Sophie Scholl and the White Rose

by Annette Dumbach

  SEVEN

  THE “LEAFLETS OF THE WHITE ROSE” began to appear in Munich in mid-June 1942. Four of them came out, one after another, like a staccato burst of fire—filled with rage, brimstone, and literary citations. And as quickly as they came, they were gone.

  The city had seen nothing like it in years; perhaps only in the early months after Hitler’s takeover had such lengthy and passionate anti-Nazi tracts been circulated. The leaflets were typed single-spaced on both sides of a sheet of paper, duplicated, folded into envelopes with neatly typed names and addresses, and mailed as printed matter to people all over the city.

  At least a few hundred of the leaflets were turned in to the Gestapo by individuals who received them. The police began to discern a pattern: the leaflets had been scattered around the university, but not in large numbers. Most of them were mailed individually to academics, civil servants, and—oddly, from the Gestapo viewpoint—such nonintellectuals as restaurateurs and pubkeepers. For the state security services, the leaflets were an unwelcome manifestation in Munich, “Capital City of the [Nazi] Movement”; they were a symptom of ebbing morale, and in addition showed some strategic planning on the part of the authors. It was not easy to track down printed sheets in the mail, not easy to find the mailboxes where they were posted; it was much simpler for the Gestapo to pluck people out of phone booths where they were pasting up posters, or spot them in public toilets painting anti-Nazi graffiti on walls.

  After some weeks of investigation, the authorities concluded that the leaflets were designed to reach “the educated classes”—which in itself was unusual—and that their author or authors remained “unknown.”

  From the authors’ point of view, the situation was rather more complicated. Although the timing of the release of the leaflets did seem skillfully planned, it was really more a matter of organization that reached the operational stage, rather than a clever attack on the depressed German psyche.

  At that point in the summer of 1942, Germany was still winning battles; the thrust into Russia was deepening, and Rommel was scoring success in North Africa. But it was clear that the war was going to last. To help prepare the population, Propaganda Minister Goebbels produced a major new film, Der Grosse König (The Great King). Ostensibly about Frederick the Great of Prussia, the film actually presented a new image of Adolf Hitler, no longer as a populist spokesman but as a tragic, unapproachable hero; it suggested that he shouldered the burdens of war alone; it also helped explain his increasing absence from public view. “The year will be hard and difficult,” film posters said, “but . . . every man who loves and honors his country must stake his all.”

  But at the end of May, over one thousand silver-winged airplanes of the Anglo-American forces—they made a spectacular display for those watching below—had destroyed almost all of the city of Cologne, and not just the industrial sections and railheads. Other cities—Hamburg, Lübeck, Düsseldorf—were being savagely hit in air raids, and the streaming silver formations kept moving to the south, ever closer to the city of Munich.

  Meanwhile, fear of denunciation had increased; this kept people from sharing their disaffections with one another in any form other than the widespread Flüsterwitze, or “whisper jokes.” “Do you know that in the future teeth are going to be pulled only through the nose?” one joke went. “Why? Because nobody dares open his mouth anymore.” The joke was partly in response to Hitler’s speech at the end of April calling for harsher punishments and threatening to remove from office “any judge who manifestly does not know what the time calls for.”

  The appearance of the leaflets showed that Hans Scholl and Alex Schmorell had begun to act, possibly after planning and discussion with Christoph Probst. Each of the medic-students earned 250 reichsmarks a month (more than the average German worker), and by pooling what they had with some of the allowance Alex got from his father, they were able to buy a secondhand duplicating machine in an out-of-the-way shop—at an outrageous price. Alex also bought the typewriter and got special printing paper, stencils, envelopes, and stamps—always in inconspicuous amounts. An acquaintance, an architect named Manfred Eickemeyer, gave them access to his studio in Schwabing, letting them use his cellar for printing and storage.

