H-GERMAN BOOK REVIEWS
                           18 JUNE 1997


           Nathan Stoltzfus. _Resistance of the Heart:
           Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi
           Germany_.

           REVIEWED BY RICHARD S. LEVY


           Juergen Heideking & Christof Mauch, eds. _American
           Intelligence and the German Resistance to Hitler. A
           Documentary History_.

           REVIEWED BY PETER HOFFMANN



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Nathan Stoltzfus. _Resistance of the Heart:  Intermarriage and the
Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany_.  New York and London: W. W.
Norton & Co., 1996.  Pp. xxix + 386. Cloth $30.00. ISBN
0-393-03904-8.


Nathan Stoltzfus tells the little-attended-to story of the German
women who rescued their husbands from deportation and death in early
1943.  Swept up from their forced labor jobs in what was meant to be
the Final Roundup in the national capital, 1700-2000 Jews, mostly
men married to non-Jewish women, were separated from the 6000 other
victims of the Gestapo and SS and herded into Rosenstrasse 2-4, a
welfare office for the Jewish community in central Berlin.  Because
these Jews had German relatives, many of them highly connected,
Adolf Eichmann hoped that segregating them from the others would
convince family members that their loved ones were being sent to
labor camps rather than to more ominous destinations in occupied
Poland.  Normally, those arrested remained in custody for two days
before being loaded onto trains for the East.  Before that could
happen in this case, however, wives and other relatives got wind of
what was happening and appeared at the Rosenstrasse address, first in
ones and twos, and then in ever-growing numbers.  Perhaps as many as
six thousand participated in the protest, although not all at the
same time.  Women demanded back their husbands, day after day, for a
week.  Unarmed, unorganized, and leaderless, they faced down the
most brutal forces at the disposal of the Third Reich.  Goebbels,
_Gauleiter_ of Berlin and anxious to have it racially cleansed, was
also in charge of the nation's public morale.  On both counts he was
worried about the possible repercussions of the women's actions.
Rather than inviting more open dissent by shooting the women down in
the streets and fearful of jeopardizing the secrecy of the Final
Solution, Goebbels with Hitler's concurrence released the
Rosenstrasse prisoners and also ordered the return of twenty-five of
them already sent to Auschwitz.  To both men, the decision was a mere
postponement of the inevitable.  But they were mistaken.  Almost all
of those released survived the war.  The women won an astonishing
victory over the forces of destruction.

All this Stoltzfus relates in about ten pages of the introduction,
and the reader waits another two hundred pages to return to the scene
of the protest.  The reconstruction of the episode for the sake of
its human drama or its moral uplift is clearly not the author's main
purpose.  He wants to explain it.  Before admirably achieving this
end, Stoltzfus engages the reader in a searching analysis of
marriage, family, politics, and the possibilities of resistance in
the Third Reich.  He accomplishes one of the historian's major
tasks -- contextualization -- with rare brilliance.  By the time the
book returns to Rosenstrasse, readers are in far better position to
understand the meaning of that event and thus to deepen their
admiration for this tale of courage.  It is not often that a book can
inspire and instruct at the same time.  The Fraenkel Prize has been
well bestowed.

Although the author conducted numerous interviews with surviving
participants, as well as with a high functionary in Goebbels'
ministry and two members of the Berlin Gestapo, the all-important
analysis of the social limitations on Hitler's dictatorship does not
really emerge from this evidence.  Oral testimony buttresses the
presentation, illustrates its key points, or calls into question
older historical conceptions Stoltzfus finds untenable.  He is
respectful enough of his human sources to let them speak, even when
their remembered experiences do not directly contribute to the
argument. But at times the oral history component of the book is made
to bear too much of the weight for far-reaching assumptions and
conclusions about the nature of the Third Reich.

