non violent protest under the 3rd Reich

[Michael Bailey]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenstrasse_protest

note: no innocent bystanders killed, no monstrous retribution, and
some actual success in achieving the stated objective.
equal amount of bravery required.  this would I emulate and urge
others to consider as well:

"Just after the German defeat in the Battle of Stalingrad, Joseph
Goebbels' Gestapo had arrested the last of the Jews in Berlin during
Fabrikaktion. Around 1,800 Jewish men, almost all of them married to
non-Jewish women, were separated from the other 6,000 of the arrested,
and housed temporarily at Rosenstraße 2-4, a welfare office for the
Jewish community located in Central Berlin. Before these men could be
loaded onto the trains to be deported, their wives and other close
relatives turned up on the street near the building. For a week, the
protesters, mainly women, demanded their husbands back by holding a
peaceful protest. The protesters appeared first in ones and twos;
afterwards their number grew rapidly, and perhaps a total of 6000
participated at one time or another.

Not wanting to invite open dissent by shooting the women down in the
streets, Goebbels, at that time Gauleiter of Berlin, released the
prisoners, and ordered the return of 25 men already sent to Auschwitz.
Almost all the released men survived the war.

This little-known episode in the dark history of the Holocaust is
highly significant, because it was one of the few attempts by anyone
during the Third Reich to peacefully and openly protest the Reich's
actions. Another peaceful protest took place in Berlin's Große
Hamburger Straße. Amazingly, the protesters and their arrested
relatives were not harmed, and most survived until the end of World
War II. This event is even more noticeable, because the women that
protested were unarmed, unorganized, didn't have a leader, and
confronted one of the most brutal of Hitler's establishments — the SS.
Because of its success, the episode raises questions about the
potential for civil disobedience in the Third Reich. At issue is
whether further, similar disobedience might have saved more lives, if
only Germans had been willing to disobey more, or whether the success
of the Rosenstrasse protests was a unique event, from which inferences
cannot be drawn about either the Third Reich or about civil
disobedience. However, no one disputes the courage of these women's
efforts to save their husbands."

-- 
--
"Frenesi's eyes, even on the aging ECO stock, took over the frame, a
defiance of blue unfadable."