Sophie Scholl and the White Rose

by Annette Dumbach

  “Whoever doesn’t know Heine,” she said in a whisper, as all eyes turned to her, “does not know German literature.”

  It was exceptional for long-standing members of the Hitler Youth to turn against the movement in which they were earning recognition and prestige. Still, Hans and Sophie Scholl were not the only German teenagers who felt a distaste for National Socialism that slowly matured into opposition.

  In the same year as Hans’s turning point, in 1936, when membership in the Hitler Youth had become compulsory, gangs of hostile young men began to appear in the cities of Germany and especially in industrial districts. Among them were the children of workers with some degree of class consciousness; Communists were to remain the firmest opponents of the regime, suffering extreme torture in the hands of the Gestapo and in the concentration camps. But most of the young people seem to have been consciously “unpolitical.”

  Sharing a contempt for playing soldier, these groups would gather in pubs to drink alcohol, smoke, and play cards with their elders. Or they would behave like the “punks” of a later era, dressing in simple, almost ragged clothes to express their rejection of the stifling hypocrisy around them: they wore long hair, checkered shirts, old hats, and signet rings with skull and crossbones. Calling themselves the Navajos, the Black Gang, or the Edelweiss Pirates, they listened to so-called degenerate swing music, and jeered at the smug obedience of Hitler Youth stalwarts.

  Some of these groups did more than jitterbug and look dangerous. Having been forced into the Hitler Youth, these youngsters played double roles: after-hours they gathered occasionally with criminal elements and tried to disrupt Hitler Youth meetings. In Munich a band calling itself the Red Anchor was said to have appeared in Haidhausen, the same working-class district from which Hitler had launched his beer-hall putsch. Their targets were not people in elegant furs and top hats, but anyone alone and wearing a Hitler Youth uniform. In Leipzig in 1937, the police carried out a major action against a group that had spread to Berlin and Cologne as well. According to the Gestapo, 1,500 boys had banded together in 1936 to attack youth leaders at night; their explicit goal was to recruit more members in Leipzig than were in the Hitler Youth. Their two seventeen-year-old leaders were eventually caught and sentenced to three years’ hard labor.

  By the time the Hitler Youth became compulsory, perhaps only 10 per cent of its members were diehard National Socialists; the rest were a mixture—some bored, some annoyed, some seething on the inside, but most of them willing to go along with whatever their society seemed to demand. And yet, like the White Rose to come, there were those few who took a stand, not only as teenage rebels, but consciously, as political dissidents. Between 1940 and 1945, 1,807 inmates were executed in the Brandenburg prison alone for polit-ical reasons, some after years of forced labor. Of these, 75 were under twenty years of age; 22 were high-school pupils or university students. In Hamburg between 1933 and 1945, of all those sentenced for political “crimes,” 11 per cent were youths.

  While the Hitler Youth marched tirelessly and proudly to songs like “The Rotten Bones of the World Are Trembling” or “When Jewish Blood Spurts from the Knife,” these other German young people, few as they were, changed the words of these songs and sang altered versions of their own, perhaps in the loneliness of their cells or on their way to the scaffold:

  We are criminals in your state

  and proud of our crime.

  We are the youth of high treason

  And we shall break this servitude.

  FIVE

  SOMETIME in 1937, Hans Scholl took a small but serious step into opposition, joining an underground youth group that still managed to operate, despite Gestapo attempts at surveillance. They called themselves the “d.j.1.11,” the German Youth of November 1, 1929, the day their founder had arrived back in Germany from wanderings abroad, and decided that another anti-Nazi youth group was needed—before the Hitler takeover—to counter the growing influence of the Hitler Youth.

  These young men—girls were not accepted as members—maintained a tight organization, protecting their identities through the use of Germanic runes and nicknames. Although they did not take effect-tive action against the Hitler Youth, their very existence was an act of defiance.

