Sophie Scholl and the White Rose

by Annette Dumbach

  Through all this the German universities were never really bastions of free spirit and free inquiry, apart from the natural and phys-ical sciences. In virtually all of the universities, however, the voices of liberalism, moderation, and self-criticism could be heard, but they were usually lone voices, not expressing the will of the community—the community, of course, being defined by believers in the concept of the Volk, and not by the labor movement, the Socialists, and the artistic anarchists on the left.

  But no matter how “conservative” the universities were, they had never experienced the siege of repression that came with the takeover of power by the National Socialists in 1933. Although nothing came of most of their plans, the Nazis had grandiose schemes about what to do with the university, the “ivory tower,” and “the weaklings” that resided in it. Even though the German university had never been a home to leftist or liberal thought, it was detested by the men of the radical right.

  Some of the Nazi theoreticians on the national level, themselves professors in the New Order, made some daring proposals when they gained power. Ernst Krieck, for example, suggested that the univer-sities be dissolved entirely—this was to be made a constant threat to faculty and students throughout the twelve years of the Third Reich. He wanted to turn them into technical and vocational schools. Alfred Bäumler, a philosopher and expert on Nietzsche for the Party, proposed that the universities be made “houses for men,” eliminating all “feminine-democratic” elements.

  By the time the members of the White Rose enrolled at the University of Munich in the early 1940s, virtually all vestiges of pluralism in thought and quality in scholarship had vanished. To be sure, the university looked the same as it had for decades. It was situated at the edge of Schwabing, the artists’ section of town. This was an appropriate place for it to be, squatting between the worlds of the bourgeoisie and the bohemians. It consisted of a low-lying series of neutral-colored edifices on both sides of the austere Italianate thoroughfare called Ludwigstrasse, which was Sophie Scholl’s favorite street in Munich.

  The university blends in architectonically with the grand design of the street, which is one of the most noteworthy in the city. Ludwigstrasse is long, severely straight, treeless, and awesomely classicist. It has the naked and endless perspective of a surrealistic painting, but it is neatly parenthesized on both ends. On the northern end, just beyond the university, is the Siegestor, a smallish victory arch of the Bavarian army, and on the southern end, near midtown Munich, it is enclosed by the Feldherrnhalle, a copy of the Florentine loggias, replete with Bavarian lions and generals; it was the scene of Hitler’s infamous 1923 putsch.

  Ludwigstrasse, the university, and much of Munich was designed deliberately to seem a part of the Latin and Mediterranean world. This was a decision made by the Wittelsbachs, the royal family of Bavaria that had become known throughout Germany—and Europe—for its Louis XIV pretensions as builders of castles, palaces, plazas, and long avenues, all in the grand manner.

  The university, with its simple pseudo-Renaissance lines, fits comfortably into the physical and social map of the city. Its horizontal plainness is softened somewhat by two large fountains facing the entrance of the university that splash languidly as soon as spring arrives each year; they announce in sight and sound the arrival of balmy weather and easier living. Munich is a city that loves fountains and clearly prefers the summer heat to the dark days of a Gothic winter.

  Like the city itself, the university has attracted a strange assortment of people over the years. One of them was Rudolf Hess, a veteran of the First World War who enrolled as a student of economics after the armistice but spent most of his time passing out anti-Semitic leaflets and fighting the modest forces of the short-lived Bavarian republic. He had become acquainted with Karl Haushofer, professor of geopolitics at the university, whose concept of Lebensraun, or “living space,” for the German people had become so inspiring to Adolf Hitler; it was Hess who introduced Haushofer, a former general, to the Austrian corporal in the early days of “struggle” for the Nazi movement. Munich was also one of four or five universities where Joseph Goebbels dabbled in philosophy and the arts before receiving his doctorate in Heidelberg in 1921.

