by Heath, Tim
Sophie, it was said, possessed her mother’s quiet sensitivity, but her father’s strong personality. Sophie and her brother Hans strongly believed in human rights, and like the rest of the Scholl children, this was a quality inherited from their father Robert.
At the age of eleven in 1932, Sophie began her secondary education at a school for girls. The following year, Adolf Hitler stormed to power with his Nazi Party. He immediately began to implement completely new reforms within the education system, urging both girls and boys to join the Hitler Youth.
Ingeborg Scholl recalls the response of the German press and radio on 30 January 1933: ‘The newspapers and radio were full of the news that Hitler had come to power.’
‘Now everything will be better in Germany. Hitler is at the tiller’, the headline news proclaimed.
Ingeborg, who was sixteen at the time, says:
There was much talk of the fatherland and of comradeship and the union of the Germanic peoples. Of course, it impressed us, and we listened positively. We loved our homeland and everywhere we heard that Hitler wanted to help Germany rebuild itself back to greatness, happiness and prosperity. He wanted everyone to have employment and to have enough to eat. He promised every German citizen that he would not rest until they enjoyed independence, freedom and happiness.
At the age of twelve, along with her brothers and sisters, classmates and friends, Sophie joined the Hitler Youth for girls (JM/BDM). Sophie’s father was under no illusions as to the game Hitler was playing, asking his children, ‘Have you considered how he’s going to manage all that he has promised? He is expanding the armaments industry and building barracks. Do you know where that’s all going to end?’
The Scholl children argued that Hitler would solve much of Germany’s problems, including unemployment, by the building of the new autobahns across the land.
Sophie was initially enthusiastic about the Hitler Youth movement, but she soon began to question many of the organization’s ethics. She became very concerned by the Nazi attitude towards her Jewish school friends, who were not permitted to join the Hitler Youth. While her brothers and sisters became group leaders within their respective organizations, Sophie became increasingly sceptical. She became aware of the dissenting political views of her father, friends, and of some of her teachers. During this time, Hans was not on speaking terms with his father.
Robert Scholl came to despise the Hitler Youth and all that it stood for, and could no longer understand his son’s eager participation. However, Hans soon changed his whole outlook of the Nazi regime when he was given the honour of bearer of the flag of Ulm at the Nuremberg party rally in 1935. He became extremely despondent with the constant drilling, hate-filled oration, and stupid conversation and vulgar jokes about silly things. He, like Sophie and their father, now understood more clearly than ever before what Nazism really meant. To make matters worse, bad stories were beginning to filter back into Germany as to what was happening to Jews in German concentration camps.
The political attitude now became an essential criterion in Sophie’s choice of friends. She found that she could no longer integrate with those who supported the Nazi ideal, naturally seeking the company of those who shared the same opinions and felt the same way as she did.
The arrest of her brother and some of his friends in November 1937, for their membership of an outlawed youth group banned by the Nazis and known as the ‘dj.1.11’ (taken from the date of its founding, 1 Nov 1929), left a very strong impression on Sophie. She greatly admired their courage and conviction to stand by their personal beliefs.
After their arrests, the Scholl household was searched by the Gestapo. Nothing was found, however, as Frau Scholl, with great presence of mind, had managed to cleverly dispose of any incriminating material, on the pretence that she had to visit the bakery. The Gestapo let her go after she had managed to get to the attic room to hide the illicit documents for which the state secret police had been searching. She had placed it under a cover in her basket, then leaving the Gestapo to search the house.
Ingeborg and Werner Scholl were taken to Stuttgart where the authorities detained them for a week before releasing them. Hans Scholl was held for five weeks and was only saved further interrogation by a conscription order. A sympathetic German army officer had him released upon the context that he was now a serving soldier and was therefore under army jurisdiction.
Non-conformity was a very dangerous path to choose to take at that time in Germany, and few young people would ever dare to deviate from the path of such institutionalized conformity.
Sophie had a great talent for drawing and painting, enjoying anything to do with art. Her drawings of Peter Pan – each with a certain aura about them – are excellent examples of Sophie’s creative skill. Many wonder why such a promising young artist chose to study biology and philosophy instead of art at university. It was through her love for painting and drawing that she first came into contact with what the Nazis termed as ‘degenerate artists’ – those artists who refused to embrace the Nazi perception and terminology of art as seen by Hitler.
Sophie was a compulsive reader, developing a growing interest in philosophy and theology. Engrossing herself in such books became her way of escaping from the world of National Socialism and its preoccupation with hate and violence. She also enjoyed reading the poetical works of Heinrich Heine, the 19th century German poet who was of Jewish origin. At one particular BDM meeting, the teacher asked the girls to suggest some suitable literature for home reading. Sophie, quite innocently replied that Heine was an excellent choice of reading. The BDM teacher and some of the other girls were appalled by Sophie’s improper choice of selecting the work of a Jew. Sophie remained defiant, saying, ‘The person who doesn’t know Heine doesn’t know German literature.’
