Facing the Gestapo
Karin Wharton and her mother, Maria Lowenstein, took part in one of the greatest acts of civil disobedience in the history of Nazi Germany. One that few heard of then and fewer know of now: The Rosenstrasse Protest.
Mrs. Lowenstein married Dr. Max Lowenstein in Berlin, several years after her first husband, an architect for Tsar Nicholas II committed suicide. The Hermitage-trained artist and her new husband had a son, Henry, in 1925 making up a small combined family of four.
The problem began with Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. Dr. Lowenstein was Jewish, and although his wife was German her choice of spouse resulted in a loss of citizenship and harassment. For ten years the family survived in Berlin as the Nazis made it policy not to execute Jewish spouses.*
Then on February 27, 1943 Joseph Goebbels and Hitler had had enough. The minister of propaganda, under the Fuhrer’s orders, rounded up the last of Berlin’s Jews. Approximately 10,000 Jews still lived in Berlin, nearly 8,000 classified as irreplaceable workers. Those 8,000 were sent immediately to death camps.
The other 2,000 or so were Jewish men married to German women. They could not be sent with the laborers without causing an uproar, so they were brought to a Jewish center located at Rosenstrasse 2-4. The plan was to convince the women that the men were to be sent to labor camps when the plan was, in fact, to murder them all.
What the Nazis did not expect was that the women of Berlin would not go quietly. Beginning with simple questions from one or two wives about their husbands, an organic protest grew. Over the next six days an estimated 6000 German women, including Mrs. Lowenstein and her daughter Karin, came to Rosenstrasse shouting “Give us our husbands back!”
At one point the Gestapo, concerned about the unrest, set up machine guns, pointed them at the women and warned them that if they did not disperse they would be shot. The protest only grew louder, the women changing their shouts to, “Murderers! Murderers!” The Gestapo never fired a shot.
On March 6, Goebbels recognized the public relations disaster of killing German woman on the streets of Berlin ordered that all the men be released. They would all survive the war. In fact, 98% of the Jewish men who lived through World War II in Germany were married to German women.
When the war ended, Ms. Steinberg found a job with Otto Grotewohl, leader of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in Germany. The SPD was one of two rival Communist-aligned political parties in the country, the other being the Communist Party of German (KPD), led by Wilhelm Pieck. Ms. Steinberg was present at a meeting between Grotewohl and Pieck where they discussed the merger of the two parties - as ordered by Josef Stalin - into the Socialist Unity Party as well as the plans of Communists to undermine their Western allies. She was able to smuggle the information to the Americans in the U.S.-occupied zone of Berlin.
Not long after while driving in Mr. Grotewohl’s limousine, the Soviet Army surrounded the car, and Ms. Steinberg. Instead of taking her into custody, the soldiers bragged about their catch ordering the limo to drive around Berlin. At one stop, the driver drove off into the U.S. zone saving his and Ms. Steinberg’s lives.
The U.S. government agreed to move Ms. Steinberg’s family to America in order to protect them. Ms. Steinberg, who met and married a journalist named James Wharton, and her stepbrother Henry would end up living across the street from each other in Denver. The two would work together at the Bonfils Theater, later the Lowenstein Theater, for years.
Karin Wharton passed away on January 18, 2014 at the age of 98.
Sources: Denver Post, Florida State University Research in Review, and Wikipedia
(Image of the Lowenstein-Steinberg family, taken in early 1939, with Henry, age 14; Karin, age 24; Max, age 54; and Maria, age 45. It is part of the Lowenstein Family Holocaust Papers collection at the University of Denver.)
* Fourteen-year-old Henry was sent to London as part of the Kindertransport in the early spring of 1939.
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