Sophie Scholl and the White Rose

by Annette Dumbach

  After the summer semester ended, there was nothing to keep Sophie in Munich. It was a relief to go home, but her spirits were low. Fritz and both her brothers were at the front, her mother was in poor health, and now she had to face two months of work in an armaments factory over the summer vacation—another new requirement in a society now made up of nothing but proclamations and orders.

  This train trip from Munich to Ulm brought no exhilaration. Not long after she arrived, her father was tried and sentenced to four months in prison for an anti-Hitler remark. She made a hurried trip back to Munich. With Traute’s assistance, she cleared out Hans’s room and her own to make sure that no incriminating scrap of evidence could be found by the Gestapo now that the entire family was in danger of Sippenhaft, or “clan arrest.”

  Magdalena Scholl was shattered by her husband’s arrest. Although it was probably not mentioned in the Scholl home, the knowledge hung in the air that many prisoners served their terms, were released, and emerged from the prison gates only to find a Gestapo official waiting with the appropriate signed and stamped papers of “transfer”—to a concentration camp.

  Sophie requested a postponement before checking in at the factory in order to help her mother at home; she was turned down.

  It was a grim and lonely time. The family was allowed to send Robert Scholl a letter every fourteen days; he could write once a month. Sophie’s letters to her father were filled with words of encouragement and poorly concealed defiance. Her manual work at the factory began in August. Sometimes in the evenings she would go out to the grounds of the prison, as close as possible to the barred windows where she hoped her father might be.

  She took her flute along and played the melody “Die Gedanken Sind Frei” (“Your Thoughts Are Free”), an anonymously written song of the 1848 revolution, part of the accepted liberal and antidespotic heritage of Germany. A sample of one of its verses:

  Your thoughts are free,

  No one can guess them,

  They flee right by

  Like shadows in the night;

  No man can know them,

  No hunter can shoot them

  With powder and lead,

  Your thoughts are free.

  She loathed the work at the factory. It was not only the idea of making parts for Hitler’s machines of war that oppressed her, but also, as she wrote to a friend,

  this spiritless, lifeless work, purely mechanical, these tiny little pieces whose whole we don’t know, whose purpose is horrible. The work affects you not so much physically as mentally. The constant noise of the machines, the shocking howl of the sirens at the end of the shift, the degrading image of human beings at the machine, as if wholly in the power of the machine . . . how beautiful is a farmer’s work, a craftsman’s, yes, even a street cleaner’s.

  Her daily thoughts often turned to Hans, Alex, and the others in Russia—even her dreams did. “I went walking with Hans and Shurik,” she recorded in her diary one morning upon waking.

  I walked in the middle . . . half the time jumping, so that the two of them could lift me in the air and swing me forward a bit. Then Hans began: “I know a perfectly simple proof for the existence . . . of God. People breathe so much that after a while the entire heaven must become polluted from man’s used-up breath. But, to make sure that people don’t lose this nourishment for their blood, from time to time God puffs a mouthful of his own breath into our world . . . and renews the air. That’s how he does it.” And then Hans lifted his face up to the dark, melancholy sky, drew a deep breath and blew it all out. His breath streamed upward in a blue shining column, becoming larger and larger, going far up into the heavens, pushing aside the dirtied clouds, and there above us and before us and around us was the purest, the bluest sky. It was beautiful.

  At the factory she started a private slowdown strike. She was rebuked by the foreman; she shrugged and told him she couldn’t help it, she was clumsy.

  When she looked around at her fellow workers, all women, she realized that she was relatively lucky. Most of the girls and women were forced laborers from Russia, living in barracks behind barbed wire in a compound adjacent to the factory. They were treated like cattle, barely surviving on watery soups, working seventy hard hours a week (the Germans worked sixty).

  Gradually she made friends with a few of the Russian women, not with many words, but with a few friendly smiles when no one was watching them. She tried out a few phrases that Shurik had taught her; the Russians’ warm response touched her. She gave them some of her bread and rations furtively; her contact with them—their smiles, their warmth, their simplicity and innocence—was one of the few positive experiences in those months of uncertainty.

  The news of Robert Scholl’s arrest had reached Hans in Gzhatsk almost as soon as he got there. His mother wrote, asking Hans and his brother Werner, who, by coincidence, was stationed in Gzhatsk with a regular unit, to submit a plea for clemency for their father. She thought that the fact that the Scholl sons were on the front lines might have some impact on the judicial authorities.

  Hans rode over on horseback to Werner’s unit. He had made up his mind as soon as he got his mother’s letter: there would be no pet-ition for mercy. Werner went along with Hans; they wrote their mother that they felt they were acting in the spirit of their father. As Hans put it in his diary, “I know false pride, but I also know real pride.” But his father’s arrest deeply upset him. As he wrote home on September 18, 1942: “Here I think so much about father, and in the way it can only happen in Russia, I shoot up the whole tone-scale of my personality to the highest tone of rage, and then, just as quickly, I sink back into an expectant, confident and calm state.”