Only a few of these conclusions can be discussed in the space
allotted here.  Stoltzfus's central assumption is that the Nazi
regime constantly faced the difficult problem of balancing
ideological imperatives with the maintenance of social peace,
accommodation, and consensus.  Hitler placed great emphasis on
winning the support of Germans.  Terror was never conceived of as the
best means of achieving the perfectly united _Volk_ or even the
lesser goal of extorting its compliance.  The problem of Jews in
intermarriages, especially vexing for the regime, must be seen in
this context.  In the occupied East, those in charge of the Final
Solution did not hesitate to wrest Jews from such marriages and
consign them to death; sometimes non-Jewish spouses were killed as
well.  This was not acceptable in the old Reich.  Neither the
Nuremberg Laws, several subsequent draft decrees, nor various
bureaucratic initiatives dared to interfere with the traditional
institutions of marriage and family for fear of provoking unrest.
Thus, the problems of _Mischlinge_ (half and quarter-Jews) and Jews
married to "Aryans," living mostly in Berlin by 1943, plagued the
Gestapo, the RSHA, and Goebbels in his dual capacity.  These Jews had
not been abandoned, despite the best efforts of Nazis and civil
servants.  Stoltzfus contrasts them to those Jews without German
relatives, the ones who had been totally isolated by German society
-- more thoroughly so than any police agency could have enforced.
Such isolation, he says repeatedly, was the prelude to certain death,
the "critical foundation of genocide" (261).  (Readers looking for
the antidote to Daniel Goldhagen's _Hitler's Willing Executioners_
will not find much solace here.  The evidence of gratuitous cruelty
and self-interested persecution on the part of ordinary Germans --
uncoerced by government -- is abundant in the oral testimony.)

When in February 1943 Goebbels decided to risk seizing and deporting
all the Jews left in Berlin, even those married to Germans, he was
met by women who had already endured years of harassment. Defined as
members of "Jewish households," they became chief breadwinners as
their husbands' incomes dwindled away; they took over the task of
representing the family in the outside world, learned to evade the
endless regulations designed to make married life unbearable, and
defended themselves and their husbands against informal but intense
social pressure.  In the process they were toughened.  Despite all
the incentives to do so, very few divorced. These are the personal
factors that Stoltzfus adduces to explain their victory.  But there
were larger causes as well.  The protest came at a particularly
perilous time for the Nazis.  The debacle at Stalingrad, the fear
that dissent might spread beyond those immediately affected, the
crucial role of women in the maintenance of public support, the
scrutiny of foreigners -- the demonstration was reported on the BBC
-- all persuaded Goebbels to cut his losses and give in.  Byzantine
politics among Hitler's upper level functionaries may also have
contributed to the retreat.

Stoltzfus attempts to disarm critics who might be inclined to see the
Rosenstrasse protest as a small, exceptional demonstration to which
the regime bowed so that it could better pursue its larger purposes.
After all, the women had no political agenda and did not envision an
overthrow of the regime.  They acted on a single issue in an
obviously uncalculated way.  By releasing the 1700 Jews, at least
temporarily, the protest could be defused "cheaply" and the genocide
could go on out of view and undisturbed.  Such a small event proves
nothing about the resistibility of the Final Solution because a
larger protest might well have been answered with brutal force
(261). Stoltzfus admits that one of the key problems in the
evaluation of the Rosenstrasse episode is its singularity.  There is
little in the way of resistance, dissent, or protest to compare it
to, especially when more organized Catholics and workers are left out
of consideration.  Nevertheless, he makes a convincing case that the
"history of intermarriage is substantial additional evidence that
the Nazi dictatorship backed down when it encountered overt mass
protest...that it relented, in small numbers, even on the issue
constituting the core of its ideology" (266).  Women unmistakably
succeeded in modifying the behavior of the regime. Comparing these
singular Germans to the rest of the population, Stoltzfus arrives at
the stark conclusion:  Germans did not fully exploit their chances
for noncompliance.  Even if they did not fathom the ultimate design
of the Final Solution, their accommodation to official and
unofficial oppression of Jews encouraged genocide.

Richard S. Levy
University of Illinois-Chicago



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Juergen Heideking & Christof Mauch, eds. _American Intelligence and
the German Resistance to Hitler. A Documentary History_. Boulder,
Co.: Westview Press, 1996. Pp. xxii + 457. Cloth $35.00. ISBN
0-8133-2687-7.

The editors have chosen 115 documents as "a small but fairly
representative selection" from the records of the American
intelligence and psychological-warfare agency, the Office of
Strategic Services (OSS), which was established in June 1942 "to
collect and analyze strategic information and to plan and operate
special services" (2). Some of the documents have been available to
researchers since the 1960s and 1970s, some of them were previously
published, others have become available only recently.

The editors state that they reproduced each document "as it appears
in the original, with only minor editorial intervention."  They
converted underlining to italics throughout and they corrected
"obvious slips of the pen and errors in type setting" (xxi);
handwritten passages in typed documents are also printed in italics.
Editorial interventions further include the omission of passages "in
order to avoid repetition and digression" (xxi). "Editorial omissions"
of no more than a page in length are indicated by bracketed ellipses,
and longer ones are shown by ellipses in parentheses.  These
editorial principles therefore do not reflect what German historians
call "diplomatically exact reproduction."

