That draft—never printed, never circulated—was to cost Christoph his life.
Although the group apparently refused to pull back and take fewer risks, they also had a feeling, growing stronger, that they were in imminent danger of being caught.
Hans’s personality seemed to be undergoing a change. He walked by friends without seeing them; he seemed to be living in an inner world, unaffected by the conditions around him; his manner was distracted, no longer self-confident and eager. On one occasion, he told Gisela Schertling that he was being watched. Later Josef Söhngen, the owner of the bookshop, was to recall that Hans had given him the impression that he had secret contacts within the Gestapo itself, that perhaps he knew they were on his trail.
Since January, the Gestapo in Munich had indeed been feverishly hunting for the authors of the leaflets. When the anti-Nazi graffiti began appearing on walls, the security investigators linked that action with the student “unrest” after Gauleiter Giesler’s speech, but not with the leaflets. They were focusing their attention on the university now, and circulated a bulletin offering a reward to university per-sonnel who knew anything about the “smear campaign.”
The Gestapo already had a file on Hans from his days in the underground youth movement and his arrest in 1937; they were also certainly aware of Robert Scholl’s sentiments and the prison sentence he had served.
There are other troublesome and elusive scraps of information. In November 1942, Hans Hirzel, the Ulm high-school student who was a fervent admirer of Hans Scholl, had tried to enlist new supporters for the White Rose leaflet campaign. He talked to a fellow student, mentioning Hans Scholl’s name, among others. The student turned out to be a Gestapo informer. When Hirzel found this out, he managed to convince the young spy that he had lost his head and was slightly mad when he told him those stories of leaflets and conspiracy. The informer seemed convinced; in any case, the Ulm Gestapo did nothing. Hans Scholl was alerted in Munich for trouble, but nothing further happened. Some time later, Hirzel again tried to persuade a student to join in the underground activities; again he was reported to the Gestapo.
On February 17, 1943, Hans Hirzel was summoned to the Ulm Gestapo headquarters and interrogated. They let him go. He was now desperate to warn Hans Scholl in Munich that there could be serious trouble. He went to the Scholl home and told Inge to contact her brother in Munich immediately, using their code for danger, Machtstaat und Utopie (The Absolute State and Utopia), the name of a book by the distinguished German historian Gerhard Ritter.
Inge promptly called her fiancé-to-be, Otl Aicher, who was on military leave and staying at Carl Muth’s in Munich. She asked him to relay the message to Hans.
After contacting Hans that evening, Otl Aicher arrived, as agreed, at the apartment on Franz-Joseph-Strasse at eleven the next morning, February 18, 1943. But no one was home. He left and returned at eleven-thirty. This time the door swung open. Otl Aicher was greeted by the Gestapo.
EIGHTEEN
IN BERLIN that day, Thursday, February 18, 1943, the Sports Palace was packed with an overflowing audience of the Party faithful.
Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels had been planning for this moment since January: painstaking analyses of public-opinion surveys had been made; the most radical currents among the Party and population had been stirred; now, carefully chosen representatives of the German Volk community were gathered to greet their Führer.
But Hitler himself was sequestered in the isolation of the Wolf’s Lair, his secret battle headquarters deep in an East Prussian forest. He had been brooding there ever since Stalingrad, a battle that he had promised would be a turning point toward victory. At home in the Reich, the families of those lost in Russia and everyone else were enduring bombing raids that grew with unexpected fury. The innocent and guilty alike were consumed by the tens of thousands in the green flames of clinging phosphorus.
Now Goebbels would do something significant to renew the Führer’s confidence and spirits, and in the process restore himself to a paramount position in Hitler’s eyes. Today was the most important demonstration of Goebbels’s entire career. He would orchestrate it as if he were directing Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods, transforming the ignominy of defeat at the hands of the Slavic “subhumans” into Germany’s superhuman last stand, the apotheosis of the Thousand-Year Reich.
In the audience were fifteen thousand. Above the speaker’s platform, behind Goebbels’s head, hung an enormous banner with the words “Total War—Shortest War.” Radio microphones were poised to transmit the words spoken on this historic occasion into every German home; newsreel cameras were already rolling, panning across the rows of faces. Grouped around the stage were casualties of the eastern front, and Red Cross nurses in white smocks, standing by. In the first rows sat ministers of government, high Party leaders, the generals of the Wehrmacht. Behind them came a sample of the German Volk itself, selected from all over Germany—tradesmen, office workers, artists, engineers, civil servants, ordinary soldiers, teachers—gathered to chant in unified response to the questions Goebbels would pose.
Goebbels began. His speech consisted of ten questions, designed to build excitement, bringing the audience to the highest emotional pitch. He wanted them to experience a release of energy that was orgasmic, self-abnegating.
“I ask you,” Goebbels called out into the hushed silence. “Do you believe with the Führer and with the rest of us in the final total victory of the German people? Are you determined to follow the Führer through thick and thin in the struggle for victory, and to put up even with the heaviest of personal burdens?”
The audience called in a single explosion of consent. “Ja!”
“I ask you, are you and are the German people determined, if the Führer orders it, to work ten, twelve, or if necessary fourteen and sixteen hours a day, and to give your utmost for victory?”