  Everything was in place: now it was time to write “The Leaflets of the White Rose.” The choice of the name White Rose is still obscure, although it was obviously intended to represent purity and innocence in the face of evil: it is a poetic or artistic symbol rather than a polit-ical one. Later, under Gestapo interrogation, Hans would say that the name was taken from a Spanish novel he had read. Actually, a novel about peasant exploitation in Mexico had been written by the mysterious German author B. Traven (the author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), and was called The White Rose. It had been published in Berlin in 1931, and there is a chance that Hans and Alex read it; nevertheless, ambiguity remains.

  Hans and Alex would each write a draft of a leaflet individually, then come together to read each other’s efforts, discussing them aloud, and then, finally, Hans made the editorial decisions. Most of the prose usually turned out to be from Hans’s pen.

  The first leaflet appeared, in mailboxes all over Munich, bellowing with anger.

  . . . every individual has to consciously accept his responsibility as a member of Western and Christian civilization in this last hour; to arm himself as best he can to work against the scourge of humanity, against fascism and every other form of the absolute state. Adopt passive resistance, resistance, wherever you are, block the functioning of this atheistic war machine before it is too late, before the last city is a heap of rubble like Cologne, and before the last youth of our nation bleeds to death because of the hubris of a subhuman. Don’t forget that each people gets the government it deserves!

  The leaflet goes on to cite Schiller’s work on the codes of Lycurgus and Solon, and Goethe’s “Awakening of Epimenides” at some length, ending with the call: “Freedom! Freedom!” and a note to the reader to please reproduce the leaflet and pass it on.

  This first effort changes keys from rage to admonition, to lofty poetry about the individual and the state, to the final call for freedom. It is unstructured, confusing, rambling, and touching.

  The ripples began.

  Sophie knew nothing about the White Rose and their new campaign. A little over a month after she arrived in Munich, rumors began to circulate that anti-Nazi literature had appeared at the university; reading such a leaflet without reporting it to the Gestapo was a crime. Among the students there was a flurry of tension and excitement; some of them did turn the leaflets in, but most did not.

  While attending a lecture, Sophie noticed a mimeographed sheet lying under a desk; she picked it up. “Nothing is more unworthy of a cultured people,” she read, “than to allow itself, without resistance, to be ‘governed’ by an irresponsible ruling clique motivated by the darkest of instincts.” She felt a sudden thrill; darted a look about her. “The state is never an end in itself. It is important only as a means by which humanity can achieve its goal, which is nothing other than the advancement of man’s constructive capabilities.”

  Now she saw clearly that there were others at the university who felt as she did; they called themselves Die Weisse Rose, “The White Rose,” and they were taking action. But there was something about the words . . . She folded the leaflet quickly into her notebook and left for her brother’s room, to show it to him.

  Hans was not there; she began to leaf through the stack of books on his desk. An old volume of Schiller fell open to a page full of pencil marks: “. . . if a particular state hinders the progress of the spirit, it is reprehensible and corrosive. . . . The longer it exists, the more corrosive it becomes.” Turning the pages further, she found the passages cited in the leaflet, word for word, underlined.

  She was gripped with shock.

  When Hans came in, she confronted him; he denied any involvement, as he already had to Traute Lafrenz. Alex and Christel arrived, and the c
onfrontation became the moment of truth for Sophie Scholl.

  Her thoughts, as always, revolved around the war—concern for her younger brother Werner and her friend Fritz, both at the front. But she was also experiencing a quickening self-criticism for standing by and doing nothing but “feeling.” Not long before, she had shocked Fritz by refusing to contribute sweaters and gloves to the Winter Relief fund for men at the front: “It’s all the same if it’s German soldiers freezing or Russians, and it’s equally tragic,” she had told him. “We have to lose this war. If we donate woolens now, we only contribute to extending it.”

  Now she was facing her intense and determined older brother, who had crossed the invisible line. Her inner turmoil must have been nearly unbearable. She spoke to Hans, in front of Alex and Christel, about the terrible risks he was taking; she reproached him for adding extra weight to the family’s impossible burden: Werner in Russia, their father awaiting a prison sentence, their mother’s heart condition deteriorating under the strain. And by now their entire family had at least some sort of Gestapo record.

