The White Rose is the name of the resistance group in Germany that carried out a series of risky actions against the Nazi regime in 1942-1943. It cost them their lives. To understand their courage, it is important to pay attention to two factors. The first is the immense enthusiasm that surrounded Adolf Hitler during his first years in power. The second factor is Nazi terror. Of the peoples of Europe, the German people were the first to be affected by Nazi terror. Murder, beatings, dismissal, indoctrination were widely used means. If you consider how many people in contemporary Western societies accept an increasingly narrow corridor of opinion, how many remain silent or adapt to political correctness without the slightest risk of losing their lives or health, you are not surprised by the uniformity in the Third Reich.
In addition, there is a third factor, the Nazis' skill as leaders of a mass movement. Above all, they were very skilled youth leaders. They took up the working methods of the German youth movement. For us, the most famous ones are from the film Sound of Music: singing, music, dancing, nature, freedom from everything conventional. The most famous in The White Rose – Hans and Sophie Scholl – were also drawn into this. But it soon became clear that the Hitler Youth and the Bund Deutscher Mädel were something else. There was no room for the freedom and individualism that had been the hallmark of the youth movement. When Hans Scholl wanted to let his group have its own banner, there was a major conflict. It became clear to Hans what it was all about. This was not about joy of life, idealism and community, this was about raising soldiers for Hitler's armies. The Scholl siblings' parents had realized this very early on. Their father, who was a lawyer and mayor, said: "Don't believe them, they are wolves and tamers and they abuse the German people terribly." That time the young people in the family did not listen. A few years later it began to become clear that the conflict over the youth group's pennant had more to say. Now they were adults. Several of the young men in their circle of acquaintances were called up for military service on the Eastern Front and there experienced the merciless terror against the civilian population. In the autumn of 1942, the previous series of triumphs was replaced by constant setbacks. The worst was Stalingrad, where over 300.000 German soldiers perished.
At the same time, repression in the homeland increased. Insults, corruption and abuse of power were rampant. Now the Scholl siblings and their comrades realized that something had to be done. Among the comrades were Alexander Schmorell and Christoph Probst. Their weapons in the resistance were leaflets, which they produced with primitive printing equipment. They managed to print and distribute a total of six leaflets. The production itself was risky. Buying large quantities of copy paper was a risk. Distributing them was an even greater risk. Many were sent by post, but then it was necessary to buy envelopes and stamps in large quantities. It was necessary to seek out different places to buy and not to buy so often that it aroused suspicion. Insults and fear were massive counter-forces. Soon the leaflets came to the attention of the Gestapo. However, the secret police never managed to infiltrate the group, nor to track it down. The sixth leaflet arrived in England by unknown means and was distributed in tens of thousands of copies from British aircraft.
Only slowly and cautiously did the White Rose expand its circles. The most important new member was Professor Kurt Huber. He was a professor of musicology and psychology at the University of Munich and also lectured in philosophy. He made important contributions to the later leaflets.
What did the leaflets contain? They were primarily appeals to resistance. The first leaflet begins with the words: “Nothing is more unworthy of a civilized people than to allow themselves to be ruled without resistance by a ruling clique, devoted to obscure impulses.” The White Rose addresses a fundamental notion in Nazism, “the dubious legality of history.” Nazism was completely characterized by Darwin’s view of reality. It meant that existence is an incessant antagonism, a struggle between the races, in which the best-equipped race will necessarily defeat and annihilate the weaker races. It was imagined that the “wheel of history” rolls relentlessly in one and the same direction, and that the individual cannot intervene in it. Everything is fated. Determinism is total. But – and this is important – through this fatedness, evolution constantly pushes forward.
In the second leaflet, the White Rose quotes a quote from Hitler: “No one can imagine how one must deceive a people in order to govern them.” Lying was one of Hitler’s most important tricks. For him, it was a matter of lying a lot, lying big, ignoring all objections and repeating the lie in an ever louder voice. The Nazis claimed to have a scientifically based “worldview,” and many of the scientists of the time also gladly contributed to that image. But basically, it was all lies, constantly repeated lies.
The third leaflet speaks directly to our own situation. How often have we heard: “What kind of society do we want? We must create a just society!” The idea that one can “create” a society is the basis of all utopias, even the Nazi one. The White Rose writes: “A state cannot be constructed purely theoretically, but must grow, mature, like the individual human being. But one must not forget that at the beginning of every culture there is an already existing, preparatory form for a state. The family is as old as man himself.”
There were Christians who were deceived by Hitler's talk of God, but it was not the Father of Jesus Christ that he was talking about, it was – in his opinion – the uncontrollable Fate. In the fourth leaflet, Vita Rosen writes: “When Hitler mentions the name of the Almighty in the most shameful way, he means the power of the Evil One.” This brings us to an even deeper layer of analysis. Nazism is not only a deceptive ideology, it is also demonic: “Anyone who still today doubts the real existence of demonic powers has not understood the metaphysical background of this war.”
The fifth leaflet is a prediction about the new Germany, the Federal Republic: “The future Germany can only be federalist.” When this leaflet was written, Stalingrad was already lost. Defeat was on the way: “Divest yourselves in time from everything that concerns National Socialism!”
The sixth leaflet ends with the words: “Our people are facing the break from the National Socialist subjugation of Europe, facing the new breakthrough of freedom and dignity.”
The six leaflets cost the lives of five young people. Kurt Huber was also arrested and executed. But with their courage, their truth and their sacrifice, they laid the foundation for the new Germany.
