The new leaflet, as in the past, was written—in separate drafts—by Hans and Alex. But this time they turned to Kurt Huber for his opinion and stylistic revisions. They went to his home; occasionally he came by the Scholl apartment after lectures.
The new collaboration was not easy. Huber read both drafts; he found Alex’s unacceptable in content and writing style; even though Alex had not become a Communist, Huber felt, his reactions to Russia had made him less critical of the Soviet Union. Huber reluctantly accepted Hans’s version—with the few corrections he made—although he made it quite clear he was not very pleased with that one either. From his point of view, the young men had changed since they came back from Russia. Perhaps he found them hardened, leaning a bit toward the left. What they called “pragmatism,” he felt was a loss of the idealistic creed of individualism.
From a conservative standpoint like Professor Huber’s, much that appears in the fifth and next-to-the-last leaflet of the White Rose must have been unpalatable. It is testimony to his desperation, his desire to participate, to fight back, that he agreed at all to help them. He too had now crossed the line.
For the first time, the name “The White Rose” did not appear on the leaflet. The authors now presented themselves and their work as “Leaflets of the Resistance Movement in Germany,” a rather formid-able title. Huber did not approve. He had admired the White Rose as a symbol of personal purity and courage; the new name implied a kind of heavy-handed organizational structure that he disliked. He was overruled by Hans and Alex.
The leaflet was headed “A Call to All Germans” and began with the warning that “the war is nearing its inevitable end. . . . Hitler cannot win the war, only prolong it.”
The German people were admonished in a fairly brief paragraph to break with the Nazis, and then the leaflet discussed what kind of world the “movement” envisaged after the war was over:
Imperialistic designs for power, regardless from which side they come, must be neutralized for all time. A onesided Prussian militarism must never come to power again. Only in a generous, open cooperation among the peoples of Europe can the groundwork be laid for genuine reconstruction. All centralized power, like that exercised by the Prussian state in Germany and in Europe, must be eliminated. . . . The coming Germany must be federalistic. . . . The working class must be liberated from its degraded conditions of slavery by a reasonable form of socialism.
The leaflet went on to advocate basic civil rights—freedom of speech, of religion, protection of each individual from the encroachments of capricious governments—and concluded, as always, with the request to pass on the information.
There were no citations from Goethe, Schiller, or Lao-tsu, no effort to address themselves to a “cultured” audience. The leaflet was short, fairly precise; it offered a political platform for the future.
Almost every line of the political manifesto in the last few paragraphs was probably anathema to Kurt Huber. He was a passionate admirer of the Prussian state and military, in spite of his South German upbringing. The chasm between Prussia and many of the former duchies and princely states of Germany was immense. It involved not only political resentment on the part of southerners who recalled that Prussia had created and seized control of the new empire of Germany in 1871; it was also a question of style, of social habits, of values and attitudes—the eternal schism between the “cold” North and the “warm” South that seems to exist in many countries.
In the South—in Bavaria, Baden, and Swabia—Prussia stood for spartan austerity, the pounding beat of the military boot, and the German language spoken in the imperative, a cross between a bark and a gunshot. The southerners had nursed their grievances for over seventy years; they had been taken over and unified into a nation by an unsympathetic people whose stern values and undisguised arrogance made the southerners seethe with anger.
This feeling was expressed in the White Rose leaflets: Prussia was held responsible for the rise of Adolf Hitler and for the war he decided to wage.
Kurt Huber, a deep admirer of the German idealists—Kant, Hegel, Fichte—who had developed and refined their philosophical systems within the Prussian milieu, could not accept this rather simplistic evaluation of German history that he heard time and again in the discussion groups he attended. Prussia, he believed, had contributed far more to Germany than the crack of a whip; Prussia was not responsible for the rise of Adolf Hitler, who was born in Austria—in the easygoing, softhearted “South”—and who actually launched his mass movement not in the North, not in Prussia, but in the happy-go-lucky, gracious city of Munich.
