It Can Happen Here

MAGA HATES women -but also FEARS them.

Look at this extraordinary language: white women CAN’T be real protesters! They’re just drunk & silly!

Fascinating to me as a historian of women’s protest,because- EXACTLY what they did to the London Matchgirls in 1888, then suffragettes! https://t.co/nOkzKcye99

— Dr Louise Raw (@LouiseRawAuthor) January 12, 2026

Sounds familiar:

On February 27, 1943, SS soldiers and local Gestapo agents began seizing the Jews of Berlin in an operation called “the Final Roundup.” They were loaded onto trucks and taken to the Jewish community’s administration building at Rosenstrasse 2-4, in the heart of the city. The goal was finally to make the city judenfrei (free of Jews), necessitating the forcible collection of Jews with German spouses and their Mischling (mixed ancestry) children. 

For two years these Jews had escaped the jaws of the Holocaust because they or their German spouses were essential for the war effort, and the regime wanted no unpleasantness on the home front. But the stunning military defeat at Stalingrad earlier that month shattered German morale and led Hitler to call for “Total War,” against Jews inside Germany as well as Allied armies. 

Word spread quickly about the abductions in Berlin, and before long a group of non-Jewish German women had gathered on the Rosenstrasse with food and other personal items for their Jewish husbands, whom they believed were being held inside...The crowds grew considerably despite the winter chill, and soon women waited outside day and night, holding hands, singing songs, and chanting “Let our husbands go!” By the second day of the protest, over 600 women were keeping a vigil on the Rosenstrasse... 

By the third day SS troops were given orders to train their guns on the crowd but to fire only warning shots. They did so numerous times, scattering the women to nearby alleyways. But the wives always returned and held their ground. They knew the soldiers would never fire directly at them because they were of German blood. Also, arresting or jailing any of the women would have been the rankest hypocrisy: According to Nazi theories, women were intellectually incapable of political action. So women dissenters were the last thing the Nazis wanted to have Germans hear about, and turning them into martyrs would have ruined the Nazis’ self-considered image as the protector of motherhood. 

The campaign soon expanded to include women and men who were not in mixed marriages. The ranks of protestors bulged to a thousand, with people chanting to let the prisoners go and taunting the SS soldiers. Joseph Goebbels, seeking to stop more from arriving, closed down the nearest streetcar station, but women walked the extra mile from another station to reach Rosenstrasse 2-4. By the end of the week Goebbels saw no alternative but to release the prisoners. Some thirty-five Jewish male internees, who had already been sent to Auschwitz, were ordered to gather their belongings and board a passenger train back to Berlin. 

Without fully realizing what they had done, the Rosenstrasse women had forced the Nazis to make a choice: They could accede to a limited demand and pay a finite cost—1,700 prisoners set free, if all the intermarried Jewish men were released. Or they could open a Pandora’s box of heightened protest in the center of the capital and brutalize German women in the bargain. For the Nazis, maintaining social control was more important than making sure every last Jew made it to the gas chambers. The regime that terrorized the rest of Europe found itself unable to use violence against a challenge on its very doorstep.

Amplifying that part about the role of women in the Nazi worldview:

One of the regime’s most coveted traditions was the notion that women’s role was limited to the domestic arena. But women’s influence extended far beyond that narrow sphere. Goebbels understood this when he wrote that women were “largely responsible” for “our public sentiments.” Stoltzfus describes the powerful position of women at the crucial time when Hitler’s fortunes began to fade:

The regime’s hopes for regaining control of the war relied more on women than men. Thus in early 1943 German women might have constituted a particularly influential group in any collective effort to oppose the Nazi regime not only because they made up an increasingly large part of the home front and possible labor pool but also because the regime’s decision to conscript women caused internal conflict. Total war measures contradicted the noncivic role Nazism had assigned women and ran contrary to the traditional female household roles it had asserted for ten years.

To sum up:

The few examples of German dissent, such as those against euthansia and the Rosenstrasse, were motivated not by principle but by family ties. However, in retrospect the vulnerability of the regime seems evident. Given the regime’s concern for public opinion, the Germans could have done more to shape policies —by expressing more opposition to the regime.

When the Nazi regime encountered no significant opposition, it increased its brutality, especially toward the Jews. Had the people realized their own strength, Johnson suggests that they might have played a larger role in shaping the Third Reich:

Had the decency and courage that thousands of Gentile partners in mixed marriages displayed during the Holocaust been more widespread among the general population, many more Jewish lives might have been saved. Although many Germans disagreed with Nazi policy against the Jews, and some provided Jews with aid and compassion, it is telling that the only open demonstration against the deportations of German Jews during the Holocaust was carried out by Aryan wives of Jewish husbands.

Also please see Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo.

Selah.

PS - Not quite in the same vein, but also please see Abigail Adams and friends.