Because of something I wrote about here yesterday, I spent much of the day thereafter re-reading for the hundredth time many of the excerpts from the letters and diary entries of Sophie Scholl. And because of something I coincidentally read today, I now want to write a bit about Sophie Scholl. I type her name knowing full well that many readers will not know who she is. Good, because then I get to introduce her in the way I see fit.
Sophie Scholl was a remarkable girl who developed into a remarkable young lady and who might even have become a remarkable woman had her life not been tragically cut short a few months before her 22nd birthday. I say “might even have” instead of “would have” because we tend to learn about such people — who by all accounts seem fairly normal to their contemporaries — only via extraordinary circumstances. Were it not for the fact that she lived — and died — when she did, she may never have become so remarkable that we would know anything at all about her today.
Nevertheless when reading her letters and diary entries it is difficult to avoid becoming a real fan of hers and thinking, “she would have been something.” Today we are simply not accustomed to nineteen year-olds writing letters containing passages such as the following:
There are two roses on my bedside table. Strings of tiny beads have formed on the stems and the foliage, which hangs down into the water. What a pure and beautiful sight, and what chill indifference it conveys. To think that it exists. That trees simply go on growing, and grain and flowers, and that hydrogen and oxygen have combined to form such wonderful, tepid summer raindrops. There are times when this comes home to me with such force that I’m absolutely filled with it and have no room left for a single thought. All this exists, although human beings behave so inhumanly, not to say bestially, in the midst of creation. That is a great blessing it itself.
Nor are we accustomed to reading such words from a twenty year-old:
People shouldn’t be so ambivalent themselves just because everything else is, yet one constantly meets the view that, because we’ve been born into a world of contradictions, we must defer to it… If it were so, how could one expect fate to make a just cause prevail when so few people unwaveringly sacrifice themselves for a just cause?
Or…
At nights, while the others are cracking jokes,… I read St. Augustine. I have to read slowly, it’s so hard to concentrate, but read I do, even when I don’t feel like it. I also read some of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain in the lunch break today… I’m trying to remain as impervious as possible to current influences. Not the ideological and political kind, which have ceased to have the slightest effect on me, but the atmospheric influences.
Or from twenty-one year-olds…
I’ve just been playing the Trout Quintet on the phonograph. Listening to the andantino makes me want to be a trout myself. You can’t help rejoicing and laughing, however moved or sad you feel, when you see the springtime clouds in the sky and the budding branches sway, stirred by the wind, the bright young sunlight. I’m so much looking forward to the spring again. In that piece of Schubert’s you can positively feel and smell the breezes and scents and hear the birds and the whole of creation cry out for joy. And when the piano repeats the theme like cool, clear sparkling water — oh, it’s sheer enchantment. Let me hear from you soon.
It’s beautiful writing, yes, but perhaps too dreamy, too sentimental, too poetic? Does it simply reflect the bourgeois sensibilities of a well-educated girl who apparently had lots of time on her hands and therefore probably came from a privileged class of people? Precocious? All talk, no substance? No, Sophie Scholl was also a very active young lady, as I’ll soon show.
She was looking forward to spring in that, her last letter, but five days later she was dead. How exactly did she die? A man lifted her small body and placed it flat on a platform, and a blade from high above came crashing down and severed her twenty-one year-old head from her twenty-one year-old body. Yes, she died on the Guillotine, as did her brother and a close friend on that same day.
Her murderers are well-known to us: Die Geheime Staatspolizei, the Secret State Police, the Gestapo.
Sophie Scholl was a young lady both of words and of action. She was arrested with her brother Hans on February 18, 1943, one day after that final letter of hers cited above. Their friend Christoph Probst was arrested soon thereafter, and all three were murdered on the same day, February 22, 1943. The Gestapo, though they didn’t know precisely who their prey was, had been hunting them for some time, because leaflets from a group calling itself Die Weisse Rose, the White Rose, had been distributed on multiple occasions in Munich and other cities since the second-half of 1942. On February 18, 1943, Hans and Sophie Scholl were observed by a custodian of the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich as they quickly distributed leaflets inside an otherwise empty hall of the university. This “loyal” janitor, Jakob Schmied, raised the alarm, and the resistance movement called the White Rose came to an end.
[An Excerpt from the leaflet they were distributing:
A Call to All Germans!
...
Do you and your children want to suffer the same fate that befell the Jews? Do you want to be judged by the same standards as your traducers? Are we to be forever the nation which is hated and rejected by all mankind? No. Dissociate yourselves from National Socialist gangsterism. Prove by your deeds that you think otherwise. A new war of liberation is about to begin...]
How seriously the regime took their resistance is shown by the fact that they called in none other than Dr. Roland Freisler, the infamous chief judge of Hitler’s “People’s Court,” to preside over the kangaroo court. (Freisler was mercifully (for him) killed during air bombardments and therefore did not have to face Nuremberg.)
A prison guard later said,
The whole prison was impressed by them. That is why we risked bringing the three of them together once more — at the last moment before execution. … Then they were led off, the girl first. She went without the flicker of an eyelash. None of us understood how this was possible. The executioner said he had never seen anyone meet his end as she did.
The reaction in the Nazi newspapers was characteristically disgusting.