In the vehement discussions Huber had with the students, he may have objected to the expression “reasonable socialism” as well, but in no case were his suggestions to change content or tone accepted; he was simply overruled.
The leaflet was written, revised, and edited; now printing oper-ations began. The Gestapo later estimated that between eight thousand and ten thousand copies of the Call to All Germans were disseminated, a twentyfold increase over the first four flyers. Alex again bought a typewriter and now a larger duplicating machine. Sophie and Traute made forays into shops all over the city in order to purchase the special paper needed, as well as envelopes and stamps. In each store, in each post office, they waited patiently in line, aware that clerks were on the alert for all suspicious behavior and out-of-the-way requests.
Even though the new press was larger than the old one, it still had to be cranked by hand. Each leaflet was turned out one by one, night after night. Stencils had to be changed, cylinders broke; again the tension was becoming unbearable. In order to stay awake and to function during the day, they took pep pills from the military clinics where the medics worked.
The bombing raids were another menace; it was not only the danger to their lives—they feared the real possibility that the atelier would be hit, and that the equipment and supplies in the cellar would lie naked in the streets, revealing all.
Hans devised a scheme: if the bombs seemed to be zeroing in on Schwabing, he would call Josef Söhngen and ask for a specific book. If the bookdealer said yes, he had that book, it meant the coast was clear. Then Hans and Alex would put the duplicator in a suitcase and carry it through the blacked-out streets, finally depositing it in Söhngen’s cellar. The discovery of a printing press in a bookshop would not be as damning as in the studio of an architect.
Somehow, day by day, night by night, in spite of delays and breakdowns and unsteady nerves, the leaflets were printed and ready to go.
Gestapo headquarters in Munich was housed in the Wittelsbach Palace, one of the many residences in Bavaria built by the royal dynasty. It was a massive building in red brick, designed in the mid-nineteenth-century style of other Bavarian state buildings constructed in Munich. It is gone now, destroyed by bombs and never rebuilt, but its history will never quite disappear in the city of Munich; the experiences of men and women inside its walls reflect the ironic and tragic swings of the pendulum in the Bavarian past.
The palace had hosted, among others, royal princes and their courtesans, like Lola Montez, in the uncomplicated days of mid-nineteenth-century Europe. After the First World War, it had been the seat of the Eisner republic that was so quickly snuffed out by reactionary and right-wing forces. Now, in 1943, and since the early days of the Third Reich, it served as the focal point for Gestapo activities in Bavaria; its cellars were used for torture, its archives filled with the denunciations of zealous and envious neighbors and reports by Gestapo Spitzel, or “spies.”
Robert Mohr was a Gestapo official who had served in a police capacity in Munich since the end of the First World War. One morning in January 1943, he was urgently summoned by the head of his department, Oberregierungsrat Schäfer. Schäfer was extremely nervous when Mohr arrived; he handed him a sheet of paper.
It was the leaflet, A Call to All Germans. Mohr read it and waited. Schäfer ordered him to push aside all other pending projects and concentrate on finding the authors
of the leaflet. Hundreds had appeared in the city, perhaps more. The Gestapo’s paid and voluntary helpers had brought them in from movie-houses, park benches, lobbies of apartment buildings, telephone booths. Schäfer added ominously that “the leaflets were creating the greatest disturbance at the highest levels of the Party and the State.” Although no names were mentioned, he undoubtedly meant Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and all security forces, including the Gestapo—and possibly even Adolf Hitler.
In a voice trembling with indignation, Schäfer told his subor-dinate that the Munich Gestapo had been put in charge of finding the culprits and “putting an end to the affair.”
Mohr began to investigate; he quickly discovered that the leaflets were now surfacing in Stuttgart, Vienna, Ulm, Frankfurt, and Augsburg. They were sent by mail as printed matter and none were postmarked in the city where they appeared. Those received in Stuttgart were postmarked Vienna, those in Frankfurt were mailed in Salzburg.