Aged nineteen in the spring of 1940, and with the Second World War still in its infancy, Sophie graduated from secondary school. The subject of her essay was titled The Hand that Moved the Cradle, Moved the World.
She was very fond of children and she became a Kindergarten teacher at the Frobel Institute in Ulm-Soflingen. Sophie had chosen this position as she had hoped that the authorities would recognize it as an alternative service to Reichsarbeitsdienst (National Labour Service), which was compulsory for all females, and a prerequisite to any university education. This was an error in judgement. From the spring of 1941 onwards, she had to enrol for six months’ auxiliary war service as a nursery teacher in Blumberg. The military-like regime of the Labour Service, or RADwf as it was known, only made her more determined to practise passive resistance and non-conformity. Her six months of service soon passed without any serious incident caused by her non-conformist attitude, though this had not gone unnoticed by the authorities and leaders of the RADwf.
In May 1942, at the age of twenty-one, Sophie eventually enrolled at the University of Munich to study for a degree in biology and philosophy. Her brother Hans was also at the university, studying medicine. It was here that he introduced her to his group of friends. This group later became more known for their political activities, though they had been drawn together initially by a shared love of art, music, literature, philosophy and theology. Sophie also enjoyed skiing in the snow-covered mountain ranges around Germany, and was also a fine swimmer. With her new group of university friends, she attended concerts, plays and lectures.
It was during her time in Munich that Sophie met artists, writers and philosophers. People like German publisher and writer Carl Muth and writer and cultural critic Theodor Haecker became important links to her concerns about the Christian faith. The one thing that became of prime importance to Sophie was the issue of how one should act under the rule of dictatorship.
During her summer vacation in 1942, Sophie had to do war service in a metallurgic plant in Ulm. The work was dirty and oily, involving basic manual duties on hand-operated, metal-pressing machines, as well as other laborious and monotonous tasks producing minor parts for military applications.
During the early summer of 1942, Sophie had become involved in the production and distribution of a series of political leaflets of the ‘White Rose’, the name given to their student resistance movement. It is also interesting to point out that the White Rose may have been the only resistance group to have mentioned the mass murder of European Jews.
Sophie, Hans, and the other students enjoyed the support of philosophy lecturer Kurt Huber in their endeavours. The resistance fighter was already under suspicion, so the Nazis had been watching him closely, trying to gauge his political activities. Huber was much older than the student group. Whilst he was unable to lead them, he gave them much moral and material guidance, editing the last two of the six leaflets and handbills produced by the students.
Sophie and her friends shunned violence as a means of protesting against government, aiming to change the way that people viewed Nazism and its militaristic ideal through non-violent, or passive, opposition. The movement was given a studio owned by an architect as a meeting place and where they could work on their leaflets. They had also managed to acquire a typewriter and a small printing machine. Sophie was not a part of the early organization, but joined and contributed in the later stages.
The first four fliers produced by the White Rose were issued in quick succession, appearing in June and July of 1942. The authors of these were mainly Hans Scholl, Alexander Schmorell and Christoph Probst. Apart from Huber, Christoph was the only member of the group who was married. The 23-year-old Huber had two young children. His wife was expecting their third when Huber was arrested and executed, so he never saw the child.
The first of the leaflets distributed by the White Rose are striking in their content, reflecting the political maturity of its young authors. The first leaflet states, ‘Nothing is less worthy of a cultivated people than to allow itself to be governed by a clique of irresponsible bandits of dark ambition without resistance.’ These are examples of the type of phrases used in the leaflets to address non-violent direct action such as sabotage of the weapons and ammunition industry. They are highly critical of the non-Christian nature of the war:
‘We are all guilty.’ ‘We will not be silenced.’ ‘We are your bad conscience.’ ‘The White Rose will not leave you in peace.’
The group constantly worked in fear of betrayal or discovery by the Gestapo, but they were driven by the desire to fight National Socialism and the spectre of Adolf Hitler. Sophie also feared greatly for her family, wondering what might happen to them if her activities were discovered. Each member of the White Rose had his or her own personal fears, but the group persisted in their goal.
The White Rose temporarily scaled down its covert activities in the summer of 1942, as Hans Scholl, Willi and Alexander were ordered to the Russian Front. They returned to Munich that October.
For the first time, Hans Scholl, during his service on the Russian Front, had witnessed the ill treatment meted out to Jews and Russian prisoners of war. There was one occasion when Hans gave his tin of tobacco to an old man and his meagre army rations to a little girl. The little girl understandably threw the rations back at Hans, but he very calmly picked them up. He then picked a daisy and carefully placed it on top of the rations, before putting them at the girl’s feet. She momentarily stood gazing at him with her huge brown eyes, before kneeling to pick up the rations. She carefully took the daisy and placed it in her hair. It was the moment that changed Hans’s life. The scene of that little girl putting the flower in her hair haunted him afterwards, fuelling his determination to oppose what Hitler was doing, not only to his own country, but also Europe in general.
When the group returned to their fulltime mission of opposing the Nazis, they did so with an absolute vengeance. They had managed to meet with a relative of a member of the Red Orchestra, to whom they expressed a desire to make contact with the main resistance movement in the capital, Berlin. This aim, however, was never achieved.