  In 1933, like all universities, it was taken over by National Socialist personnel. The new rector, Professor Dr. Walter Wüst, an Oberführer in the SS, was known as one of the leading experts on “Aryan culture.” By 1942, when the White Rose had assembled there, the university was thoroughly “integrated” into the Nazi system. The students were imbued, to the point of boredom and apathy, with Nazi clichés from their days in the Hitler Youth, and all classrooms and lecture halls were infested with spies from the National Socialist Student Association, zealously scribbling notes, their antennae groping for heresy while professors uneasily lectured. Academic freedom had become, in the words of Walter Schultze in a speech to the Scientific Assembly of the National Socialist Association of Professors, “a notion of freedom that is specifically our own, since we know that freedom must have its limits in the actual existence of the Volk . . . Ultimately freedom is nothing but responsible service on behalf of the basic values of our being as a Volk.”

  A sampling of courses offered at two universities, Berlin and Munich: “Geography in the Service of the National Socialist State”; “The Life of the Soul in its Racial, National and Historical Forms”; “Volk and Race (including legislation on racial improvement and eugenics), with slides and field trips”; “Birth, Marriage and Death: The Role of Race in the Volkish Character (with slides)”; “Retrogressive Peoples, Primitive Races, Ancient Cultures, 1st part (with slides)”; and “The Sociology of War (open to the public).”

  Academic scholarship and publications had reached the nadir; professional and scientific journals produced in Germany were now barely read in the international community of scholars. An extract from the journal Deutsche Justiz (German Justice)—an article by Supreme Party Judge Walter Buch, published October 21, 1938—indicates the level of the scholarly press of that era: “The Jew is not a human being. He is an appearance of putrescence. Just as the fission fungus cannot permeate wood until it is rotting, so the Jew was able to creep into the German people, to bring on disaster, only after the German nation, weakened by the loss of blood in the Thirty Years’ War, had begun to rot from within.”

  Despite the descent into mindlessness and terror, pockets of knowledge and decency somehow went on existing here and there, scattered among the different institutes and faculties, attracting as little notice as possible. Students with anti-Nazi sentiments were able to find like-minded Kommilitonen, or “fellow students,” through a kind of secret rejectionist vocabulary and by observing unguarded expressions on people’s faces when a cryptically subversive remark was made. Sophie Scholl, as a new student, was guided by Hans’s girlfriend and fellow medical student Traute Lafrenz through the labyrinth of evasion. At Traute’s and Hans’s suggestion, Sophie took a course in philosophy that met twice a week, in the morning, in the large auditorium; it was the most popular course offered in the summer semester of 1942—the semester ran from May through July—and the lecturer was Dr. Kurt Huber.

  Evasion had not been the only form of protest at Munich University, however; in 1935, for example, a distinguished author named Ernest Wiechert had given a series of talks on “The Poet and His Times.” His lectures were enormously popular and crowded; what he said stunned his listeners. He told them bluntly that the “art” fabricated by the Nazis was “murder of the soul.” He also admonished the students “not to allow yourselves to be seduced, if your conscience orders you to speak.” The lecture was reproduced as a leaflet and circulated at other German universities. Ernest Wiechert was taken away by the Gestapo and put into prison; some time later he was detained in Dachau for a brief period.

  Professor Fritz-Joachim von Rintelen lectured on ancient Greek thought. He was one of the most superb manipulators of double meanings at the university, and his lectures were subtle but deva
stating critiques of Nazi thought and practices, as viewed through the prism of the civilized Hellenic past. His classes were also packed, but one day he simply didn’t show up. Nor did he appear at his next scheduled lecture. One of Rintelen’s students—Jürgen Wittenstein, a fellow medic and friend of Hans, Willi, and Alex—recalled the episode later. He and about fifty other students dared to go to the Rektor himself to ask what had happened to their teacher. Rector Wüst actually came out of his private office to meet the delegation, probably because the idea of students demanding to see him was incredible. When they told him what they wanted, he simply stared at them in disbelief for a moment, wheeled around, went back into his office, and slammed the door. The students then staged a protest on Ludwigstrasse, in front of the university, and in a final and dazzling display of defiance, they walked over to Rintelen’s flat and stood under his window in a show of solidarity. It was courageous, it was incredible; nevertheless, Rintelen was not seen at the university again.