  The activity on the front near Moscow was gradually dying down as more men and munitions were poured south by the German High Command in the direction of the Volga River, concentrating for an offensive against a major industrial city called Stalingrad.

  In October 1942, word seeped into their unit that they would soon be recalled to Germany. Shurik had contracted diphtheria and then lapsed into depression. He didn’t want to go back; he wanted to stay in Russia. But if he did—that is, if he deserted, as he said so often he would—what would happen to him in Russia? He could not shoot a Russian, but he would also never fire a gun at a German. Shurik had always envisaged his goal in life as being a bridge between the two countries and cultures, a reconciler, a man of harmony and peace. Now he was plunged into a limbo between them; he belonged suddenly to neither; he was alone.

  It was probably the second severe emotional crisis of his life. He stared moodily at his mud-caked boots; he said he would never wash them clean, never wash off the soil of Russia.

  Autumn was settling in on the Muscovy plain. Hans wrote in a letter home:

  Alex is almost in good health again, but still not ready to leave the barracks. So I still have to go fishing by myself. But the fall is beautiful here. Can you imagine what it looks like when the endless birch forests gradually change into all the colors of late summer, from soft gold to purple-red. The sun is always shining, the autumn wind chases the clouds— just now a staff doctor got me angry, complaining about my unmilitary haircut. Jawohl, Herr Stabsarzt . . . the time will come when we will experience Russia in a different way, when we’ll let our beards grow as long as we can, till they touch the earth, if we enjoy doing it.

  They were all obviously depressed about the continuing German encroachments into Russia, and even about going home; but there was nothing to do, for Alex or for themselves, except to discuss “the plan” (as Willi put it cryptically in his diary): the restructuring of resistance activities once they got back to Munich.

  As the day of departure from Russia grew close, their emotions were at fever pitch. Willi’s notation for that day: “The last morning, preparations, saying good-bye to Sina, to the children. It’s very hard for me. . . .” And the intensity of their friendship was heightened and exalted too, even with friends left at home, like Christel Probst. He wrote Ha
ns at the very end of the Russian interlude; he too was affected by Russia. His words expressed feelings in a form far more open and free than was expected among young German men.

  In a letter dated October 18, 1942, from Ruhpolding, Christel said:

  It’s strange that now the first letter from you has come; just in the past week I have experienced such a strong feeling of missing you. It’s true; I’ve experienced and seen everything as if I’d been with you, and I’ve often felt the pain of separation. More and more I sense how my life demands true male friendships, the intellectual exchanges—but even more, those of the heart.

  I’ve rented a room for Herta and Mischa in Ruhpolding and go there often. I play toccatas and fugues by Bach. And then, after breakfast, the children come down. Ach, Hans, when you sit like that, in the warmly heated room, the small one playing with a car, the other crawling up your lap, then it really goes straight to the heart, and you doubt if you’ve earned the right to so much happiness and grace. To be together with the children is such a joy that I am often filled with the sense that this could not be permanent. . . .

  Now, Sunday morning, I’ve read your letter and got the answers to questions in the discussions I’ve been having with you in my mind. Your dear words have deeply moved me and I understand so well what all of you have experienced in Russia.

  I am looking forward to a joint skiing and mountain-trekking winter with you, dear Hans and Alex. We’ll also go on sharing our common interests and obligations in the city.

  I think of you often and am deeply convinced that nothing can happen to you in Russia.

  The men at the front had now seen and experienced much; they could no longer brake themselves as they had done so long at home. They began to use their fists. A few days before they left Gzhatsk in October, they had a brawl with Party officials visiting the front who were sitting at a nearby table in a tavern. Somehow they got out of that without being caught.

  At one stopover on the train journey home, Hans told his sister Inge later, he saw a young girl with the Star of David on her breast; she was repairing tracks on the line, along with other people with yellow badges on their clothes. Her face was pallid, sunken in; her eyes, beyond grief and terror. Impulsively, Hans thrust his rations in her hand. She looked up at him, then at his uniform. She threw the packet of food to the ground.

  He scooped it up, wiped off the dust, and picked a daisy growing by the side of the tracks. He placed the package, with the daisy on top, at her feet. He said, “I would have liked to give you a little pleasure.” He boarded the train.

  When he looked back, the girl was standing there, watching the train disappear, the flower in her hair.

  Defying orders was now their way of life. Instead of standing patiently in a long line waiting to be deloused in Wjasma before going on to Germany, they took off and went into town for a last splurge. They used all the money they had left and bought a collective samovar; it served them well on the long train trip—they had hot tea day and night.

  Not only did they bring back lice and a samovar; they smuggled in a few weapons. The three of them were spoiling for a fight. At the Polish border, they were almost arrested. Again the train had stopped, and this time they watched as German guards abused, beat, and stamped on Russian POWs. Their rage exploded. Alex and Hans and Willi jumped off the train and, cursing, fell on the guards. The train began to move, and before the stunned guards could react, the three of them had swung aboard.

  It was November when they came back to Germany. They passed through Berlin and went directly to Munich to their unit—and then were dismissed for a few days to go home before classes began again at the university.

