BERLIN, 13 September 2003 — The little-known story of a successful uprising by women against the Nazis has reached the screen in a harrowing film on Germany’s only significant rebellion on behalf of the Jews during the Holocaust.

“Rosenstrasse” by veteran German director Margarethe von Trotta premiered at the Venice Film Festival this month and claimed the best actress prize for its star, Katja Riemann. It will hit German cinemas on Sept. 18.

The picture tells the story of spontaneous demonstrations in February and March 1943 by mainly Christian women demanding the release of their Jewish husbands from a deportation center.

The dramatic story of remarkable bravery and unconditional love is all the more gripping for being true.

The men, who were supposedly protected under Nazi law by being married to “Aryans” in so-called mixed marriages, had been herded together in the previous days as part of a nationwide sweep for the last remaining Jews.

They were taken to a center on Berlin’s Rosenstrasse (Roses Street) in what could have been their last station before the death camps.

After a weeklong vigil day and night by hundreds of women outside the building, what was by all accounts a miracle occurred.

The gates opened, the guards stepped aside and the men poured out into the arms of their wives.

The story, which fails to appear in most history books of the era, raises difficult questions about how much resistance was possible under the Nazis and how many more lives could have been saved.

“Particularly because these women symbolized an uncomfortable truth — that there was an alternative to looking away and playing along — their resistance remained unknown,” von Trotta said.

The Rosenstrasse of 1940s Berlin came to life at the legendary Babelsberg studios outside the capital where Roman Polanski’s Oscar-winning “The Pianist” was also filmed.

The production depicts how the fate of the men spread by word of mouth and the wintry cobblestone street filled with dozens, then hundreds of women, as well as a handful of children and sympathetic men.

The group is threatened by SS officers, at one stage at gunpoint, but what begins as a scattering of whispers becomes a chorus of chants: “We want our men back.”

It is the film’s most wrenching moment and according to historians, true to life.

Professor Wolfgang Wippermann of Berlin’s Free University said that the story flew in the face of what he called “the double lies of the postwar Germans” about Nazis’ systematic murder of six million European Jews. “First, we didn’t know what was happening and second, we couldn’t have done anything anyway — both are shown to be false by this story,” he said.

The director of the Memorial Center of the German Resistance, Johannes Tuchel, noted that some historians had questioned whether the men from mixed marriages were in fact headed for deportation.

One theory is that they were to take up slave labor jobs left vacant by Jews already in concentration camps.

“But of course the women could not have known that when they were out on that street. The new theories do nothing to minimize the courage of those women who fought desperately for their husbands,” Tuchel told AFP.

Tuchel, however, warned against claiming that the triumph of Rosenstrasse could have been repeated across Germany, noting the special status of Jews in mixed marriages.

Meanwhile, there is evidence that the protests shook the Nazi leadership to the core.

Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels noted in his famous diaries on March 2, 1943: “We are finally clearing all the Jews from Berlin. They were suddenly gathered together last Sunday and will be deported east post-haste.”

Days later, in the wake of the Rosenstrasse uprising, Goebbels suddenly ordered the release of all Jews from “mixed marriages” in custody.

“There were unfortunately some unpleasant scenes before a Jewish retirement home where the population gathered in great numbers and some even took the side of the Jews.

“I am giving the Security Service the order not to continue the Jews’ evacuation at such a critical time,” Goebbels said, using the Nazi euphemism for deportation.

“We would rather wait a few weeks. Then we can continue even more thoroughly.”