  Hans tried to shrug it off, and his friends defended him. Alex told Sophie that their actions were not reckless, that the choice of people to receive the leaflets was more or less random, and that there was no way to link Hans or Alex to the operation. Christel spoke about acting for a higher good, and Hans, too, finally said that in the name of the German intellectuals whose moral spines had been broken in 1933, they had to act.

  She saw, in spite of her fear, in spite of her terror, that there was no turning back. “Be performers of the word,” her favorite epistle said, “not just listeners.” They had crossed over; they had chosen the only way they could. She would now join them.

  EIGHT

  MUNICH was—and still is—a deeply Catholic city. Churches are everywhere, reconstructed Gothic, baroque, rococo, neoclassicist, bearing witness to the curves and bends in the river of Catholic history. While strolling down a narrow medieval lane, one suddenly encounters them, looming above—like the Frauenkirche, its twin domes still dominating the city of which it is the symbol. Or one comes upon a rococo jewel of a chapel, ornate and delicate amid the cars screeching and the pedestrians running in the heart of town. Churches are in profusion—in the downtown commercial district, in residential neighborhoods, in the vast and sprawling suburbs, and in every town and village in the Upper Bavarian countryside. Their interiors are alight with Bavarian rococo altars and gilded Virgins, in gleaming contrast to their cold, white walls. They are bedecked with fresh flowers on the bleakest days of winter, offering silence and fragrance and color to the pious and to the passerby seeking rest.

  The church permeates the air of Munich, whether one is Catholic or not. Most of the White Rose members were not Catholic, or at least not seriously practicing ones, but the intellectual and emotional currents of protest against the Nazis associated with Catholicism played a significant role in the shaping of their resistance.

  The Roman Catholic church, as most institutions in Germany, had an ambiguous relationship with the men of the Third Reich from the very beginning. Hitler signed a concordat with the Vatican on July 20, 1933, about half a year after taking power. It was considered a most essential diplomatic breakthrough at a moment when he was still being viewed as a pariah among world statesmen. The agreement, a marriage of convenience on both sides, permitted German Catholics to practice their faith unmolested, but forbade any activ-ities that intruded on the functioning of the state. It stripped Catholic youth organizations like the New Germany, the one that Willi Graf belonged to at that time, of the right to wear their own uniforms, plan and carry out excursions into the countryside, print or distribute their own journals, or undertake any program not directly controlled by state and Party authorities.

  The church consented to the agreement in order to protect its clergy from harassment and arrest—which in fact it was unable to do. Thousands of priests, nuns, and lay workers were arrested for “immorality,” or for “smuggling foreign currency,” a trumped-up charge often used by the Nazis in their crazed hunt for dissidents. But the agreement with the Nazis had a deeper, more fervent motive: the official hierarchy was offering Hitler tacit support for his avowed anti-Communist policies both inside and outside of Germany.

  The National Socialists did not make for smooth and ingratiating partners. As their power waxed at home and abroad in a crescendo of diplomatic, economic, and psychological triumphs throughout the thirties, the latent contempt in the Party for religion and clerical institutions became more overt and crude. Outspoken priests were hauled off to prison, the sanctity of the confessional was violated by the Gestapo, Catholic publications were no longer merely censored but closed down, and monasteries and convents were forced to shut their gates.

  Michael Cardinal von Faulhaber, the archbishop of Munich-Freising, embodied the ambiguities of most ecclesiastical figures toward the Third Reich. A conservative nationalist and an ardent believer in the justness of the German cause in the First World War, he had been named Munich’s archbishop in 1921. As most prom-inent church, intellectual, and military leaders in Germany, he never supported the Weimar Republic or its efforts at building democratic institutions; in fact, his was one of the persuasive voices that brought the deputies of Pope Pius XI to the negotiating table with representatives of Adolf Hitler.