  Like Manfred Eickemeyer, they had seen for themselves; they had passed through a universe beyond their ability to describe or express. Hans wrote a few days after his return to Germany:

  Far from all political thought (which is not that strange to me, but rather is closer to me than ever; more about that later), I am grateful to God today that I had to go to Russia. There I finally learned not to take myself so utterly seriously, but to turn the aimless reflections upside down, and direct the mind outward, toward concrete reality.

  What they had seen and done in Russia and en route back to Germany is still clouded over, but the Gestapo may have been aware of them even then. Willi’s enigmatic diary entry of November 11, 1942, has never been fully explained. He wrote, after they arrived exhausted in Munich from Berlin, that “the Kriminalpolizei [the criminal police] visited us, but after that I went on sleeping.”

  What is known, though, is that their rage, so muted and coolly expressed in letters and diaries, had taken on new dimensions. The fight was only now really to begin.

  THIRTEEN

  ALTHOUGH Sophie had some grounds for rejoicing in the early days of October 1942, she seemed to remain depressed.

  The good news was that Robert Scholl, after serving two of his four months in prison, was released without explanation, although prohibited from practicing his profession. Sophie had also completed the eight weeks of work for the war effort, and now, as she wrote Fritz Hartnagel, who had been transferred to the Stalingrad front,

  Hans is coming back from Russia. Now I really should be happy that he is back with us, and I am, and I’m already sketching out the days we’ll be able to spend together in our small flat in Munich . . . and yet, I can’t be completely happy. The insecurity we live in constantly casts its shadow; it won’t allow any positive planning for tomorrow and all the coming days. It hangs over me day and night and never leaves me for a minute. . . . When will the time finally come when we won’t need to clutch on with all our strength and alertness to things that are not worth the effort? . . . Every word, before it’s uttered, has to be considered from all sides to see if the slightest shimmer of ambiguity exists. Trust in other people has to give way to suspicion and watchfulness. Oh, it’s exhausting and discouraging.

  Sophie was grappling with a desperation that appears to have had personal aspects beyond her concerns about her family and the war. It seems that she had been strongly drawn to Alex Schmorell since she had arrived in Munich, and the attraction may not have been reciprocated. In her diary during the period when Alex, Hans, and Willi were in Russia, she referred often, if obliquely, to Alex. Then, on October 10, 1942, she wrote:

  This morning I was at the Schmorrels’ [in Munich] in Shurik’s room, looking for books. What false dreams people can create for themselves! Months ago I was still thinking my feelings for Shurik were greater than for anyone else. But this was such a false delusion! It was only my vanity that wanted to possess a person who had value in the eyes of others. I distort my own self-image in a ridiculous way.

  It was not a time for auspicious beginnings. The atmosphere in Germany had become grimmer. Winter was coming, coal for heating was getting scarce, and the air raids over Munich and South Germany were stepping up. The prospect of spending winter nights in unheated black cellars while bombs whistled down was bringing out a bleak despair in the population.

  Munich suffered its first direct air raid the night of October 30, 1942. An aristocrat living in the country outside Munich described it in his diary:

  . . . a hideous red glare, transforming the autumn night and its full moon. I heard in the distance the muffled booms. . . . It had taken three minutes for the sound to carry, three minutes during which the victims at the scene had been gasping and gagging and dying. Finally, the whole of the sky to the west was a gigantic sheet of fire.

  Anti-Hitler whisper jokes were making the rounds more than ever before. They were not particularly funny, but they were dangerous; the more Germany’s leaders felt themselves embattled, the harsher the sentences for these utterances.

  When the White Rose met again in Munich in early November for the start of the winter semester at the university, national morale was plummeting. The German offensive at Stalingrad had not only been stopped in its tracks, but the Russians had launched a massive counter-offensive.
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  In spite of the incessant blaring of Goebbel’s propaganda apparatus about victory piling on victory, Hans and Willi and Alex had seen for themselves that the German troops were exhausted, that they had no adequate clothes or supplies for a Russian winter, and that the logistical pipelines were operating chaotically—if at all. The news reports on the “people’s” radio was a pack of lies; from listening to “enemy broadcasts”—Swiss Radio and the BBC—they also knew that Anglo-American forces had landed in North Africa, and that the American industrial machine, now totally geared to war, was delivering an endless supply of munitions, fuel, and machinery to the Russians and the British.

  The Allied invasion of Europe, they believed, was drawing near.

  At Franz-Joseph-Strasse, the discussions were daily vehement affairs. Hans and Sophie’s landlady had left them the flat and fled to the countryside as the bombing raids became frequent. The friends came and went at all hours, and the “plan” was the major if not the only subject of conversation when they were alone. But the program was never discussed if a relative or friend came by who had not been admitted to the inner circle; this was done to spare “outsiders” anxiety and to protect them in case the worst ever happened. When Anneliese Graf, Willi’s sister, came to Munich to study, she stayed with Sophie and Hans for a few weeks till she found her own room. Till the very end, she knew nothing about their secret operations.