent and legally ambiguous. Some Jewish men married to non-Jewish women were protected due to familial advocacy and fear of public backlash, while others faced escalating discrimination, particularly with the passing of the Nuremberg laws, which prohibited new intermarriages. In 1943, the Gestapo began to arrest intermarried Jewish men, leading to their wives protesting to free their husbands at what is now known as the Rosenstrasse protest. In a rare and significant example of successful protest in Nazi Germany, this culminated in the release of their detained husbands. The Rosenstrasse protest is often overlooked in Holocaust scholarship, and this project aims to address that through genealogical research by finding archival records, such as birth and death certificates, on databases such as Ancestry.com, JewishGen, and Arsolen Archives. These documents are analyzed to write biographies about their lives, which are stored in a database where descendants and others can learn and contribute to this research. Through analyzing these individuals' lives, it highlights the way ordinary people faced oppression, through surviving and resisting the Nazi regime.

Keywords: Holocaust, Civil Courage, Intermarriage