The documents were selected for the purpose of demonstrating what
the American government knew through OSS about the German Resistance
to the National Socialist regime; to show how the OSS perceived the
'military-political value and ideological orientation" of the German
Resistance; to show how OSS reacted to the German Resistance's
attempts to contact Western governments and to solicit support; and
to show how and to what extent OSS supported or sought to manipulate
the German Resistance. The editors conclude that "the OSS files
reveal that the headquarters in Washington, D.C., were [sic]
preoccupied with German resistance matters" (2).

The documents are in fact revealing in several regards.  It appears
that the OSS view of the German resistance was influenced by German
emigres of the New School of Social Research, led by Franz Neumann,
Herbert Marcuse and Max Horkheimer.  The "German underground" in
which OSS was interested in the first instance was a putative
anti-National Socialist labor movement.  Such a movement hardly
existed inside Germany, certainly not beyond the most rudimentary
clandestine contacts between a number of individuals and some small
groups and resistance cells.  Even after the new Communist "people's
front" line had been proclaimed at the "Brussels" (really: Moscow)
Comintern meeting in 1935, Social Democrats and Communists found it
difficult to cooperate not only because of years of confrontation
and animosity, but also because most of their leaders were in exile
or in prisons and concentration camps.  When in June 1944 two Social
Democrats and two Communist underground leaders finally met to
coordinate their positions in case Hitler's regime were overthrown,
they not only did not command any following to speak of, but they
also discovered that the Communist underground politburo had been
infiltrated by the Secret State Police (Gestapo), and they were
arrested in the first days of July when they tried to meet a second
time.

Notwithstanding a strong bias in the OSS headquarters favoring
"labor," the Allied war aim of the total defeat of Germany and the
constraints of the war coalition precluded any Allied support for
both labor and conservative resisters in Germany. The total defeat of
Germany had been the aim of the British government in case of war
against Germany from 15 March 1939 on, and it had been embraced
increasingly by the American government since the outbreak of war,
and quite explicitly in the Atlantic Charter (August 1941) and in
the Washington Pact (January 1942). The meaning of Point 8 of the
Atlantic Charter (disarmament of "nations which threaten, or may
threaten, aggression") was immediately clear to Ulrich von Hassell,
one of the leading German resisters.  The proclamation of the
"unconditional surrender" formula by Churchill and Roosevelt at
Casablanca in January 1943 contained nothing new in substance.  But
the editors are quite right in pointing to hardened positions within
the American government (4).  When in the same year the historian
William L. Langer of the OSS wanted to see the German popular
opposition strengthened by an Allied guarantee of self-determination
and non-partition, American policy had already begun to embrace the
idea of the "dismemberment" of Germany (4). This position prevailed,
in spite of occasional suggestions that support for the "German
underground" might shorten the war and save lives.

The selected documents reveal the displacement by Allied military
objectives of any consideration of bona-fide support for any Germans
who opposed National Socialism and sought to establish a durable
peace with a parliamentary government and the rule of law.  The
potential benefits of collaboration with the German Resistance, apart
from their exploitation for purposes of military intelligence, were
disregarded.  In April 1944, OSS Planning Group decided merely to
"play upon" Helmuth James von Moltke and his group "as a possible
instrument of double agents or in any way coldly calculated to
promote the success of the invasion, without any regard whatsoever
for the German individuals involved, their safety, personal relations
to them or the ultimate effects upon Germany once the invasion has
succeeded" (205).

The reader of the introduction also learns that "it took Washington
some time to realize" that certain signals reaching it through
Stockholm, Madrid, Istanbul, and Berne "originated from just one
source in  Germany" (8), and that only after the war "it became clear
that a working class 'underground' never materialized [in Germany]
although many people had suffered for their political oppositional
behavior" (13).  This will not surprise the reader after having
learned that the OSS perception of the German Resistance was heavily
influenced by a combination of "the Marxist doctrine of class
struggle with the egalitarian idealism of the New Deal" (3).  But
the editors offer no explanation for the apparent lack of knowledge
about the German Resistance after the war among American officials
concerned with it.  As late as four months after the war, after
months of research and investigations in Germany, the American
Counterintelligence Division (CID) of the United States Army
comprehensively certified the German resisters who had attempted to
overthrow Hitler as lacking "a true democratic spirit" (13). Although
they had captured the relevant documents, the CID did not know that
the resisters had committed themselves in policy statements prepared
before 20 July 1944 to the restoration of the German Constitution of
1919. The CID seems to have been a victim of pre-conceived notions
and of the Allies' own wartime propaganda.  By stating that "the
total defeat of Germany seems a far better guarantee for world
security than might have been created by a peaceful entry of Allied
armies into Germany in July or August 1944" (13), the CID retro-
actively justified the American Government's decision not to assist
the anti-Hitler conspirators in Germany.

