Sophie Scholl and the White Rose

by Annette Dumbach

  Life in the Third Reich had been a complex and ambivalent experience for the five Scholl children. Sophie, the fourth child and youngest daughter, had always known emotional and relative economic security; her parents were a harmonious and loving couple. Her father, Robert Scholl, had been mayor in several small towns in Swabia, an area of southwest Germany known for its rural charms, thrifty people, and spirit of independence, before settling in Ulm, where he opened his own office as a tax and business consultant. He was a big, rather heavyset man, with strong opinions and an unwillingness, if not an inability, to keep those opinions to himself. His views were never fashionable ones: he had worked as a medic in the First World War because of pacifist convictions, and during the war had met Magdalena, a Protestant nursing sister, who was to become his wife.

  Mrs. Scholl was a gentle and soft-spoken woman who made her husband, home, and children the center and purpose of her life. In traditional style, she was the serene foil to her dynamic and strong-willed husband. She tried to soothe troubled waters and maintain the peace; Robert Scholl was not a man who adopted the prejudices or values of the rural and small-town folk among whom he happened to live. Even when he was Bürgermeister in the twenties, he did not find it necessary to visit the local pubs and have desultory chats with farmers and shopkeepers over a glass of wine or beer. When the political climate became increasingly conservative toward the end of the decade, he lost his mayoral post for advocating too liberal a position. Later, in Ulm, he would maintain some contact with Jewish friends and business associates despite the pressures around him, as well as with young artists who, like him, despised the new regime.

  The Germans have a word for individuals with Robert Scholl’s kind of personality—Einzelgänger, a man who goes his own way, alone. He brought up his children in the same manner; it was a hard but full and rich life. The price he ultimately paid was the heaviest that can be exacted from a father.

  Sophie must have felt a twinge of uncertainty at the idea of separ-ation from her family in Ulm, which over the years had become more and more an island of safety in a society gone mad. It had been different at first. In the days when her brother Hans was an active Hitler Youth leader—all the children had been members of the movement—the most disturbing aspect of their lives had been the conflicts this had aroused with their father. But those days were long over. All of the Scholl children had grown disillusioned with National Socialism, and after a few tension-filled years, the family was reconciled. Where before the children seemed to have sided with youth against their own parents, now their political and social attitudes were in tune again with their natural affections. Along with a loose network of like-minded friends, their family stood posed against a regime that was making increasing inroads into the peace and autonomy of their lives.

  The train on the stretch between Ulm and Augsburg moved slowly east through Bavaria. Looking out her compartment window, Sophie would still see a countryside much like Swabia with its patterns of brown and green neatly cultivated fields. As the train approached small towns and the outskirts of Augsburg itself, the land along the tracks would be lined with small, orderly gardens. These were plots rented out to industrious employees of the German railroad, the Reichsbahn; they were carefully fenced with white pickets, and in the center of the plot a small toolshed often stood, designed to resemble a one-family house, complete with flower boxes beneath the windows. Owning one’s own piece of land was part of the German image of earthly perfection; and even if it was not truly one’s own, it made for pleasurable weekends in nature and gave people a sense of being rooted in the landscape, like the flowers and vegetables they tended.

  In the spring of 1942, these gardens had gained in importance: they had become part of the home-front effort to produce enough to feed the population and the faraway military forces, in a time of increasing food shortages and rationing. The German people had just endured a difficult winter, worsened by a campaign against the Soviet Union that was heralded as another blitzkrieg victory but instead had bogged down. Hitler had been angered by the sinking public morale that winter: “If the German Volk is not prepared to assert itself for its own survival,” he had said, “fine, then let it vanish.” By spring, however, there came a change; the winter had been gotten through and the mood of the population was tentative but hopeful; there were no significant signs of opposition. People were particularly enthusiastic about the successful U-boat campaign against Allied shipping, and Hitler had promised in March that the “Bolshevik hordes,” which had not been defeated that past winter, would be annihilated in the coming summer months. Even the new Allied technique of saturation bombing seemed to strengthen the resolve of the German home front, although it also spread a terrible fear of the unexpected. Only three weeks before Sophie passed through Augsburg, that city of renaissance facades had been hit in a major air raid—and in broad daylight—to the shock of its inhabitants.