  It was also a fact that the cardinal tried to use quiet diplomacy to ease Nazi excesses, that he pleaded in behalf of victims in concentration camps; and there were times that his voice was heard. But persecution of Catholics persisted. About four years after the Nazi takeover, on November 4, 1936, the Bavarian cardinal was received by the Führer at his awesome Alpine retreat at Obersalzburg. The three-hour meeting was actually a warning: “The Catholic church should not deceive itself,” Adolf Hitler told the cardinal. “If National Socialism does not succeed in defeating Bolshevism, then both the church and Christianity are finished in Europe. Bolshevism is the mortal enemy of the church as much as it is of Fascism.”

  Even though the church hierarchy was in fundamental agreement with this point of view, by March of 1937 they felt impelled to speak out. Pope Pius XI issued an encyclical, Mit brennender Sorge (With Burning Concern), charging Nazi Germany with violating the concordat and threatening to unleash “destructive religious wars.”

  Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938, or what has also been called the Night of Broken Glass, had a disturbing impact on members of all churches in Germany as they saw civic order disrupted and watched Jews being herded into the streets, beaten, spat upon, and taken away; they watched as SA and SS men in civilian clothes smashed Jewish shops and homes and set houses of Jewish worship to the torch. The police looked away. The Scholl family recalled that night with numb, impotent horror: the beast in man had lifted its mask and the time of euphemistic niceties and rationalizations was over. Cardinal Faulhaber sent a van to the chief rabbi of Munich when he heard that the temple was in flames in order to help salvage the sacred relics.

  Although conflicts between the Catholic leadership and population, on one hand, and the Nazi state, on the other, were to emerge intermittently throughout the twelve years of the Third Reich, the major energies of the Nazis were directed toward the propagation of a new state church, to be created out of the majority confession in Germany, the Protestant, or Lutheran, church.

  The German Christians, as they were known, rejected the Old Testament’s “Hebrew” values, and called for the reawakening of the “Nordic spirit,” a rebirth of ruthlessness and strength. Traditional Christianity was the religion of the “sick and the weak.” With Adolf Hitler as the new messiah, they saw their faith as identical with their nation. “Either we have a German god or none at all,” a spokesman for the German Believers’ Movement proclaimed in 1934. “We Germans have been forsaken by the Christian God. He is not a just, supernatural God, but a political-party God of the others. It is because we believed in him and not in our German God that we were defeated in the struggle of n
ations.”

  The new church de-Christianized the rituals of birth, marriage, and death, and tried, not too successfully, to transform the deeply ingrained Christmas customs into a celebration of the winter solstice.

  The antithesis of this primitive and clumsy effort to create a Nazi religion was the Bekennende Kirche, usually called the “Confessing church,” but perhaps more accurately translated into English as the “Professing church.” This group of Lutheran pastors met for the first time in March 1935 to express their revulsion for fascist “theology.”

  Among its leaders, and indeed its moving spirit, was Martin Niemöller, minister in the wealthy Dahlem suburb of Berlin. He too had been a staunch conservative, and was actually a U-boat captain during the First World War. He and another young pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, member of a distinguished Prussian family, were to become the driving force in this group, this perilously eroding rock of Protestantism in a sea of hate.

  The Confessing church stated unequivocably and publicly that “the new religion demands belief in an eternal Germany in place of the belief in the eternal kingdom of our Master and Savior, Jesus Christ . . . This insane belief creates a god from man’s image and being . . . It is anti-Christian . . . In the face of temptation and the danger of this religion . . . we must bear witness to our country and people.”

  Five hundred Protestant ministers who read these words from their pulpits were arrested. By 1939, by the time Hitler was ready to go to war, the stubborn band of pastors had almost completely been silenced. Martin Niemöller had been arrested, tried, and imprisoned. Upon his release, he was taken by the Gestapo and put into the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and then the one at Dachau; he was freed after the Allied invasion in 1945. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was to end up in the German resistance movement; his clandestine effort to negotiate peace with the Allies, provided that the military would be able to assassinate Hitler, ended in his arrest in April 1943 and his execution in April 1945, shortly before the Allies entered the concentration camp where he was imprisoned.