Sophie, having listened to her brother Hans’s experiences on the Russian Front, had built up even more contempt for Hitler. A school friend once confided to Sophie: ‘If I had a pistol and I were to meet Hitler here in the street, I’d shoot him down. If men can’t manage it, then a woman should.’
Sophie replied, ‘Yes, but then he would be replaced by Himmler, and after Himmler there would be another.’
On 13 January, an interesting incident occurred at the Munich University while it was celebrating its 470th anniversary. The district Nazi Gauleiter of the city, Paul Giesler, gave a speech in which he insulted the girl students by telling them: ‘It was better that they get on with giving the Führer a child than wasting time on books.’
He then insulted them further by even offering some of his men to oblige this cause. Several girls immediately left the assembly hall in disgust at the statement, but they were arrested at the exit. A disturbance broke out in which the Nazi student leader was dragged from his podium and beaten senseless, before being declared a hostage as he was against the release of the girls. The Nazi authorities soon telephoned the police, who arrived very quickly on the scene to break up the trouble. This was the first protest against the Nazis to have been held by students in Munich. It forced the Gestapo to increase its efforts in tracing the whereabouts of the White Rose organization.
Sophie knew that time was running out. She became nervous, but her thinking was never far from that of resistance. She expressed a need to write anti-Nazi graffiti on walls, stating, ‘You’d need to use something that was very hard to get off, something like bitumous paint.’
The next morning, Hans, Sophie and Elisabeth Scholl went to the university to attend a lecture by Huber. Near the entrance, someone had inscribed the word ‘FREEDOM’ in huge lettering on a wall.
One of the older students stepped forward and asked, ‘What bastard did that?’
A group of Russian female labourers were given the task of cleaning the word from the wall, prompting Sophie to remark, ‘They will have a hard job, that’s bitumous paint.’
Hans Scholl was smiling to himself as Sophie said these words, but they had also been picked up by those students who supported the Nazis.
The turning point came in 1943, when Sophie had contributed to the writing and production, and the distribution of various fliers and handbills around Cologne, Stuttgart, Berlin and Vienna. The authorities had been alerted and they began to search for the authors of the circulated material. The Gestapo assumed that the authors of the material were from the Munich student set. One of the pieces of literature called for the National Socialist regime to establish a ‘New Mental Europe’. This particular leaflet was reprinted in England and was dropped by RAF Bomber Command aircraft over Germany. Additional excerpts were read out over the BBC Sender Radio. The subversive material was becoming a serious threat.
On 18 February 1943, Sophie and her brother Hans distributed over 1,700 leaflets on their Munich University campus. This was the sixth leaflet that the White Rose movement had produced. Sophie and Hans ran inside the university at around 10.00am, spreading their latest leaflet everywhere they could until they almost ran out. As they came out of the main building, they stopped before deciding to run back in to distribute the remaining leaflets. This they managed to do just in time.
However, the Scholls had been seen – this was now the beginning of the end. The caretaker at the university, Jakob Schmidt, raced towards them. He caught them on the stairway, shouting, ‘You are under arrest!’ Sophie and her brother remained quiet and calm as they were taken first to the bursar, and from there to the SS Oberführer, Dr Walter Wrist, a lecturer in Aryan language and culture.
The Scholls were then taken in handcuffs to the Gestapo headquarters
. Christoph Probst, another member of the White Rose, was arrested the following day. He faced the same charges as Sophie and Hans. Over the following days, more members of the movement were arrested.
Sophie and Hans knew that they would now have to pay a very high price for denouncing the National Socialist regime and their resistance movement’s written attacks on Hitler. Shortly before her death, Sophie said, ‘So many people have died for this regime that it’s about time that someone died against it.’
The White Rose had certainly caused considerable embarrassment to the National Socialist regime. They had bloodied the nose of the dictatorship in a way that very few had done so far, or had ever dared to do.
There was to be no torture carried out on the Scholls. Nevertheless, over a four-day period they underwent intensive interrogation at Gestapo headquarters at Wittelsbach Palace in Munich. Otle Aicher and Traute Lafrenz broke the terrible news to the parents, Robert and Magdalene Scholl. Nothing could be done to secure their release.
It was very obvious as to what the fate of Sophie and Hans would be. The fact that the monster known as ‘The Hanging Judge’, Roland Freisler, was given the ‘pleasure’ of conducting their court trial had confirmed the fears of most.
Nazi judge Freisler was an intimidating, raging bully, who could only ever perform such over-theatrical behaviour in his court under the notion that those who appeared before him in court had no way of harming him. In every respect, Freisler represented Nazi low life in its most virulent form, which explained why Hitler had insisted that Freisler travel from Berlin to Munich especially to preside over the case against the ‘criminals’. There was absolutely no way that Sophie, Hans or Christoph would receive a fair hearing. As was the case with all Nazi political trials, the proceedings were generally concluded well in advance, depending on the seriousness of the crime committed against the Reich or its Führer.