  The winter of 1941/42 had been a difficult time for Sophie Scholl. More than two years earlier, she had passed her Abitur and received her diploma, despite the warnings of her high-school principal, who had been informed about her lack of enthusiasm for National Socialism. But then a series of delays had occurred, preventing her from joining Hans at the university. First came a period of training as a kindergarten teacher, which she had tried to use as a stopgap to avoid compulsory farm work with the National Labor Service. But that failed and she had to suffer six months of heavy labor and indoctrination under the thumb of fanatical Nazi women leaders. After that she had thought she was free to study. But the conscription order came from yet another government agency, the War Assistance Program, demanding an additional six months from her as an attendant in a kindergarten attached to a munitions factory in Blumberg, near the Swiss border. She had to resign herself; there was no way out.

  The mothers whose children she looked after worked in a brick factory that produced metal parts for the military. Blumberg itself was a small and unattractive industrial town. It was hard for Sophie to find any saving graces here, even though she did become fond of the children. But her chores were menial and exhausting, and as she labored, she was aware always that her work helped indirectly to perpetuate a war she deplored, conducted by a regime she had gradually come to consider criminal.

  There were no like minds in Blumberg, no one to talk with; it was a dark period. “Many people think of our times as being the last before the end of the world,” she wrote later in her diary.

  The evidence of horror all around us makes this seem possible. But isn’t that an idea of only minor importance? Doesn’t every human being, no matter which era he lives in, always have to reckon with being accountable to God at any moment? Can I know whether I’ll be alive tomorrow morning? A bomb could destroy all of us tonight. And then my guilt would not be one bit less than if I perished together with the earth and the stars.

  During the course of her work at Blumberg, Fritz Hartnagel was called back temporarily from Russia to train new soldiers for the North African front. On several weekends Sophie was able to escape the kindergarten and join Fritz in nearby Freiburg. They had met at a dance in Ulm when Sophie was sixteen years old and Fritz was twenty; his courtly manners and gentle personality had made an immediate impression on her. But she soon became aware of troubling political differences between them. Fritz had been raised in a milieu that was conservative, although not National Socialist, and had gone on to become a career soldier. For him, loyalty to the Wehrmacht had been an honorable tradition long before the rise of Adolf Hitler; Fritz seemed to think that he could keep the two aspects of Germany separate.

  Sophie wrote honestly to Fritz of her feelings about their relationship as it developed, but she did so in the probing and contradictory way of a headstrong and sensitive teenager. “It is true, isn’t it,” she wrote him in one letter, “that sometimes in the evening you think of me? You dream occasionally of our vacations together. But don’t just think of me as I am; think of me also as I would like to
become. Only then, if you still can care for me, will we truly understand one another.”

  As a soldier, Fritz needed to know Sophie was waiting for him at home. But later, as the war progressed and her horror of it increased, Sophie felt it urgent that Fritz understand her political passion, which was not just a female whim but a fundamental part life. “I’ve always been aware subconsciously of the career to which you are committed,” she wrote. “I can’t imagine how two people with such differing perspectives . . . could live together.” Nonetheless, she continued to write him; he began gradually to change his attitude, and her deep feelings for him persisted. “When I was able to get home,” she wrote Fritz in February 1941, shortly after he had been in Ulm on leave,

  it first hit me that you had left and I couldn’t do anything about it. Every day before that an evening with you was waiting for me after school, now no more, strange feeling. I had grown too accustomed to your warmth. That is also a danger. At home I looked at the notebooks that you had bought and I got the stupidest surge of hope that I’d find something of you, something especially meant for me. I would so much like to have something of you that I could always keep by me, that nobody else would notice.