It was a unique occurrence in the decade of Nazi rule. The Gestapo suddenly found itself confronted by what it saw as a massive bombardment of subversive literature coming from beyond the left wing, generated inside the Reich, but not from one particular location; the treasonous material seemed to spring up haphazardly all over the country. Was a small group behind it? Or, as the morale at home and on the front was deteriorating, was this the first manifest-ation of a nationwide resistance organization? Would the leaflets trigger a chain reaction that the Nazis could no longer contain? How strong was this resistance?
The Gestapo manhunt began in earnest.
In order to stir up the fears and anxiety that the authorities were experiencing, and to give the impression of a wide-based network, the Munich group had worked out a daring scheme. They took the leaflets in rucksacks and suitcases by train to other cities and mailed them from there to yet another city. When they boarded the train in Munich—they always traveled alone—they would leave the suitcase in one compartment on the overhead rack, and then find a seat in another compartment, as far away from the suitcase as possible.
The trains were overcrowded; often there were no seats at all, and one stood or perched on pullout benches in the long, narrow corridors. Often they didn’t leave on time, since Allied bombing raids had destroyed many lines and tracks, and repair time was needed.
The expeditions of the White Rose were dark, cold, and chaotic. Travel had become a menace; not only the trains but even streetcars were controlled by the Gestapo and the military police, and some-times pedestrians were stopped on the street. All citizens had to carry their identity papers with them at all times, and especially when traveling; the Munich students were very aware that each trip could be their last. The police were hunting not only for “subversives,” deserters, and fugitives, but also for those engaged in food smuggling, a practice that had become extensive as the nation grew more and more hungry.
The trains the group took often arrived at the planned destination in the middle of the night. The students would pick up their luggage from the compartment where they had stored it and descend into darkness and often bombed-out railway stations, trying to look normal as they walked the cold, blacked-out streets, looking for mailboxes in unobtrusive places. Then, with their empty suitcases, they would return to Munich.
They had worked out plausible explanations for each journey in case they were stopped and questioned, and eventually they were even able to get counterfeit travel papers. Each one of the students made a journey like this, each one accepted the risks.
Hans went to Salzburg and posted 150 leaflets. Alex journeyed to Linz and Vienna with a suitcase filled with 1,400 leaflets; he mailed 400 from Vienna to Frankfurt, then stopped briefly in Linz and posted 200 more, and finally mailed the rest from Salzburg on his way back home, immensely relieved that the suitcase was empty.
Probably the most unpleasant aspect of these journeys was the fact that the participants undertook them alone, not in pairs. Going alone meant attracting less attention and it kept costs down, but undoubtedly these expeditions were their most terror-filled moments. But over the years they had learned to dissemble, learned how to look cool and distant, how to keep their faces inscrutable, their eyes blank, how to submit to security checks without trembling.
Sophie made her courier runs in the Augsburg-Ulm-Stuttgart area, from where she mailed about eight hundred leaflets. While at her parents’ house, she had an urge to show her father one of the leaflets, which she said she had “found” in Munich. He expressed admiration over this sign of resistance, as she had hoped. But suddenly he turned to her, troubled. “Sophie, I hope you two haven’t anything to do with this?”
She answered with indignation. “How can you even suspect that? Things are brewing in Munich, but we don’t get involved in them.”
But to Susanne Hirzel, her old friend from the days at the Fröbel Seminar, she said: “If Hitler came walking by right now and I had a pistol, I would shoot. If the men don’t do it, then a woman will have to. You have to do something to avoid being guilty yourself.”
While she was still in Ulm, Sophie also gave Hans Hirzel a few copies of the new leaflet, which they then reproduced in his father’s church. Hirzel and Franz Müller and Heinrich Guter selected names and addresses from telephone books, typed the envelopes, and posted them.