  The group’s members developed attitudes and styles that would set them clearly apart. They were not nationalistic; and unlike the earlier Wandervogel, they preferred hitchhiking to tramping. For their group name and in their writings they used lowercase letters, a modernist style reminiscent of the Bauhaus movement in art and architecture, and one that was reviled by the Nazi establishment. They sang Balkan folk songs, even American cowboy laments, played the Russian balalaika, and devoured banned literature. Finally, as an act of nonconformity, they rejected the military-style tents of the Hitler Youth and used one of foreign ethnic origin, the Lappish Kothe. This tent, shaped something like a wigwam, had a hole at the top through which smoke could escape. Tucked deep in the woods to avoid Nazi vigilance, camps made up of such Kothe looked like primitive forest villages.

  Everything was politically controversial in the Third Reich, including art; its appreciation was an important component of the Scholl family life. Among the family friends were a number of artists critical of National Socialism, including Otl Aicher, who helped Sophie with her sketching and later married her sister Inge.

  In the summer of 1937, Hans and Inge went to Munich to visit the premiere exhibit of the new Haus der deutschen Kunst (House of German Art). The two eldest children shared an enthusiasm for the great German expressionists who had flourished in Munich only twenty years before, especially Franz Marc. Hans admired Marc’s dynamic blue horses, an arrangement of sensual curves and arcs, galloping across rose-colored canvases. And Inge felt an affinity for the architectural designs of the Bauhaus; to her the heroic new art museum, a rather severe neoclassical edifice overendowed with bare Doric columns, was unoriginal and uninspired.

  Everything they saw in the museum that day profoundly dis-turbed their esthetic sensibilities: idealized Germanic families, their faces dour and emotionless; a crusty old peasant reading the official Nazi newspaper with delight; nude statues of men, meant to indicate “action in repose,” and of women, in stances that were supposed to suggest fertility and grace but which instead seemed passive and ster-ile. Every work in the vast halls was representational with a vengeance.

  At the opening of the exhibit, Adolf Hitler had said that these works had finally put an end to the “artistic lunacy and pollution of our Volk”; one of the exhibit judges announced that the most perfect shape ever created in the new Germany could be seen all the time at Party rallies: the steel helmet.

  To complement this exhibit of Germany’s new artistic awakening, Propaganda Minister Goebbels gathered together examples of the “degenerate art” that it had replaced. Hans and Inge also walked over to this counterexhibit in a Munich gallery a few blocks away. They found these paintings far more stimulating and incisive than the ideologically derivative works they had looked at before. Many of their favorite modernists were represented, but the paintings were now given new captions: “Thus did Sick Minds View Nature” and “Peasants Depicted in the Yiddish Manner.” Next to the modern works were pictures painted by the mentally ill in German and Austrian asylums, implying that both types of creativity had the same inspirational source.

  The “Degenerate Art” exhibit backfired for the Nazis by attracting greater crowds than the exhibit at the House of German Art.

  At about this time, the Scholl children began to take part in a clandestine reading circle, made up mostly of friends with whom their family had always maintained contact. “We have a large circle—all of them anti-Hitler,” the wife of a local artist told Inge. “And each of these friends has his own separate circle which is anti-Hitler, and so on and so forth: a great underground network against Hitler. If only one could somehow get them to act collectively. . . .” This circle was to become especially important for Sophie and Inge, w
ho could not be members of Hans’s d.j.1.11 group. They circulated forbidden literature and even printed their own modest newsletter, Windlicht (Storm Lantern), in which seemingly harmless articles contained disguised references to current political ills. They also began to receive anonymous writings in the mail, critical of the regime.

  After 1937, the pressures in Nazi Germany diverted Hans from d.j.1.11, but he nonetheless remained in contact with his comrades. Hans now began his required six months with the Reichsarbeits-dienst, or National Labor Service, where he worked on the building of Germany’s new highways, the autobahns.

