Branagan, Martin

2023-04-25

<p>Many people think Nazi Germany was beaten only through military violence, and mainly by men. As Barack Obama said in 2009: "Nonviolence could not have halted Hitler's armies". In fact, non-violent action was widely used in resisting Nazism. Brave women often led it. They later got little recognition, though this is now changing.</p> <p>Women in nations such as France, Germany and Holland gathered intelligence, founded resistance groups, published underground media and coordinated people-smuggling operations. Some engaged in sabotage. Their networking and people skills were invaluable, and their lack of visibility under a sexist regime was an asset. Some of these brave women sacrificed their lives for the cause.</p> <p>It is useful to consider their impact today and how such female-led, non-violent movements might help people around the world resist dictatorships and invasions, such as in Ukraine.</p> <p>Some German women used overt, concentrated tactics – such as those who were thrown into jail for speaking out against Hitler, and the "Rosenstrasse" group, who protested in Berlin in 1943. These non-Jewish women shouted for their Jewish husbands to be set free, despite the threat of being machine-gunned. Amazingly, they succeeded – at least in the short term – with about 2,000 men released. Most of these men survived the war.</p>

The Conversation, p. 1-7

https://hdl.handle.net/1959.11/61188

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The Conversation Media Group Limited

Attribution 4.0 International

Spying, Sabotage, Subversion, People-smuggling: The Brave Women Who Resisted the Nazis Through non-violence

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