Sophie Scholl and the White Rose

by Annette Dumbach

  Sophie felt uncharitable, snobbish; she loathed them. And even more, she was enraged by the women leaders who exploited the power they never would have gained in any other society. They barked orders, they made their charges jump like marionettes. She seethed each time they ordered her around, and once wrote, “We live like prisoners; not only work but leisure time is turned into duty-hours. Sometimes I want to scream ‘My name is Sophie Scholl! Don’t you forget it!’”

  Her bunkmate snored and never took a bath; even bed was no sanctuary, except after lights-out when she took her flashlight and read Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain under the covers. The book was on the banned list; the very act of reading it must have given her a feeling of communion with ideas and values that transcended time and place. Mann’s lofty mountaintop in the Swiss Alps may have become more real to her than the daily rounds in the fields or the gray-brown coldness of the castle.

  One visiting day Inge and Otl Aicher came to the castle, managing to visit Sophie despite the machinations of the camp leader, who tried to detain her until the very last minute. It was a beautiful day and the three of them picnicked in a nearby meadow. But the joy of reunion was shattered by a radio announcement: Germany was invading the Soviet Union: it was June 22, 1941. Although the Third Reich was at the height of its victories that summer, the announcement shocked and frightened many Germans, even those with confidence and pride in Hitler. The idea of a war on two fronts, especially in the vastness of Russia, where no European ever seemed capable of winning, was a staggering one. To Sophie it now seemed that the war, and the viciousness of those who conducted it, would go on forever.

  Not long after, she wrote to Fritz. “If one believes in the victory of might, one also has to believe that men are on the same level as animals.” And to Inge she wrote, “I go on, neither sad nor particularly happy, trying to hold on to my own values.”

  There had to be a meaning, a significance beyond this world she lived in that had become a grotesque perversion of itself. There had to be a deeper truth. She read Saint Augustine under a tall tree on the castle grounds when the weather had become warm and the days were longer. In her recorded reflections of that time, she described the peace that settled over her as she read. She felt herself merging with the leaves, the branches, the trunk of the tree, the birds who chirped companionably. At these moments she knew there was a meaning beyond what men had done to the world.

  Sophie had grown up in a middle-class milieu in which the perspectives of the far left seemed alien and hardly accessible; National Socialism, calling upon youth to become part of a cause greater than themselves, had seemed a more immediate alternative at first. If she had followed the route open to her, she might very well have carved a career for herself in the BDM, assuming along the way the tools of Nazi oppression. But she did not.

  Rejecting this course, she might still have remained inconspicuous in her society; she might have led a quiet life of bicycle trips and chores and studying for exams, like so many German girls around her, who kept their eyes closed whenever possible to the ugly contradictions of their world. But there was something in Sophie Scholl that made her different from these girls; it had to do with the sharpness with which she saw these contradictions, and how she must live if she was to remain true to her values, her inner self.

  Once, in her diary, she wrote: “After all, one should have the courage to believe only in what is good. By that I do not mean one should believe in illusions. I mean one should do only what is true and good and take it for granted that others will do the same.”

  SIX

  IN JANUARY 1943, about five weeks before he was seized by the Gestapo, Hans Scholl wrote a long letter to Rose Nägele, a young woman he had known since childhood, one of several with whom he had developed an intense and intellectual relationship. The friendship seemed to be loosening its grip on Hans by this time, and in the letter he explained, gingerly, his gradual withdrawal:

  I love transitional periods. They make demands on the spirit, hard as they may be to take. It’s the same drive in me that makes a stopover in a huge railroad station so appealing. I know a man who, wherever he goes, never takes off his coat, who is always a guest. . . . When you speak to him you think that after every sentence he’ll suddenly pull a watch out of his pocket and say, “Time to move on.” That man appeals to me very much.

  The image is interesting; it reflects Hans’s intellectual and literary interests as well as his restless personality. Like the creative efforts of many young, aspiring intellectuals, it also has the whiff of the poseur, making himself terribly mysterious and important. Even so, there is something strikingly modern about the man-in-the-overcoat; he seems to embody the spirit articulated in the 1940s, although there already were subterranean attitudes and values developing in the 1930s on both sides of the Rhine, in France and Germany, which were later to be expressed by writers like Camus and Sartre, whom Hans Scholl had almost certainly never heard of. Hans’s image of himself was not dissimilar to theirs: the alienated man in the mantle of anonymous gray, without possession or home, alone, seeking and creating his own world.

  It was therefore an original image, and considering where he grew to manhood and his earlier adolescent nationalist fervor, it was both a daring and comprehensible one. Wandering without itinerary around the world, looking at one’s watch, moving on: these are images that strike directly against the tedious and blaring folkishness of his own nation; they were a blow against all those roots-in-the-soil tentacles that were encircling and stifling his spirit.

  But the essence of exile, of uprootedness, was more profoundly exemplified in Hans’s friend Alexander Schmorell, torn apart by his two heritages, Russia and Germany. His German grandfather had settled in Russia as a fur trader without giving up his German nationality. Alex’s father, Hugo, was born in Russia but considered himself German; he went to Munich to study medicine, although afterward he settled in Russia and married a Russian woman, the daughter of a Russian Orthodox cleric.