  Afterward, Hans entered military service, something he wanted to get over with as quickly as possible. Since his base was not far from Ulm, he was able to receive occasional visits from his youth-group friends. But the Gestapo had decided once and for all to put an end to all illegal youth activity. When the crackdown came, it was swift and affected the entire Scholl family. Hans was arrested one day at his base and taken to the Gestapo prison in Stuttgart.

  Meanwhile, security agents burst into the Scholl home in Ulm. Mrs. Scholl overcame her shock quickly; she quietly went upstairs to the children’s rooms with a basket under her arm; she put any potentially incriminating material she could find into the basket. Downstairs, she walked past the Gestapo agents and out the door, saying in the brisk manner of the German hausfrau, “The gentlemen will excuse me—I have to hurry to the baker’s.”

  It was a wholesale arrest. Inge and Werner were taken, transported in an open truck to Stuttgart. Sophie too was hauled off. She was sixteen at the time, wearing her hair bobbed so short that the family decided the Gestapo must have thought she was a boy. Although released later that day, Sophie was jolted by this first direct encounter with brute force. Her home would never be quite the same again: the doors and windows that kept the hostile world at bay could never be sealed. For a sensitive, intelligent adolescent, deeply attached to her parents and family, it must have seemed that all certainty had been swept out of her life.

  Inge and Werner were released after a week of confinement in a cold Gestapo cell. Hans was detained three weeks longer while the Gestapo tried unsuccessfully to pump him for information. In Ulm, Robert Scholl watched helplessly as the other children tried to comfort their mother, who had become lifeless and depressed. He paced like a caged bear, wondering what was happening to Hans. “If they do anything to my children, I’ll go to Berlin and shoot him!” he shouted. There was no question whom he had in mind. In school, Sophie had to endure the harassing questions of her classmates, who wanted to know what crimes her family had committed.

  Hans was finally released at the personal behest of his cavalry officer. By then, the experience of the arrests had transformed their home into a precarious island and the outside world was now a vast, limitless region of confinement. Now the impact of other events—the triumphal march of German troops into Austria, the destruction of Jewish shops and homes and synagogues on Crystal Night, and the invasion of the Sudetenland—rocked their home. They were living in a Nordic tempest that was growing more savage and wild every year.

  On September 1, 1939, the German armed forces invaded Poland, unleashing the Second World War. Sophie wrote to Fritz Hartnagel expressing her bitterness. “Now you’ll surely have enough to do,” she wrote. “I can’t grasp that now human beings will constantly be put into mortal danger by other human beings. I can never grasp it, and I find it horrible.

  “Don’t say it’s for the Fatherland.”

  Once war started, Hans had to continue in military service, with alternating periods of university study at Tübingen and then Munich. In 1940, during the invasion of France, he was ordered to the front lines as a medic. Although he observed little of the actual fighting, he saw a good deal of its results: working at a field hospital where four hundred wounded soldiers were being treated, he had to assist during leg amputations and other operations. He despised his own occupying army for requisitioning the most lovely houses in the town of Saint-Quentin, in Picardy, where he was stationed for a time. “I liked it better when we slept on straw,” he wrote. “What am I—a decent person or a robber?” In Ulm, Sophie was depressed by the rapid collapse of the French forces. “If I didn’t know that I’ll probably outlive many older people,” she wrote in a letter to Fritz on June 28, 1940,

  then I’d be overcome with horror at the spirit that’s dominating history today. . . . I’m sure you find what I’m writing very unfeminine. It’s ridiculous for a girl to involve herself in politics. She should let her feminine feelings dominate her thoughts. Especially compassion. But I believe that first comes thinking, and that feelings, especially about little things that affect you directly, maybe about your own body, deflect you so that you can hardly see the big things anymore.

  The last years of high school had become difficult for Sophie; National Socialist ideology pervaded every lesson, and she felt alienated from most of her classmates. “Sometimes school seems like a film to me,” she once wrote. “I look on but for all intents and purposes I’m excluded from performing.” At least one of her teachers seemed to agree; she evaluated Sophie’s classroom behavior as “totally uninvolved.” Yet whenever she was asked a question, she had the answer; she paid enough attention to fulfill the requirements for her Abitur. But she did not participate. For Sophie, the difference between observing and participating had become a conscious choice.

