stating "One has to intervene all over the place, to ward off damages. The efforts of certain officers are so lacking in political savvy that one cannot let them operate on their own for ten minutes!". On April 1, 1943, the American Legation in Bern reported to Washington: "Action against Jewish wives and husbands on the part of the Gestapo ... had to be discontinued some time ago because of the protest which such action aroused." Leopold Gutterer, who was Goebbels's deputy at the Propaganda Ministry, remembered that Goebbels stated if force was used to crush the demonstrations, it would prompt wider protests all over Berlin, which might soon become political, and could possibly even lead to the overthrow of the Nazi regime. Gutterer later stated in an interview: "Goebbels released the Jews in order to eliminate that protest from the world. That was the simplest solution: to eradicate completely the reason for the protest. Then it wouldn't make any sense to protest anymore. So that others didn't take a lesson [from the protest], so others didn't begin to do the same, the reason [for the protest] had to be eliminated. There was unrest, and it could have spread from neighborhood to neighborhood ... Why should Goebbels have had them [the protestors] all arrested? Then he would have only had even more unrest, from the relatives of these newly arrested persons." Gutterer also stated: "That [protest] was only possible in a large city, where people lived together, whether Jewish or not. In Berlin were also representatives of the international press, who immediately grabbed hold of something like this, to loudly proclaim it. Thus news of the protest would travel from one person to the next." Goebbels swiftly realized that to use force against the women protesting on the Rosenstrasse would undermine the claim that all Germans were united in the volksgemeinschaft. Using force against the protestors would not only damage the volksgemeinschaft, which provided the domestic unity to support the war, but would also draw unwanted attention to the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question". Stoltzfus wrote: "A public discussion about the fate of deported Jews threatened to disclose the Final Solution and thus endanger the entire war effort." Despite the news blackout imposed by Goebbels, the news of the protests on the Rosenstrasse had traveled swiftly by word of mouth all throughout Germany and beyond; in Switzerland, British and