An Honourable Defeat (27 page)

The group had no wish to throw bombs, or to cause any injury to human life. They wanted to influence people’s minds against Nazism and militarism. Already a sympathetic architect had lent them his studio in a rear courtyard for their clandestine activities, and the relatively well-off Schmorell had been able to buy a typewriter and a duplicating machine. They called their group the ‘White Rose’. Sophie was not brought into it initially, but she had a shrewd idea of what her brother was up to from early on. She would find books in his rooms — which smelt of jasmine and cigarettes — with significant passages marked.

The choice of the name ‘White Rose’ is not easily explained. The rose as a symbol of secrecy might have occurred to them, and ‘white’ might have reflected the fact that their leaflets were not inspired by any colour of political thought, but by broad humanism.
[73]
It’s also possible that the name was taken from B. Traven’s eponymous novel, in which a Mexican farmer fights a tyrannical oil company. Whatever the reason, the symbol is still a powerful one in Germany.

The first four leaflets of the White Rose appeared in quick succession in June and July 1942. They were written jointly by Hans Scholl with Alexander Schmorell and Christoph Probst, who was the only married member of the group apart from Huber and who was already, at twenty-three, the father of two children (a third, whom he would never see, was born after his arrest).

The first leaflet begins uncompromisingly: ‘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.’ The four issues, each covering two sides of the paper, draw on Goethe, Schiller and Aristotle, among others, to make their point, which is contained effectively in the sentence quoted. They refer to the murder of Jews in Poland, encourage the idea of sabotage in the armaments industry, and criticise the anti-Christian and anti-social 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!’

Sophie soon joined. Fear for the safety of her family was overridden by her desire to do something to fight Hitler. It was hard for them all: hard to swim against the current, and harder still to wish defeat upon their own country. Worst of all was the isolation in which they worked.

Tirelessly the group distributed the leaflets by the suitcaseload throughout towns in southern Germany, either travelling with them (a very dangerous undertaking) and delivering them by hand at night, or using the mail. They were so successful that the movement spread, notably to Hamburg, where a branch of the White Rose was set up which survived its originator.

The White Rose went into temporary abeyance during the summer of 1942 as Hans, Willi and Alexander were ordered to the Russian Front, but they returned to Munich in October. The period had been of special significance to Schmorell. His mother, whom he had lost in infancy, was Russian. Meanwhile Sophie had spent the vacation working in an arms factory, and Robert Scholl had been in a Gestapo prison.

Hans had seen the maltreatment of Jews and Russian prisoners at first hand. One day he gave his tobacco to an old man, and his iron rations to a girl. The girl had thrown the rations back at him, but he had picked them up, plucked a daisy, placed it on the pile of rations, and laid them at her feet. After a moment’s hesitation, she had accepted them, and put the flower in her hair.

The group returned from the Front more determined than ever to carry on the work of Resistance, and to make the White Rose into a permanent Resistance cell. Hans and Alexander even managed to arrange a meeting with Falk Harnack, the younger brother of Arvid Harnack of the Red Orchestra, with the intention of making contact with the main Resistance in Berlin, though death was to prevent this ever happening. In the meantime, postage and paper cost money. Fritz Hartnagel gave Sophie 1000 Reichsmark, for what she told him was ‘a good purpose’. A generous source of support was the Stuttgart tax consultant Eugen Grimminger, who was married to a Jewess and had looked after Robert Scholl’s business while he was in prison. A schoolfriend of Sophie remembers a meeting in Stuttgart in December 1942, when she told her, ‘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.’ She replied, ‘But then he’d be replaced by Himmler, and after Himmler, another.’ Sophie retorted: ‘One’s got to do something to get rid of the guilt.’

They bought a new, less noisy, duplicating machine. On trains, they took suitcases full of leaflets. If the police searched the train, they would leave the suitcase on the rack and hide in the lavatory, or spend the journey in another compartment. They became used to living on their nerves, but they never considered that they had a choice. Sophie and Hans took adjoining rooms in Franz-Josef-Strasse 13. In January 1943 a new White Rose leaflet appeared, this time written in a more popular style. Several thousand copies were made. Addresses were painstakingly copied out of telephone directories. The conspirators had to ensure that the Gestapo could not trace the source to Munich. Once again by train journeys, the group had to run the police gauntlet and post their leaflets from neighbouring towns.

On 13 January, to mark the 470th anniversary of the university, the Nazi
Gauleiter
— District Leader — of the city, Paul Giesler, gave a speech in the course of which he told the female students that it would be better for them to get on with giving the Führer a child than wasting time on books; he even offered to put his henchmen at their service. Several girls immediately left the hall in protest, only to be arrested at the exit. This led to a demonstration, in the course of which the Nazi Student Leader was dragged from the podium, beaten up, and declared a hostage against the release of the girls. The Nazis telephoned the police, who promptly arrived and broke up the meeting. This was the first student demonstration against the Nazis in Munich, and it stimulated the Gestapo to redouble its efforts to find the originators of the White Rose.