  Her behavior did not go unchallenged. As the time of her exam-inations approached, the school principal called her to his office several times with warnings; if she didn’t change her attitude she would not graduate. He could not have used a better weapon. Sophie had always yearned to go to university; she wanted to specialize in biology and philosophy, perhaps to invest the former with more human truths than Nazi racialist ideology had done. University study was also a means to avoid service to the regime more than was necessary. And it meant a chance to develop herself in a time when women were discouraged from any productive career outside of their procreative one.

  But Sophie did not change her attitude. It must have been a large personal triumph when she passed her Abitur, despite everything, in March 1940.

  But now the delays began. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful,” she wrote in her diary early in 1941, “if Hans and I could study together for a time? We’re already bursting with plans!” But the state required that all female high-school graduates serve at least six months in the National Labor Service. Hans tried from Munich to get an exemption for Sophie and a university placement, without success. As a girl, Sophie would have to do either housework in a “child-rich” family, or as was more usual, some form of manual labor. To avoid these two unappealing options, she tried to substitute kindergarten studies at the Fröbel Seminar in Ulm, along with some practice-teaching.

  Sophie experienced her months in the Fröbel Seminar as a kind of reprieve. Susanne Hirzel, the daughter of an Ulm pastor and one of Sophie’s close friends, enrolled as well; they provided each other with moral support. Once, as BDM girls in the days after membership had become compulsory, Sophie had confided a fantasy of hers to Susanne: “Really, one ought to try and infiltrate their highest offices, and then reveal all of their hypocrisy.”

  Fräulein Kretschmer, their inscrutable seminar teacher, had managed to keep her job despite the fact that she was not a convinced National Socialist; this made life a bit easier for the two girls. During one ideological training session, when the interns were supposed to listen attentively to a speech by Hitler on the radio, Sophie and Susanne sat reading quite openly. The only response Fräulein Kretschmer made was to signal quietly to them; with most other teachers this could have meant serious trouble.

  These months in Ulm, working with children and sketching children at play, were probably the last relatively untroubled ones Sophie was to have. She had managed to avoid mandatory service and still had a chance to work and learn without being involved in the war effort. She still had time for an occasional bicycle excursion int
o the countryside around Ulm. “Even when you’re sure everything is falling to pieces,” she wrote after one such respite, “the moon is always right back in its usual place the next evening; the birds are still singing the next day as sweetly and eagerly as ever. And whether or not their singing is of any use, they never give that a thought.” But she couldn’t escape the ugly daily realities: “I think I would be much happier if I could,” she wrote, “but the way things are now, everything else has to take second place.”

  Despite Sophie’s hopes, her work at the Fröbel Seminar was not deemed an acceptable substitute for the National Labor Service. She would still have to do a six-month manual job; she would be delayed yet again in joining Hans at the University of Munich.

  In March 1941 she was ordered to a run-down castle that had been turned into a work camp for young women. By this time, there were two thousand of these camps across Germany, housing young women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, conscripted for labor sometimes so fatiguing that they felt themselves to be beasts of burden. But their reaction often depended upon their political orientation. One young woman who made a career for herself in the BDM as a zealous propagandist described her own Labor Service experience as bone-wearing. And yet she could sing aloud for joy in the fields: “Our camp community was a model in miniature of what I imagined the Volk community to be,” she wrote later in her memoirs.

  For Sophie it was terrible. The girls wore uniforms and had ideological training sessions run by fanatic women leaders. The rooms in the castle were huge, cold, and damp—she was always cold—and the meals consisted mainly of boiled potatoes in their skin. Surrounded by young women of her age, she wrote in her letters that she never felt so alone in her life. The others obeyed, they submitted, they asked no questions; in their free time they talked about nothing but boys and sex, giggling interminably.