  Past Augsburg, the flatter Bavarian fields leading to Munich were now visible from Sophie’s train window and in twenty minutes her train would be pulling into Munich Central Station, with its arching ceilings and great clock. Its bustling ramps would be filled with young people arriving and others waiting to greet them, many of the young men in soldiers’ uniforms. Somewhere on the platform, Hans would be standing, waiting for her.

  During the last months at Blumberg, Sophie got the news that someone had denounced her father; she was deeply shocked. The informer—his own secretary—was a woman whom the Scholl family had thought was well disposed toward them. One day she overheard her employer say in a moment of anger that Hitler was a “scourge of humanity.” Apparently she had felt it her duty, as a loyal German citizen, to report his comment to the Gestapo; they arrived at the Scholl home shortly thereafter, and hauled off Robert Scholl to be questioned. But almost immediately he was released, his trial put off indefinitely. The reason given was that his private consulting firm was in the midst of a crucial, long-range project for Ulm’s municipal Finance Department, a project that was not to be interrupted.

  From that day on, Robert Scholl and his family lived with the fear of his impending trial. And they could never be sure that one day the Gestapo might not show up again; once Robert Scholl was in Gestapo hands, anything would be possible.

  Sophie found some solace from these troubles in a small chapel at Blumberg, where she could practice on the organ. During these stolen moments, her thoughts would turn to profound questions, intertwined with her anguish over the conditions she experienced around her. The last months, and all of the years since she had rejected National Socialism, had been difficult ones for her, but they had been important ones as well. “Isn’t it a riddle,” she wrote to a friend back home,

  . . . and awe-inspiring, that everything is so beautiful? Despite the horror. Lately I’ve noticed something grand and mysterious peering through my sheer joy in all that is beautiful, a sense of its creator. . . . Only man can be truly ugly, because he has the free will to estrange himself from this song of praise.

  It often seems that he’ll manage to drown out this hymn with his cannon thunder, curses and blasphemy. But during this past spring it has dawned upon me that he won’t be able to do this. And so I want to try and throw myself on the side of the victor.

  But the dark days at Blumberg were over now, and Sophie was on her way to Munich, to her brother, to a free, cosmopolitan life. All of the delays were behind her; she had no regrets. The experiences of the past few years had toughened her, made her self-reliant, nourished her search for a life of the spirit. Her father’s favorite line from Goethe had taken on personal meaning: Allen Gewalten zum Trotz sich erhalten— “Despite all the powers closing in, hold yourself up.”

  By now the train was moving slowly through the flat industrial outskirts of Munich. Before long she would see Hans on the platform at the station, a tall and handsome man, undoubtedly scowling intently into each window of the train as it passed him. She would descend with her suitcase and birthday bag and make her way to meet him.

  His intense features would soften, his face lighting up in a broad smile of welcome; he was accompanied, as so often, by an attractive young woman, Traute Lafrenz.

  As she and her brother embraced, Sophie’s self-restraint and patience would have been rewarded at last. She had arrived, she was with Hans, it was spring, her new life had begun.

  TWO

  BY THE TIME Sophie arrived in Munich in May 1942, Hans Scholl had already made the crucial and secret decision that would determine their fate. The young man on the train platform had already crossed an invisible and perilous boundary line, although precisely when that occurred remains unclear. Sometime in the spring of 1942, however, Hans and his friend Alexander Schmorell, had decided to act, to move from the realm of “spiritual resistance,” or “inner emigration,” and commit themselves to overt opposition to the Nazi regime.

  The moment of crossing that line—the line separating private (if outwardly conforming) rejection of National Socialism from active resistance—is a hard moment to seize, not only in the case of the White Rose but in countless recorded instances of workers, housewives, and other “ordinary” Germans who resisted the Third Reich. It is as if there was no single discrete, conscious moment of decision when someone said, “Yes, I will act,” but rather an accumulating force of rage, of incredulity, of desperation that came together inexorably, gathering its strength over months and years until it crested—and drowned personal fear and doubt. One gets the impression, from the accounts of these men and women all over Germany who did cross the line, that thoughts about “courage” or “protest,” or even asserting one’s rights as a human being, played an insignificant role in the process. It would seem, too, that introspection or self-analysis may be luxuries pertaining to a world at peace and to countries that have managed to keep their governments on a leash.