  During the First World War, Hugo Schmorell was sent to the Urals from Moscow; there he ran a hospital for German civilian internees and prisoners of war. Alex was born there in 1917, a time of turbulence and civil war. He was barely two when his mother died during a typhus epidemic.

  In 1921, three years after the Russian Revolution, Dr. Schmorell took the last train out of Russia that was evacuating German civilians and POWs; he took along his four-year-old son and his old Russian nurse. Hugo Schmorell settled in Munich, married again—a German woman also born in Russia—and established his medical practice.

  Some say it was his Russian nurse—who never learned to speak German and talked incessantly to her Shurik about his lovely mother and her radiant world—who implanted in Alex a longing for his homeland, for the endless steppes, the birch-tree forests, and the glowing icons, that he would never lose. Accounts of his life in Germany give the impression that he was a happy child who had an easy and comfortable life, but there were two children who were born of the new marriage in Munich and who felt completely German. Perhaps he was happy, but he was also homesick for a faraway land he didn’t remember.

  He spoke fluent Russian, and cultivated a Russian style as he grew older by reading Dostoevski, Gogol, and Pushkin. The Schmorell family, living in a villa in Harlaching, an affluent suburb of Munich, seemed to have tolerated Alex’s “Slavic soul” but did not have much sympathy for it. He was a talented boy; he loved music, the tragic and gay folk songs of Russia as well as the great classics; he played the piano and the balalaika. He learned to paint and sculpt; he wanted to become a sculptor, although that was not a vocation his father could easily accept. Hugo wanted his sons to be solid middle-class professionals; he wanted them to become doctors.

  Alex reluctantly went along, and was lavishly rewarded with allowances and the freedom to use his leisure as he pleased—indulging his tastes in art, in travel, in horseback riding, skiing, and mountain climbing, activities of the privileged youth of Munich.
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  He was raised in the Russian Orthodox church, an acknowledgment of his mother’s faith, and from his early youth there was a strange mix of gaiety, light humor, and melancholy in Alex’s personality. He always had friends, also girlfriends, was always involved in the creative as well as the performing arts and in sports, was always on the move. He truly belonged to the youthful elite of Munich; it was an enviable place to be if one was young, educated and fairly affluent.

  But there was something else in Shurik: a love to wander off into the countryside or alone in the city, to spend time with hired hands on farms, to talk to farm-women, to gypsies and vagabonds. He was attracted to tramps, to the marginal men in the fiercely homogeneous Volksgemeinschaft, or “racial community,” that was Nazi Germany. Marginality became his expression of freedom, a freedom blending in with every book of Russian literature, every song and chant of Russian music.

  Instinctively, he profoundly despised the values and precepts of the Third Reich. It was not a rational disgust; it seemed to go much deeper. It was not even a question of ethics and justice; it was simply unbearable to live and function in a gray, regimented world inhabited by men and women in uniform, marching in lockstep. Alex was in the Scharnhorst Youth, a right-wing youth group, just before the Nazi takeover, but he was never enthusiastic, and after his group was integrated into the Hitler Youth in 1933, he gradually stopped showing up for meetings. He never experienced the existential sea-change of Hans Scholl after the 1936 Party Rally; his life was dominated not by convictions but by gut feelings.

  One gets the impression that Alex was a bit spoiled, as if lavishness and material gifts could replace paternal understanding. He was stylish and elegant; he looked like a young English country squire, especially in his riding breeches and boots, with turtleneck shirts. There are hints of him being a bit of the family problem—the boy who gets into trouble and has to be rescued with his father’s money or influence. In one case, when he was serving as a medic in the Wehrmacht, he was caught wearing civilian clothes instead of the despised uniform. His father and uncle—who had contacts in high places—were able to get him out of trouble.

  He could be inconsiderate, he could be reckless, he was prodigal in his energies and talents and affections, and there was no sense of caution in him; he simply did not understand what it meant to play things safe.

  By the time Alex met Hans in the fall of 1940 at the University of Munich, he had lived through the early stages of Hitler’s conquest of Europe. After the obligatory National Labor Service stint in 1937, doing road construction on one of the autobahns, he became a medic and was in the German units that marched into Austria to bring that country “home into the Reich.” He also served in Czechoslovakia in 1938, and in France in 1940, as did Hans, although they did not meet at the time.

  At the beginning of his army career, Alex had a severe emotional crisis. He was to take the oath of induction, swearing absolute loyalty to Adolf Hitler. He could not do it; he completely broke down. Finally he went to the commanding officer and told him that he was unable to take the oath—incredible as that seems—and asked to be released from military duty. His request was turned down, but, amazingly, there were no repercussions; perhaps the officer was an understanding sort. In fact, there were many more congenial souls tucked away in medic units than in other military outfits, which is one of the reasons the eventual conspirators were able to find one another.

  After proclaiming his refusal to take the oath, Alex felt better. Even though he was forced to serve, he felt absolved from obeying the words of the oath. Later, when the war with Russia began, he vowed to his friends that, never, as long as he lived, would he shoot a Russian. Fortunately, on the front he never had to face that decision.