The crowd called out, “Ja!” louder than before.
Would the German people accept the mobilization of all women? The death penalty for shirkers and profiteers?
Spontaneous demonstrations broke out, flags and banners waving, shouts of Sieg-Heil! and “Führer, command—we follow!”
Goebbels had the crowd at a pitch of excitement he himself had never before witnessed. Now was the time for the ultimate question.
“I ask you,” he screamed, “wollt Ihr den Totalen Krieg?—Do you want Total War?—if necessary, more total and more radical than we can even imagine it today?”
The crowd rose to its feet and shrieked its assent in a shattering paroxysm, their hands and fingers outstretched with such fervent effort that their arms seemed almost ready to leave their shoulder sockets.
“Do you agree,” Goebbels called into the continuous roar, “that everyone who goes against the war effort in any way should pay for it with his head?”
“I asked you,” he said, eyes piercing, voice choked, “and you gave me your answers. You are part of the German Volk and from your mouth the will of the German people has become manifest.
“Now, Nation—arise! Storm, break loose!”
Two days before, on February 16, Sophie had written what was to be the last letter she sent to her friend Fritz Hartnagel. When she was writing it, she already knew he was safe; he had been wounded and evacuated on one of the last planes out of Stalingrad. She wrote in her usual vein, telling him about her life, her feelings, and events at home.
“Just a short greeting before I go to my lecture,” she wrote that Tuesday in Munich.
I think I already told you that I went home for ten days to help out. This stay, even though I didn’t have much time to take care of my own affairs, was so good for me, if only because my father is so happy when I come and seems so surprised when I leave, and because my mother gets involved in a thousand small chores. This love, which asks nothing in return, is something wonderful. It is one of the most beautiful things that has ever been given to me.
The 150 kilometers between Ulm and Munich change me s
o quickly that I am astounded at myself. I’m transformed from a harmless, easygoing child into an independent and self-reliant person. This being on my own has been good for me, even if sometimes I’m not very comfortable with it because I’ve really been spoiled by people. But I only feel safe, secure and warm where I sense that selfless love, and that is something so relatively rare.
February 18 was a warm, springlike day in Munich. At a little after ten in the morning, Hans and Sophie left their apartment in Schwabing and strolled toward the university. Hans was carrying a large suitcase.
They arrived at the university before eleven, while lectures were still going on. The Lichthof, the large inner courtyard of the university with a glass-vaulted ceiling, was empty of people. Suddenly Traute Lafrenz and Willi Graf came down the marble steps toward them; they had left a lecture early in order to get to a medical clinic in another part of town where they were both taking a course. They looked at Sophie and Hans, took in the suitcase, and probably were expecting an explanation. None was forthcoming. The four agreed to meet again in the evening.
On the streetcar, Traute told Willi she had a “strange feeling.” Willi only shrugged his shoulders, but she knew he was concerned too. During the lecture at the clinic, he seemed nervous and didn’t doze off.
After their friends had left the Lichthof, Hans and Sophie opened the suitcase. They took out batches of the leaflets written by Kurt Huber and placed them in front of the doors of lecture halls, on windowsills, and on the vast stairways leading from the classrooms down to the main floor. They deposited about 700 to 1,800—estimates vary. When they finished, classes had not yet ended and they decided to leave the building.
They looked inside the suitcase and saw they still had some leaflets left. They went up the stairs to the upper floor beneath the vaulted ceiling, and there, from the balustrade, scattered the remaining leaflets down into the Lichthof.
At that moment two things happened: a middle-aged building custodian named Jakob Schmid was suddenly standing beneath them, shouting up, “You’re under arrest!” and, at the same time, the lecture doors were flung open and students began pouring out. The bellowing sound of Jakob Schmid’s voice must have echoed through the vast vaulted chamber. Hans and Sophie ran down the stairs, clattering along with the other students, hoping to get lost in the crowd. But Schmid was dogged and determined; a good and loyal member of the SA and the Party, this was his chance.
Jakob Schmid caught up with the young man and woman. He shouted again, “You’re under arrest!” They stopped running and stood quietly; everything about them seemed to stop, to go limp, to be drained out.
As the horror-stricken students watched, Hans and Sophie were led without protest to Rector Wüst’s office.
By now an alert had been sounded and all the exits of the university on both sides were locked. Students and faculty milled anxiously around in the great lobby, some reading leaflets, others looking nervously away; Kurt Huber was among them.
Robert Mohr’s Gestapo team was summoned from the Wittelsbach Palace; at last there seemed to be a breakthrough in the leaflet mystery.
When he arrived, the young man and woman made an extremely relaxed impression. He was dubious that they were the culprits. He ordered Gestapo agents down into the lobby to collect all the leaflets; he then asked the two suspects for their identity papers. They handed them over to him, showing no signs of nervousness. The papers were in order.