  In any event, when Sophie arrived in Munich that day, she knew nothing about the decision made by Hans and his friend Alex, and Hans had no intention of involving her in conspiracy and danger.

  He and Traute Lafrenz brought Sophie to his rented room in Schwabing, the section of Munich with a bohemian history, although not much was left of its early spirit after the nine years of Nazi persecution of writers and artists.

  Before the First World War, this quarter—and Munich itself—had been one of the brilliant artistic centers of Europe, at least since the turn of the century. The fin de siècle school of painting and decor—Jugendstil, or art nouveau—had sprung up there, followed later by the Blue Rider expressionist movement; Kandinsky, Klee, and Franz Marc all found creative nourishment in the ambience of Munich and Schwabing. Thomas Mann—who actually was scorned by the Schwabing set as a consummate bourgeois—made Munich his residence, as did such writers as his novelist brother Heinrich, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and a major, almost cultlike figure, poet Stefan George, who was devoutly admired by the youth movements. Munich in its short-lived bloom attracted a wild variety of dreamers and utopian planners; Lenin lived there briefly during his long exile, and the hungry and embittered artist manqué Adolf Hitler arrived there before the First World War and fell in love with the city.

  Munich’s contradictions abound, which is a reason for its charm. It has a long history of monarchy, of separatism, and of provincial reactionary values; but it supported Napoleon in his wars with much of the rest of Germany and Russia. It is an elegant city, spacious, with Renaissance-like vistas, palaces, baroque churches, splashing fountains, and enormous public parks. It is a city of peasants who seem to have just arrived from the hinterlands, and aristocrats wearing expensive loden. A deeply Catholic city, it is also easygoing and Italianate, and it has an air of light and freed
om—especially when the föhn blows and the blue-white Alps loom up in the south—that few, if any, other German cities possess.

  Munich was also, briefly, the center of a workers-and-peasants republic, modeled on the Soviets of the Russian Revolution in the last months of the First World War. People recalling that time explain it as the final and heady moment of the reign of Schwabing. But a few months later, the Bavarian republic was savagely annihilated by the Freikorps and other right-wing groups from all over Germany.

  Schwabing was never again to recapture its notoriety and exquisite pleasure in the notion of anarchy, sexual liberation, and artistic experimentation. In the twenties artists and writers abandoned it, moving on to Berlin, a harder and colder city that was in social and political ferment. In Munich the wave of reaction congealed; it was becoming a fortress for a variety of chauvinists and radical nationalists, and it was home country for the growing movement called National Socialism.

  Even though much of this history may not even have been known by Sophie Scholl in the ninth year of the Third Reich, and even though the streets of Munich had grown dingy and shabby with the passing years of war, there still was a frisson of pleasure in young people, especially South Germans, when they arrived in the city and in Schwabing. Schwabing was a neighborhood still swarming with students who frequented small winehouses and cafés. It certainly offered liberating opportunities compared to the city of Ulm where Sophie had grown up.

  Hans’s friends came to greet Sophie and celebrate her coming birthday; the bottle of wine and the cake her mother had baked were a great success. In this time of growing shortages and expanded rationing of almost all foodstuffs and clothing, the birthday fare was a rare treat.

  That day Sophie met Alex Schmorell, mild, pipe-smoking, deep-voiced, who spoke German with a Bavarian intonation oddly mixed with Russian overtones; she had heard much about him from Hans on his weekend visits home. Hans and Alex—or Shurik, as she quickly began to call him—were stationed as army medics at the Bergmann School in Freimann, an outlying area of the city. They were “furloughed” to continue their study of medicine at the university, and apart from required roll calls, ideological harangues, and marches a few times a week at the base, they were able to take quarters in town, study, and work a few hours a day at nearby military hospitals looking after the wounded. Hans’s other friends, Christoph Probst and Willi Graf, who also came that day, were in much the same situation, studying medicine and attending other lectures at the university, while being attached to units of medics.