  Even in 1942, after nearly a decade of Adolf Hitler, these amazing acts, these pockets of decency persisted, daring, isolated, near-inexplicable. Professor Heinrich Wieland, director of the university’s Chemistry Institute, had made his domain a sanctuary for Mischlinge —for half-Jews, usually children of mixed marriages who were now living in a twilight limbo between the New Order and transport to a concentration camp, which is what was happening to their Jewish parents since the summer of 1941. Hans Leipelt, from Hamburg, was one of those students enrolled at the Chemistry Institute; later he was to try to carry on the activities of the White Rose after their executions.

  To this day no one is quite sure how and why professors like Wieland were allowed to continue functioning. Another major exception that doesn’t fit into the picture of bland, brown-shirted dullness was Kurt Huber.

  Since 1926, Huber had been lecturing as the equivalent of an associate professor, without tenure, in philosophy, psychology, and musicology. Some 250 students would attend his classes, and the university administration begrudgingly assigned him the largest hall, the Auditorium Maximum, to accommodate his audience.

  In 1942 Huber was forty-nine years old, a smallish man, about five feet six or seven, with graying hair. He was pale and looked tired and worn, older than his years. He walked with a heavy limp, dragging his right leg behind him. He had suffered acute diphtheria as a small child, and his larynx had had to be slit to save his life; the aftereffects never completely disappeared. His hands trembled, sometimes his head would shake violently, especially when he was upset. He would limp up to the podium, wait for silence, and then begin. Sometimes it took painful seconds and even minutes for his voice to clear and become comprehensible. But when it did, the experience was splendid. He prepared each lecture painstakingly but spoke extemporaneously. The development of his ideas, the way he shaped them, gave the students a glimpse into the world of the mind, into the enormous and powerful history of ideas that was so vital a part of their national heritage.

  His lectures in philosophy mainly centered on the German idealists—Kant, Hegel, Schelling, and others, and on the works of the seventeenth-century philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz. Huber was writing a definitive work on Leibniz during this period. He was an interesting choice for Huber to make: Leibniz is considered a singularly modern thinker, and his influence on the nineteenth-century idealists, particularly Hegel and Fichte, was profound. He tried to reconcile the concepts of substance and form, to find a middle point between the processes of reason and the methods of science. Mathematics provided a means for this: in the late 1660s Leibniz posited a model to demonstrate that all ideas, verbal or nonverbal, can be reduced to an ordered combination of numbers or words, and in the external world, to a combination of sounds or colors. But this reductionism of the world to logical calculus remained insufficient for him; in his Théodicée, published in 1710, he reflected on the necessity of including God in an analysis of the cosmos. By that time of his life he was deeply concerned about the existence of evil in a perfect, mathematically ordered universe. He resolved the problem by declaring that each creature in the universe is finite, and therefore imperfect; since each creature has its special place in creation, in the cosmic hierarchy, it is part of nature and part of the expression of “universal harmony.” Leibniz was expressing thoughts that were to recur in Enlightenment thinking of the eighteenth century. In his view, evil is like “dissonance in music”; it is a lack, a flaw, but ultimately, because it is an integral part of the whole, evil, too, increases the “beauty” of the universe and God.

  When Professor Huber lectured on subjects like these, he could not resist tossing in an occasional ironic or barbed remark. He had a dry wit—not a very academic trait in Germany, and certainly not under the Nazis. The unexpected remark just seemed to leap out of him, as if he could not do otherwise, as if there were some deep need to throw down the gauntlet. He would mention Spinoza and say with a wry smile, “Careful, he’s a Jew! Don’t let yourselves be contamin-ated.” There would be restless and fearful murmurs in the hall, but the students came back in droves, and somehow there were no reper-cussions.

