arguing that a protest rescued Jewish lives "strikes at the center of the historical perception of the character of the Nazi regime and the way it functioned, and weighs on judgments about the possibilities for resistance." Another German historian, Konrad Kwiet, added that "the successful outcome of this late protest suggests that if similar actions at an earlier stage had been carried out throughout Germany, they might have halted the increasingly destructive course of the German anti-Jewish policy." There are a lot of controversial questions surrounding these perspectives, such as: did the regime set its course, issue orders, and carry them out in every detail, using brute force to have its way if necessary? Or was it tactically opportunistic, improvising its decisions within changing circumstances to maximize its impact? Ultimately, the question is whether the Jews released following the Rosenstrasse demonstration owe their lives to the protest, or whether as another German historian wrote, they have the will of the Gestapo to "thank" for their survival. Recently, some German historians have set the protest within the contexts of left-wing resistance, Jewish underground survival, and Nazi policies of forced labour and deportation. Some argue that while the non-Jewish partners were targeted, harassed and intended for internment, actual deportation was not the aim in early 1943. Wolf Gruner has argued that at this time the Gestapo excluded Jews with Aryan partners from expulsion, and corrected Berlin officials who tried to remove them. German historian Diane Schulle summarizes this perspective in her essay "Forced Labour": "Gruner…suggests that regardless of the protests, the deportation of mixed-marriage partners had never been part of the plan. The arrests of Mischlinge ["half-Jews"] and Jews living in mixed marriages had been undertaken for a purpose other than deportation: registration." Gruner insists that Nazi directives at that time prohibited the Gestapo from deporting German Jews married to non-Jews. In Gruner's view, therefore, the protest had no impact on the Gestapo, since deportation was not their aim. As evidence, Gruner says that on February 20, 1943, Himmler's Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) ordered that intermarried Jews were to be exempted from the deportations "temporarily". Four days later, a Gestapo order from the city of Frankfurt an der Oder directed Gestapo agents to avoid drawing attention to intermarried Jews. They were instead encouraged to arrest these Jews on other charges including "impudence", prior to sending them to a concentration camp. According