to classify intermarried Jews similarly to those of the "full-Jew" status as defined by the Nuremberg Laws and dispose of them accordingly. However, most of those deemed to be of the Aryan race who were married to Jews chose not to divorce, despite the increased effort of the Nazi Government to make the process of divorce from a Jew as simple as possible. The Nazi regime ultimately refrained from outright persecution of these intermarried Jews to maintain public opinion, as there were some 30,000 intermarried couples in Germany as of 1939. Chronology On January 22, 1943, Goebbels and Hitler agreed that it was time for the final push to expel the last Jews in Germany. At this meeting, Hitler and Goebbels agreed that there "could be no internal security" until the last Jews living in Vienna and Berlin could be deported "as quickly as possible". On February 18, 1943, Goebbels proclaimed a policy of "Total War" in a speech in Berlin - he argued that the threat of a second "stab-in-the-back" required the "internal security" situation of the Reich be improved. Just after the German defeat in the Battle of Stalingrad, the Gestapo had arrested the last of the Jews in Berlin during the Fabrikaktion. Around 1,800 Jewish men, almost all of them married to non-Jewish women (others classified as the so-called Geltungsjuden), were separated from the other 10,000 arrested, and housed temporarily at Rosenstraße 2–4, a welfare office for the Jewish community located in central Berlin. The arrests of Berlin Jews, beginning on February 27, 1943, marked an escalation in the efforts made to remove these Jewish family members from their spouses and families. The 1,800 men were so-called "privileged Jews", a category exempt from deportation and other anti-Jewish measures by reason of being married to German spouses, or employment as officials of the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland, the Jewish organization officially recognized by the German government for the purpose of controlling the Jewish population. According to Mordecai Paldiel, Holocaust survivor and former Director of the Department of the Righteous among the Nations program at Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust authority, "The Rosenstrasse protest embraced hundreds of women at the site where most of the Jewish men were interned (in a building which previously served the Jewish community in Berlin), before being processed to the camps... who gathered every day, and facing armed Schutzstaffel (SS) soldiers, shouted: "Give us