He looked them over, this calm and quiet brother and sister; they didn’t resemble each other very much, except both had dark hair and eyes. He realized that they were clean-cut young students, obviously from a good middle-class family. The notion that they were performing subversive acts he found inconceivable; the Pedell (custodian) had obviously made a mistake. He asked them why they were carrying an empty suitcase. They answered easily: they were on their way home to Ulm, had decided to leave a day earlier than usual. But why an empty suitcase? They were going to bring fresh clothes and laundry back to Munich.
Mohr was uncertain what to do; he was almost convinced of their innocence. Then, instantly, the situation changed. Mohr’s men had gathered up all the leaflets from the students in the lobby and those still scattered around the corridors. They brought them up to the rector’s office and were now putting the last of them into the suitcase. They fit perfectly.
Mohr gave the order to take Hans and Sophie to Gestapo headquarters; at that moment Hans pulled a piece of paper from his pocket, ripped it up into bits, and tried to stuff it down his mouth. They fell on him, and retrieved the fragments, piece by piece; it was the draft for a leaflet that Christoph Probst had written about peace a few days before.
Hans remained cool in spite of what had happened. It was a piece of paper, he said, given to him by a student he did not know; he hadn’t even read it, he didn’t know its contents, but felt it might in some way incriminate him.
Hans and Sophie were handcuffed and taken through the milling crowd to an unmarked car outside the entrance of the university. They looked neither right nor left; there were people in that crowd who were their friends; they would not endanger them.
Standing in the throng outside the university was Alexander Schmorell. He watched as the Gestapo took Hans and Sophie away. An escape plan had been devised by the group, and now Alex tried to put it into effect. He went immediately to Willi Graf’s room; no one was there, but he left a cryptic message warning Willi. He hoped his friend could get it in time and meet Alex the next day at the Starnberger Bahnhof, a small railroad station adjacent to the Munich Central Station, from which trains went south into the alpine regions of Bavaria.
He had to kill the day somehow; he thought frantically about where in Munich he could hide safely. He called his parents. His mother answered the phone. She said quickly, “Alex! The police are here.” He hung up.
In the confusion and terror, he suddenly came on the thought of his friend Lilo Ramdohr. He could trust her, and, most important, she had no direct connection with the White Rose. He would go to her and stay in her flat overnight.
Willi Graf spent the entire day at the university clinic; he had heard nothing about the arrests. He went home, with plans to meet Hans and Sophie that evening. At six-thirty, he entered his apartment on Mandlstrasse; the Gestapo was waiting. He and his sister Anneliese were taken to the Wittelsbach Palace.
Robert Mohr chose Sophie Scholl for personal interrogation and handed Hans over to another agent, Anton Mahler. Mohr was intrigued by this young, innocent-looking woman who seemed utterly unintimidated as she stood in the midst of Gestapo officials in a building of barred windows and doors. He was still not convinced of Hans’s and Sophie’s guilt, still debating with himself about letting them take their suitcase and go off to Ulm.
The interrogation of the brother and sister went on for seventeen hours—in separate chambers. The Gestapo learned nothing. At first the students denied any involvement, and repeated again and again that they knew no one who was engaged in such an operation. They would not budge from that position.
Then the report on the second search of the rooms at Franz-Joseph-Strasse was brought in—and the house of cards collapsed. The Gestapo had found a large batch of eight-pfennig stamps, the stamps used for mailing printed matter. And, much more devastating, they had found a letter to Hans in Christoph’s handwriting: it matched the handwriting on the sheet of paper Hans had tried to destroy.
Christoph, in Innsbruck, unaware of what was happening, was in the gravest peril.
Without having the chance to consult each other, and after interrogation that continued all day Thursday and through the night into Friday, Hans and Sophie finally confessed. Both said, as had been part of the group’s last option plan, that they, and only they, were responsible for the White Rose actions. They did not once deviate from this position.
When they were taken to their cells after this nonstop inquisition, they collapsed on their bunks. They were given “honorary cells,” which had a barred
window, a toilet, and even white sheets on the bed, but the ceiling light burned day and night, a sign that they were candidates for death. Each shared the cell with another inmate, whose main duty was to prevent any attempt at suicide.
Sophie’s cellmate was a political prisoner, a woman named Else Gebel who did clerical work in Gestapo headquarters during the day and was locked up at night. Else marveled at Sophie’s unruffled calm; she could not believe that this innocent girl was in any way associated with “conspiracy” and “high treason.”
Before Sophie fell into her bed that Friday morning, she told Else briefly that she had not broken under cross-examination; she had made no slips, had given no names; only she and her brother were implicated—and right now that was enough of a triumph.
About the same time on Friday, the Gestapo appeared at the Bergmann School where the medic-students were stationed. Alex had not shown up for roll call. An alert was put out: a poster with his picture and description, with a banner across saying “Criminal Wanted—1000 RM Reward” was printed and circulated all over South Germany.
Alex had managed to arrive at Lilo’s without difficulty; she put him up overnight as he had expected. She had been a great support to him for months lately; she had contacted Falk Harnack for him, she had stored some of his leaflets and other materials in her flat, and had even contributed some money to the White Rose venture. But she had remained apart from the group; her relationship with Alex was a private matter; when the pressure built to the point of explosion, he could flee to Lilo and his art.
Sophie Scholl and the White Rose Page 18