The building at 39 Rosenthaler Strasse in central Berlin is the former site of Otto Weidt’s broom workshop. It was here that the German entrepreneur moved his broom manufacturing business in 1940, employing dozens of mainly blind or deaf Jewish workers. The workshop itself worked out of the side wing of the current structure. After the war and Weidt’s death the building became bare of its original interior and remained barren and unused for a number of decades. In 2001 the site became affiliated with the Jewish Museum of Berlin and a few years later found itself part of a government program aimed at remembering selfless individuals, or ‘silent heroes’ of the Nazi era. The German Resistance Memorial Center Foundation took control of the building and set up a museum with a permanent exhibition in December of 2006.

The historiography of Nazi resistance has grappled with how to define and place into categories various acts of ‘resistance’ during the reign of Hitler. Indeed, any narrative of resistance to the Nazis must inevitably demarcate what is considered an act of resistance and of what type. In the decades after the war there was an emphasis placed on the role of the military in this regard, and this is reflective of a trend which reserved the definition of resistance to acts which had the possibility of regime change. Such an emphasis on potentially ‘decisive’ forms of resistance marginalizes the acts of specific individuals against Nazi rule. One such example is the story of Otto Weidt, who went to great lengths to save his Jewish workshop employees from deportation. Although having no direct impact on the stability of the Nazi regime itself, Weidt’s story tells of one individual’s ability to manipulate the Gestapo and for a time save dozens of Jews from the horrors of the Final Solution. Weidt, a blind fifty-seven-year-old man from Rostock, ran his own broom manufacturing business in the center of Berlin. It was here that he employed twenty-seven blind and deaf Jewish workers in the first few years of the war. Due to the shortage of basic commodities at this time, Weidt’s broom business was deemed vital for the war effort and thus initially evaded the scrutiny of the Gestapo. Such a reality meant Weidt’s Jewish employees were in effect protected, at least initially, from the Nazis. In the words of Inge Deutschkron, who worked for and owed her survival to Weidt, ‘He was a father figure to us … He treated us as other people should be treated. With respect.’ Indeed, the Gestapo attempted on various occasions to arrest employees of Weidt’s workshop. Immediately protesting in such cases, Weidt formed a habit of bribing the men in exchange for keeping his Jewish employees. Things started to change beginning in 1943 with the Fabrikaktion and attempt at removing all Jews from Berlin. It was at this time that Weidt began hiding his employees in a secret room of his workshop only accessible through a wardrobe. His attempts were however, ultimately unsuccessful as knowledge of his hideout made its way to the Gestapo and a majority of the hidden Jews were eventually deported to the east. It was only Inge Deutschkron and Alice Licht who managed to evade capture and survive. Licht, who voluntarily turned herself in to the Gestapo in order to accompany her deported parents, only escaped from Christianstadt in 1945 and managed to return to Berlin and Otto Weidt’s home after he personally travelled to the east to set up a means of escape for her. Otto Weidt’s acts of resistance may not have threatened the entire power structure of Nazi Germany at the time; nor were they even ultimately all ‘successful’ as the majority of his employees ended up perishing in the eastern death camps. But Weidt was ‘successful’ through his resistance and manipulation of Nazi policy. His bribing of the Gestapo prolonged the lives of all of his Jewish employees. When the time for the Fabrikaktion came, Weidt was able to evade for a time the goals of the Final Solution by hiding Jews in the back of his workshop. Lastly, his actions resulted directly in the survival of two women, Inge Deutschkron and Alice Licht, living reminders that the Nazis had not murdered everyone. To disregard individual acts of resistance in favor of the larger-scale attempts would be to forget men like Otto Weidt who did all he could with all he had in order to save his workers from fascism. Such a view also downplays the agency of individual Germans during the Nazi era. Indeed, as historian Moritz Follmer has pointed out, Nazism differed from Stalinism in that it obsessed relatively little over people’s inner attitudes and thoughts. Instead, the Nazi party often allowed Germans the freedom to appropriate fascist discourse to their own ends. It is therefore unsurprising to find examples of individual resistance like that of Otto Weidt, who while not actively anti-Nazi, was able to manipulate and use the regime to his own ends. Indeed, by bribing the Gestapo in order to save his Jewish employees, Weidt showed a willingness to work within the system he ultimately sought to oppose. Otto Weidt therefore, speaks to the agency of the individual in Nazi Germany as well as the courage of individual acts of resistance, whether ‘successful’ or not.

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