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Sophie Scholl has become a symbol of the resistance to Hitler and an important figure for youth in Germany and around the world. Streets and schools are named after her, stamps have been made in her honor, there are books and films. Monuments have been erected to her.
By all accounts, Sophie brought little of the Christian faith, which was to become an important driving force in her short life, from her parental home. Her mother Magdalene had been a deaconess. During the First World War she worked in a hospital, where she met the pacifist Robert Scholl, who was ten years her junior. He was practically irreligious but had strong ideals, and he seems to have influenced the home. After the war he became a lawyer.
When Hitler seized power in 1933, the five Scholl children became strongly involved in the Nazi youth movements, to the chagrin of their parents. The Nazis were skilled youth leaders who understood how to use the Scout movement's working methods, giving them the character of liberation and break-up and an expression of togetherness and community. At the same time, the forms were militarized in a way that made the liberally raised Scholl children and young people feel increasingly alien. They had little or no insight into the demonic features of Nazism. However, it was obvious that it was alien to Christian faith and Christian life.
After graduating from high school, Sophie trained as a preschool teacher and was then called up for the Labor Service, the female equivalent of conscription. During this time, she got to know Otl Aicher, a friend of her sister Inge. He was a thoughtful Catholic who firmly distanced himself from Nazism. Because he had refused to join the Hitler Youth, he did not receive a high school diploma. At the same time, Sophie's brother Hans worked on organizing Carl Muth's library. He was a significant cultural figure and editor of the important magazine Hochland until it was banned in 1941. Carl Muth was also a Roman Catholic. For the Scholl siblings, who came from a religiously irreligious home, these were encounters with a thoughtful, convinced faith that made a deep impression. Hans put important books in Sophie's hands: Augustine, John Henry Newman, Paul Claudel. This became a gateway into a new world. While the other young women in the Labor Service barracks talked about this and that, Sophie read the Bible and heavy theological books. To a friend she wrote: “In my simple joy over all beauty, something great and unknown has penetrated, a hint of a Creator. Everything created and pure praises Him with all its beauty. Therefore, it is only man who can be repulsive, because he has withdrawn from this song of praise.” Sophie’s diary often takes on the character of a conversation with God. When she thinks of God, she does so in the form of prayer, as Augustine once did. She writes: “I have no, no idea about God. I have no relationship with him. Only this that I know. And then nothing helps me but to pray, to pray.” She also writes: “I have noticed that when I love someone very much, I can do nothing better than to enclose him in my prayer.”
Sophie was engaged to a young career officer, Friedrich Hartnagel. And the more she distanced herself from Nazism, the more problematic this relationship became. After her time in the Labor Service, she had come to the University of Munich, where her brothers were already studying. They belonged to a circle of about sixty students and professors, who could discuss politics with complete confidence in each other. The Gestapo never managed to infiltrate this circle, and it was in it that the resistance group White Rose emerged. Some of the medical students in the group had been drafted to the Eastern Front and had seen shocking evidence of Nazi abuses.
Through their mother, the Scholl siblings also learned about a different reality. In 1939, Hitler had ordered in a secret decree that all incurably ill and disabled people in Germany should be killed. The care of such patients was largely the responsibility of the Christian diaconate, and through her friends among the deaconesses, Magdalena Scholl received stories about how autistic children, among others, were killed. When the dreaded car arrived at one of the nursing homes, the children had asked: “Where are we going?” A desperate deaconess replied: “Straight into heaven.”
The Scholl siblings and their comrades in Munich increasingly felt an inner compulsion to do something concrete. This became the White Rose and the six leaflets. Sophie passionately committed herself to distributing them – they were added to telephone directories at stations, they were mailed to strangers, they were “forgotten” on trains. Now the Gestapo began to take notice of the activities, especially after anti-Hitler graffiti began to appear on the walls of houses. But even then they were unable to infiltrate the White Rose. The members of the group naturally became very close to each other, and Sophie felt attracted to one of them, Alexander Schmorell. But the engagement to Friedrich Hartnagel held. He had no personal faith, but Sophie wrote to him: “We must pray, and pray for each other. If you were here, I would clasp my hands with you. We are poor children and weak sinners.” After Sophie’s execution, he tried in vain to be demoted to private soldier. His experiences on the Eastern Front – including Stalingrad – made him an opponent of the regime. After his death in 2001, his correspondence with Sophie was published.
Sophie had an aversion to the superficial and banal everyday life. It was easy to escape into the very near to escape the turbulence of war – and the responsibility. She prays: “If you find in me the love of the beauty of life, tear me away from it. I myself am too weak.” Sophie was not content with having faith, she wanted to feel and notice the reality of faith. She prays: “Better unbearable pain than a life of chance, better burning thirst than emptiness.” She was led into a spiritual battle: “I am so far from God that I do not even feel his presence in prayer. In this situation, only prayer helps, and even if I feel a thousand demons raging inside me, I will hold on to the lifeline that God in Jesus Christ has thrown out, even when I no longer feel it in my stiff hands.”
On February 18, 1943, Hans and Sophie Scholl were arrested on the basis of a report from a university janitor. The policeman who interrogated them was touched by their strong faith and complete selflessness. They took full responsibility for the activities of the White Rose. Above all, they were anxious to protect the member of the group who already had a family and children. Four days after their arrest, they were sentenced to death and executed by guillotine.
In one of the prayers found in Sophie's diary, she prays: "My soul is like dry sand, when I try to pray to you. It knows nothing but its own barrenness. My God, transform this soil of the soul into good soil, so that your seed is not sown in vain. Let at least a longing for you grow there..."