On one occasion, Hans Scholl’s new girlfriend, Gisela Schertling, helped Sophie mail a batch of envelopes in Munich. Sophie was carrying them in her rucksack; she asked her friend to keep the mailbox open so that she could throw in batches of them quickly. Gisela Schertling obliged, but never asked what it was that Sophie was doing in such a covert manner—perhaps she preferred not to know.
By far the most dangerous journey was made by Willi Graf. Without a furlough-pass or a permit to travel, he went off, in uniform, in the direction of the Rhineland. He was not only transporting leaflets in his large suitcase, but a duplicating machine as well.
He was determined to win support from among his old Catholic youth-group comrades, regardless of previous rejections. Even carrying out the precautions of separating himself from his highly charged luggage, he barely managed to slip through some tight controls.
On January 21, 1943, he was in Cologne talking to friends; he had no luck. He went on the same day to nearby Bonn, where he had once studied, and again was not warmly received, or at least his proposals were not. Traveling on, still weighed down with his heavy suitcase, he came to Saarbrücken and went to see Willi Bollinger at the military hospital where he worked as a medic.
It must have been a great relief when Bollinger took the duplicating machine and some of the leaflets to reproduce. Willi stayed with him overnight, avoiding any contact with his family. Before he left the next day, Bollinger gave him forged papers for the rest of the journey and blank travel forms, already stamped and signed, that could be used for future White Rose ventures.
Willi’s next stop was Freiburg, then on to Ulm, giving a few leaflets to the two or three people he could trust and knew would support him.
It was a long trip; it meant many train connections, many chances to be checked; his suitcase had been a ticking bomb, and the enormous strain and effort had yielded some—but only some—positive results.
Willi’s reactions are not known. When he returned to Munich, his diary for that day reports, he went to roll call, listened to a stupid Nazi harangue, “and in the evening a highly satisfactory cello concert.”
FIFTEEN
ON JANUARY 13, 1943, for the first and last time in the Third Reich, university students rose up in protest. It was a spontan-eous outbreak of rage, it occurred in Munich, it was short-lived—but it did happen.
On that day, students and faculty were summoned to the Main Auditorium of the Deutsche Museum, an enormous repository of science and technology located on an island in the Isar River, across the city from the university. The museum was chosen as the site to commemorate the 470th anniversary of the founding of the University of Munich; none of the h
alls at the university itself was large enough to contain so many professors and students at one time, as well as prominent officials in government, the Party, and the military.
Most of the students upon arrival were ordered up to the balcony, especially the female students, since the main hall was reserved for men in uniform: the soldier-students, the veterans who came on crutches and canes, and important officers in the SS and the armed forces. Apparently the faculty, in robes, were also permitted to sit in the orchestra; Kurt Huber was among them.
On the platform, draped with a banner to proclaim the solemn and important occasion, were local, regional, and national leaders of the National Socialist Student Association—as always, in uniform.
All exits were manned by the SS.
Since the White Rose student members had made a vow, as they said in one of their leaflets, to boycott all Nazi rallies and assemblies even if ordered to attend, they were not present. However, their friends Gisela Schertling, Anneliese Graf (Willi’s sister), and Katharina Schüddekopf, Kurt Huber’s doctoral student, were in attendance, seated in the first row of the balcony.
The gauleiter of Bavaria, Paul Giesler, had replaced Gauleiter Wagner, who had had a stroke and died some months later. Giesler was to give the keynote address. Even more brutal and primitive than Wagner, he considered himself “a man of the people.” He despised intellectuals and the university—a not unusual Nazi attitude.
Giesler’s goal on this occasion was to whip up morale for the war effort. It was known that Adolf Hitler was furious with the people of Munich for not living up to his expectations. They were sullen and less than enthusiastic about sending their sons and fathers to the collapsing Russian front; the Führer felt they deserved all the bombing they got.
Sophie Scholl and the White Rose Page 16