Typical outsiders, the condemned persons shamelessly committed offenses against the armed security of the nation and the will to fight of the German Volk by defacing houses with slogans attacking the state and by distributing treasonous leaflets. At this time of heroic struggle on the part of the German people, these despicable criminals deserve a speedy and dishonorable death.
But the words of another German — some would call him the greatest German writer since Goethe and Schiller — were quite different. Speaking over the Allies’ propaganda radio show “To the German Listeners” from his exile, Thomas Mann said,
Now the world is deeply moved by the events at the University of Munich… We now know about Hans Scholl, survivor of the Battle of Stalingrad, and his sister… about the leaflet which they had distributed and which contains words that go far to make up for many of the sins against the spirit of German freedom committed in these unhappy years at the German universities. Indeed, the susceptibility of German youth — the youth in particular — to the National Socialist revolution of lies was painful. Now their eyes are opened, and they put their young heads on the block for their insight and for the honor of Germany. They go to their death after telling the president of the court to his face, “Soon you will be standing here, where I now stand,” after bearing witness in the face of death that a new faith in freedom and honor is dawning. Good, splendid young people! You shall not have died in vain, you shall not be forgotten.
Mann went on to predict that the day would come when Germans would tear down the monuments erected by National Socialists and replace them with monuments to people such as the Scholls and their friends. He was right. Schools, monuments, streets… many things are named for the Scholls. And this year, the sixtieth anniversary of their execution, a monument to Sophie Scholl was erected at the place — Valhalla — where great Germans are memorialized. She is now one of only five women there.
Above one of the doors at the German Resistance Museum, Berlin. Photo by Bill Dawson, 2000.
Also in 1943, a German officer, while laying in the hospital after being seriously injured in North Africa, received several visits from friends and family. According to the officer’s biographer, during one of these visits he asked his visitors about the “White Rose”, the resistance group of whose fate he had recently learned. The topic interested him because he was in the process of making up his mind to commit himself to resistance against the regime, no easy decision for a German staff officer who had taken an oath of loyalty. After leaving the hospital he would become the most energetic of the resistors within the military and work tirelessly to sway other officers to his view. But as early as 1942 he said to other officers, after learning of atrocities in Poland and Russia, “They are shooting Jews in masses. These crimes must not be allowed to continue.” When he made up his mind that the only way forward was tyrannicide, many around him — many who otherwise supported him — expressed their shock. Some worried about religious implications, so to the catholic doubters he cited St. Thomas Aquinas’s views on the right to tyrannicide and to the protestant doubters he invoked Luther. He is known to have famously uttered that the generals have done nothing about Hitler, so now it falls to the colonels. He was himself a colonel.
This one-eyed, one-handed, three-fingered colonel, Claus von Stauffenberg, had double duty on July 20, 1944. In the early part of the day he was to fly from Berlin to Eastern Prussia and kill his host, Adolf Hitler, and in the latter part of the day he was to return to Berlin and lead a coup d’etat that would stretch outward from Berlin to Paris, to Vienna, to all of the lands occupied by the Germans. With his three fingers he had great difficulty preparing the fuses in his briefcase bomb. This difficulty may have made the difference, for it is believed he did not successfully prepare all of them. The bomb went off and he returned to Berlin, sure that it had succeeded. He found a mess in Berlin and a lot of wavering officers; news that the bomb had actually failed had already reached them. But Stauffenberg quickly took over and very nearly succeeded. He and several others were summarily executed by firing squad that evening: surely an honorable death.
Many of those who had wavered upon hearing that Hitler had not been killed — as if they could somehow undo what had already happened, as if they believed that the Gestapo would not figure out that they were also involved — sweated through the next several weeks and met their own ends in a much less-honorable way, hanging from piano wire at Ploetzensee. They were joined by plenty of others who had acted nobly from all over Germany and the occupied lands.
A small cemetary in Berlin. “Remembering July 20, 1944. Here were buried Claus von Stauffenberg, [etc.]… Their bodies were then taken to an unknown location.” Photo by Bill Dawson, 2000.
Street sign for Stauffenbergstrasse in Berlin, where the German Resistance museum is located. Photo by Bill Dawson, 2000.
Execution chamber at Ploetzensee Prison, Berlin, where many July 20 conspirators were later hanged. Photo by Bill Dawson, 2000.
Ralph Peters suggests of Stauffenberg and his fellow conspirators that “they weren’t fighting for high ideals. They were defending their real estate.” I suggest that Peters knows very little about Stauffenberg, and that he is, ironically, employing the same kind of simplistic slander as those whom he criticizes. It’s the disgusting mindlessness of anti-Americanism here in Europe that offends Peters, myself and many others and which makes us want to hit back. With this gargantuan post I simply mean to show that one can both express disgust and disapproval towards the mindlessness here in Europe and at the same time recognize that the condition is not entirely universal.
That was the real genesis of this post today: reading Peters’ comments, as linked to by Andrew Stuttaford at NRO. I just happened to read them a day after I was already writing and reading about German resisters.
[Update: It was silly of me not to provide a list of White Rose books when I first created this entry. So I've created a separate page just for that. It includes information about several books and the film "The White Rose".]