  By the fall of 1940 he was back in Munich, studying for his Physikum, the premed exams at the university. He could live at home again, take classes in sculpture, attend concerts. He met Hans during this period; they were attached to the same medic unit. With their similar wide-ranging tastes and interests, they were immediately attracted to one another; they both loathed the military and the Nazis, and their personalities, so unlike in many ways, complemented one another—the man in the overcoat and the vagabond, both passing through on a stage they found absurd and barbaric.

  Together they crammed for the medical exams, which they passed, and the Schmorells gradually accepted Hans into their home, inviting him to the “reading evenings” that Alex would hold intermittently in the family residence. It was through Alex that Hans met two other key members of the White Rose. At one of those Schmorell evenings, Shurik introduced Hans to Christoph Probst—known as Christel—an old friend from gymnasium days in Munich; and he brought him together with Traute Lafrenz—Alex had met her when he studied briefly at the University of Hamburg—after bumping into her at a performance of the Brandenburg Concertos.

  By the spring of 1942 these friendships had solidified. Hans and Traute had been conducting a passionate and tumultuous relationship that had so worn them down that Hans would soon look elsewhere. Russia had been invaded a year earlier, air raids on German cities were intensifying, and life in those cities was becoming drab and dispirited.

  The decision was made at this point by Alex and Hans, perhaps with the knowledge and agreement of Christel Probst, that the time had come to act.

  Willi Graf was a latecomer to the group, the last to join before Sophie arrived. He was also the outsider; no matter how deeply he was to become involved in the conspiracy, no matter how perilous the acts he was to commit, there always remained a sense of distance between him and the others.

  Unlike the others, Willi was an intensely devout Catholic, a silent, brooding young man who put his faith to test constantly. His taciturn-ity and lack of social grace disguised the fact that he was tormented by doubts—in himself, in the notion of resistance in wartime, and sometimes, perhaps, in some secret and terrible place in his heart, even in God himself.

  Willi was raised in Saarbrücken, a city on the French border; in 1942 he was twenty-four years old. His father was a wholesale wine merchant who demanded correct and pious behavior from his children; it was his mother who provided the warmth and tenderness that softened this severity. The church played a primary role in Willi’s life from childhood on; religion was his major interest even in school, along with the arts, poetry, and music. He never became interested in public affairs or politics: his revolt, when it came, was not a polit-ical one.

  The true Einzelgänger of the White Rose, Willi Graf yearned more than any of the others for deep and lasting friendship. There was something terribly exacting and painful about his expectations of friends. When Hitler took power, he had just turned fifteen. He made a list of all his friends; then he crossed out the names of those who had joined the Hitler Youth; he never associated with them again.

  Like the others, on school holidays he went on week-long hikes in the country or abroad, and was a member of the Gray Order, one of those “unauthorized and illegal” Catholic youth groups that was rounded up in 1937 and 1938. He was arrested while studying at the University of Bonn, interrogated, and released several weeks later. The experience strengthened his revulsion for the regime, and convinced him that Hitler and his men were the embodiment of evil.

  By 1939 Willi was a medic; he served in Poland and then in Russia after the 1941 invasion, and was treating the wounded right in the midst of battles. What he saw seared his soul: it was not just the blood and agony of the wounded that profoundly disturbed him, it was the unspeakable cruelty and brutality of his fellow soldiers in dealing with unarmed conquered people. “I wish I never had to see everything I’ve watched in these past days,” he wrote to his sister Anneliese from Russia.

  His structure of the universe, the theological foundations, grew shaky: What was one to do? How was one to behave in a tidal wave of butchery and terror? “To be a Christian,” he wrote, “is perhaps the hardest thing to ever become in life. We never are Christians, and only in death perhaps c
an we become Christian to a small measure.” His diaries are laconic, almost cryptic, but filled with inarticulate anguish. He watched Russian women and children and old men driven out of their homes by German troops; in one village only a cat and some flowers remained. He took care of them.

  Stricken by his experiences and sharing them with no one but his sister and his diary, he was furloughed to Munich, to the Second Student Company at the Bergmann School, where he met Hans and Alex, and through them, Christel Probst, whom he particularly admired.

  Life became much easier for Willi in Munich. He took fencing lessons, read constantly, sang in the Bach choir; and most important, he had friends—old comrades from the Gray Order, but the new and livelier group around Hans and Alex as well. But he remained haunted by the scenes in Russia.

  The torment never left him, and when Hans and Alex, sometime around Sophie’s arrival, broached the subject of conspiracy, of producing underground leaflets, he could not bring himself to decide. Everything in him cried out to destroy the tyrant and the evil he was witnessing, but another side of him spoke about the ethics of illegal and perhaps unchristian acts when his own friends were fighting for their lives.

  It took weeks for Willi Graf to decide. That time must have been another siege of spiritual torment; he was fundamentally so alone. Even after he assented and joined in the clandestine work, even after sharing another posting to Russia with Hans and Alex and other friends—this time, mercifully, he was not alone—and even when he took upon himself the greatest risks, he never stopped doubting.

  Crossing over the line was an act Willi Graf had to repeat again and again—and it was never easy.