Family members, wives, mothers, and children panicked. Initially, they had no idea where their men were being detained, and didn’t even know if they would ever return.

Adding to the anxiety was operation Fabrik-Aktion (Factory Action), a German move in early March that rounded up 11,000 Jews and shipped them to Auschwitz. The Gestapo never intended to send mischlinge Jews to Auschwitz, but rather to keep “exempted” Jews inside the Reich borders, at forced labor camps. But that didn’t matter.

In short order, word spread among the “mixed” families that their relatives were being held at the Rosenstrasse center. Inside, the men had very little food and inadequate sanitary facilities. Slowly, a crowd amassed, mostly of wives and mothers hoping to learn more about who was inside. Frustrated by the lack of information, they stayed day after day in the freezing temperatures. They chanted, “Give us our husbands back.”

February crept into March. The crowds grew to 150 and then 200 people, some reports say into the thousands. Word spread about the group, first across the city, then to international press. It was an unprecedented demonstration by German citizens against Jewish incarceration. The protesters occasionally yelled but sometimes stayed silent, watching. When officers and trucks with machine guns threatened lethal force, the women stayed and faced them.

“Without warning, the guards began setting up machine guns,” said Charlotte Israel, one of the protesters, in 1990. “Then they directed them at the crowd and shouted: ‘If you don’t go now, we’ll shoot.’ The movement surged backward. But then, for the first time, we really hollered. Now we couldn’t care less…Now they’re going to shoot in any case, so now we’ll yell too, we thought. We yelled, ‘Murderer, murderer, murderer, murderer…’”

The Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels knew a massacre of hundreds of German women in the middle of Berlin wouldn’t look good. And it would further depress military morale after recent defeats on the battlefield — half a million soldiers had died in the Battle of Stalingrad by time the Nazis surrendered on February 3. Goebbels ordered the release of the intermarried Jews at Rosenstrasse. In his journal, he promised to finish the job “in a few weeks.”

Officials released the first “mixed-marriage” Jewish man on March 1. The processing would continue until March 12, by which time the protesters had dispersed. Of the 2,000 detained men, 25 were sent to Auschwitz. The rest were considered “exempt.” However, the day after their release from Rosenstrasse, Gestapo officials returned and deported them to nearby labor camps. The plan was to ship them on to extermination camps once the Germans had won the war.