  Kurt Huber’s political and social attitudes were conservative, and precisely because he viewed the Nazis as a mass movement of revolutionaries did he loathe them. He was an authentic representative of German philosophical and historical nationalism—but he never advocated war or conquest as a method to further the German spirit. At one time, early in the Nazi regime, he had tried to get a full professorship, which he undeniably deserved: he was considered one of the more brilliant, universal, and articulate younger figures in the aca-demic world. He was turned down by a National Socialist university bureaucrat who said: “We can only use officer material.”

  That casual and brutal remark may have been shattering to a man who had spent his life overcoming pain and affliction by sheer self-discipline and intelligence. In addition, he was deeply committed to the German cause and a fervent admirer of the military as a pillar of a moral German order. His own inability to serve his country in uniform must have been among the sorest of his trials; he had been of age during the First World War and had missed sharing the legendary bonds of comradeship that grew out of the trenches and that were so extolled later by nationalist writers. Now again, in the thirties and early forties, he was living in a society that prized everything he was not. Nevertheless, he went on admiring Prussia and the military for their discipline, steadfastness, and code of honor. He hated the man who would soon send these brave and strong young men out to die without purpose or reason.

  Huber was born in Switzerland but raised in Stuttgart, in southwest Germany, in a cultivated middle-class home. Both his parents were educators and scholars. His mother taught him to play the piano; his father, harmony and counterpoint. He was a brilliant pupil, and had perfect pitch. Beyond music, he had that rare kind of mind that spans the “two cultures,” the sciences and the arts. He completed his doctorate summa cum laude at the University of Munich in the fields of music, philosophy, and psychology. His great love was folk music, and his studies and writings in this field were international in scope. Among other musicological pursuits, he analyzed the chants of Burmese women working in the rice paddies; he made speculative investigations into the tonalities and rhythms of other cultures.

  His brief moments of recognition as a scholar were barely noticed at the University of Munich. He was chosen in 1936 to represent Germany at the International Folk Music Congress in Barcelona, before another fascist, Francisco Franco, launched his drive to seize power from the Spanish republic.

  Kurt Huber could have used his folk-music talents and reputation to carve out a niche for himself in the Third Reich. Because of the “folk” aspects of his musical interests, he was invited in 1938 to take over a new folk-music institute at the University of Berlin. He eagerly grasped the opportunity after the years of disappointment.

  But the Berlin year was a disaster; the university administration and the Na
zi student organization expected him to produce blood-and-soil marching songs based on folk tradition. He refused to cooperate; he was a scientist, not a propagandist. The situation became tense and almost unbearable. At the end of the year, the contract was not renewed, and the Huber family, more reduced in circumstances than ever, returned to their spartan life in Munich.

  In his mid-thirties, Huber had married Clara, a robust and healthy woman much younger than himself. By 1942 they had two children: Birgit, who was eleven, and Wolf, two. The family lived frugally—they had to; no matter how hard the professor worked, drove himself, and struggled to get along with his more compliant colleagues, he could not achieve recognition or reward in this society. He seethed inside—his personality has been described as “choleric.” He was a man full of indignation, full of the injustices and degradations—personal and national—that he encountered every day outside of his home, and it was only in his home that he could let go.

  He was a demanding, authoritarian family man, with a good-natured and worried wife. He was precise, judgmental, impatient; his goal was perfection. He could make his children tremble when he lost his temper or supervised his daughter’s piano lessons. But he could be gentle; he would caress them when he came home in good spirits, stroking their heads and trying to guess, with a smile, what meal Mrs. Huber had prepared, just from the lingering odors in the children’s hair. He loved them with every fiber of his passionate hidden being, and they knew it. When he thought about the Nazis or about the bombing of German cities or about the destruction of German culture, he would get carried away and begin to shout. Clara Huber would run frantically around the room shutting windows, whispering intently: “Kurt, stop it! They’ll take you to Dachau!”