“Now the Jews of Berlin will finally be deported. On February 28 they are to be assembled, first, in camps and then deported in groups of up to 2,000 per day.” ~Joseph Goebbels~[1]
Saturday, February 27, 2011 marks the 68th anniversary of one of the most extensive and brutal arrests of Jews in Berlin during the Holocaust.
In the early morning of February 27, 1943 the SS engaged in a massive raid, attempting to arrest the last Jews remaining in Berlin. Those arrested were taken to assembly centers around the city, where they were forced to wait, sometimes for days, before being deported to Auschwitz. In the days that followed the arrests, the non-Jewish wives of Jewish men picked up during the factory action staged a protest in front of the building where their husbands were being held. Most of these men were ultimately released. The rest of the thousands of Jews arrested that day were sent directly from Berlin to Auschwitz.
The arrest came to be known as the “Factory Action” or “Fabrik-aktion”. The protest came to be known as the “Rosenstrasse Protest.”
Some Jews were warned of the impending raid by their bosses, and thereby escaped arrest and deportation to Auschwitz. Of this, Goebbels wrote in his diary:
“The scheduled arrest of all Jews on one day has proven a flash in the pan because of the shortsighted behavior of industrialists who warned the Jews in time. We therefore failed to lay our hands on about 4,000. They are now wandering about Berlin without homes, are not registered with the police and are naturally quite a public danger. I ordered the police, Wehrmacht, and the Party to do everything possible to round these Jews up as quickly as practicable.”[2]
The Factory Action is depicted in the second act of The Sparks Fly Upward.
[1] Diana Schulle, The Rosenstrasse Protest, in Beate Meyer, Hermann Simon, and Chana Schütz, Jews in Nazi Berlin: From Kristallnacht to Liberation (The University of Chicago Press 2009) p. 159 (quoting Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels: Sämtliche Fragmente, ed. Elke Fröhlich, part 2, vol. 7 (Munich, 1993), p. 369).
[2] Joseph Goebbels, The Goebbels Diaries, ed./translated Louis P. Lochner (Doubleday & Company, Inc. 1948) p. 294.
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