The preoccupation of OSS "with German resistance matters," which the
editors claim the documents demonstrate, thus appears strangely
misguided.  Did the OSS mainly misunderstand the German Resistance,
its aims, its attempted contacts?  Or were understanding or
misunderstanding irrelevant because Allied war aims policy precluded
a distinction between supporters of National Socialism and other
Germans?  Neither the introduction nor the documents themselves
offer enlightenment on these questions.

The reader will be even more disappointed by the editors' failure to
demonstrate by quantitative analysis the OSS's preoccupation with
the German Resistance.  There is no indication of the amount of
intelligence material on the German Resistance received at OSS
headquarters in relation to intelligence on other subjects, of how
much verifiable and how much false information reached OSS
headquarters, of OSS methods of evaluation, or of its perception of
the quality of intelligence reaching it.  The reader also learns
little of OSS's and the United States Government's process of
reaching decisions regarding the German Resistance.

There are also rather large gaps and some lapses in the editors'
elucidation of OSS's knowledge or lack of information on the German
Resistance.  The gaps may be the result of a narrow definition of
"American intelligence."  For example, there is no account of Adam
von Trott's several months' sojourn in the United States in the
autumn of 1939 with the aim of establishing a network that might help
to restore peace. The FBI shadowed Trott continuously and amassed a
large dossier.  But there is only an obscure footnote (p. 196)
indicating Trott's efforts.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer is mysteriously
included in Moltke's "Kreisau Circle" (p. 163, n. 2).  The most
important omission is an assessment of the enormous influence of the
ambitious anti-Hitler conspirator Hans Bernd Gisevius upon Allen
Dulles's perception of German affairs in general and of the German
Resistance especially.  Indeed, some of the misconceptions in the
American government concerning the German Resistance may have their
roots in that influence.

Gisevius worked in the Prussian _Geheime Staatspolizei_ in 1934 and
subsequently in the German Justice Ministry until 1939, in positions
and with connections through which he was able to learn a great deal
about the inner workings of the German government.  From early 1938
he was also involved in attempts to overthrow Hitler.  In 1939, as a
vice-consul in Zurich, he worked as an _Abwehr_ agent.  In 1943 he
became one of Allen Dulles's most valuable sources of information,
and not only on the German Resistance. He did not see Dulles often,
but conveyed his information mainly through a friend of Dulles, Mary
Bancroft.  Gisevius wrote most of his book, _Bis zum bittern Ende_
(1946, published in English translation in 1947 with the title _To
the Bitter End_), in Switzerland; the first half was translated and
sent to Washington in 1943 and 1944, the second half followed in
early 1945.  A number of the documents in the present collection,
which Dulles called "Breakers" cables -- which report on developments
in the German Resistance -- are based mainly on information from
Gisevius.

Gisevius consistently argued in favor of an arrangement between a
potential German Resistance government and the Western Allies.  His
aim was to keep the Red Army out of Europe and to prevent any
cooperation between Hitler's putative successors and the Soviet
Union.  On 12 July 1944 Gisevius travelled from Zurich to Berlin to
participate in the insurrection.  After its failure he was able to
survive in hiding until he escaped to Switzerland on 23 January
1945, using a passport of Moltke's brother-in-law which had been
modified in Dulles's offices in Berne and in the German Legation.
On 25 January 1945 Dulles reported to OSS Gisevius's tale that
Stauffenberg had planned to proclaim a "workers' and peasants" regime
in Germany, and had sought to conclude a separate peace with the
Soviet Union.  Whether or not Gisevius manipulated what he had
learned from Stauffenberg on 12 July 1944 during his first of only
two encounters with him (the second and last took place in the hectic
evening hours of the 20 July 1944 insurrection), or whether he
misunderstood Stauffenberg, the reason why Dulles passed on this
version is clear: he wanted his government to encourage German
military commanders in Italy and France to surrender separately.

The collection is valuable, of course, since it makes primary sources
available to students who would not have the time to visit the
National Archives. The student is left "free to draw his or her own
conclusions and to connect the events and opinions of the past with
the debates of today" (2). But s/he really is not offered sufficient
assistance to that end.

Peter Hoffmann
McGill University



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