Elisabeth Scholl spent a week at the end of January and the beginning of February with her brother and sister in Munich. She found a Russian blouse in a wardrobe and Sophie told her that Alexander liked to put it on when he went to visit the Russian forced-labourers in their barracks. Christoph Probst dropped in on his way between postings during a period of military duty and, though he only stopped for an hour and a half, Elisabeth was struck by the fact that he changed into civilian clothes. On 3 February news of the defeat at Stalingrad (where Fritz Hartnagel was fighting) came through on the radio. One evening soon after, Alexander and Hans said they were going over to the Women’s Hospital. Later on Willi Graf arrived and when Elisabeth told him where his friends were, he laughed and said they would hardly go there without him. All that evening Sophie was nervous, and kept talking about the need to write anti-Nazi graffiti on walls. ‘You’d need to use something that was hard to get off,’ she said, ‘like bitumous paint.’

The following morning Hans, Sophie and Elisabeth went to the university to attend a lecture by Huber on Leibniz. On a wall by the entrance the word ‘Freedom’ had been written in huge letters. ‘What bastard did that?’ snarled an older student. A large group of people were watching a handful of Russian women labourers trying to clean it off. ‘They’ll have a hard job,’ said Sophie. ‘That’s bitumous paint.’ Another friend, Traute Lafrenz, who was one of the leaders of the Hamburg White Rose, and now works as a doctor in Illinois, was in Munich too that day and saw Hans Scholl. ‘I remember he was smiling to himself. Some outraged student or other came up to him and said, “Have you seen what’s happened?” “No,” said Hans. “What?” But his smile broadened. From that moment on I began to be terribly afraid for him.’

The significance of the defeat at Stalingrad, in whatever light Goebbels presented it, could not be concealed from the German people, and the group around Hans Scholl realised that they should follow up with another leaflet immediately. This, the last from the White Rose, was quickly prepared and addressed to their ‘Fellow Students’. It was more strongly and directly expressed than any of its predecessors.

The day of reckoning is come, the reckoning of German youth with the most appalling tyranny that our people has ever endured. In the name of the entire German people we demand from Adolf Hitler the return of our personal freedom, the most valuable possession of the Germans...

Hans and Sophie decided to distribute it in the university personally.

On Thursday 18 February 1943 the weather was springlike. They hurried to the university at 10a.m. before the first morning lectures were over, carrying copies of the new leaflet in a small suitcase. They hurried to spread them wherever they could — on windowsills, shelves, the tops of walls — until their supply was almost exhausted.

They had already left the main building when they decided to go back and get rid of the rest. They ran up the main staircase of the university’s central hall and emptied the remaining contents of the case from a parapet into the courtyard. They were just in time. Immediately afterwards the doors of the lecture halls opened and students poured out. But the Scholls had been seen. The university’s caretaker, Jakob Schmid, charged towards them as they raced back down the staircase, seized them each by the arm and bellowed, ‘You’re under arrest!’

Both the young people stayed calm. They remained quiet and dignified as they were taken first to the bursar and then to the rector, SS Oberführer Dr Walter Wüst, lecturer in Aryan language and culture. The doors of the university were sealed and all the students remaining inside had to assemble in the courtyard. Those who had picked up leaflets had to surrender them. The Scholls were taken to Gestapo Headquarters in handcuffs. Secret police went immediately to the rooms at Franz-Josef-Strasse, where they found several hundred new red 8-pfennig stamps. Very soon afterwards, the Gestapo was on the trail of the rest of the group, though the Scholls betrayed no one. Christoph Probst was arrested the following day and the others soon after.

The Scholls had known the risk that they were running. Sophie had even said shortly before: ‘So many people have already died for this regime that it’s time someone died against it.’ There had been plenty of indications that the Gestapo investigation had been getting closer to them every day. They failed to receive a warning at the eleventh hour: the previous day, 17 February, Otl Aicher, who had been wounded on active service, was staying with Carl Muth. He was in Munich with the intention of seeing Hans and Sophie, but before he could make contact he received an urgent coded message from Ulm by telephone, to the effect that Hans should be told personally that the ‘book called
Totalitarian
State
and
Utopia
was out of print’. He had rung Hans and told him that he had important news. They made a date for the following day — 18 February — at 11 a.m. But when Aicher reached Franz-Josef-Strasse, it was too late. The Gestapo were already there, and he, too, was arrested — luckily to be released soon afterwards.

Hans and Sophie were not tortured, but they were interrogated intensively for four days in Gestapo Headquarters at Wittelsbach Palace in Munich. Otl Aicher and Traute Lafrenz took the bad news to their parents, who tried to see if anything could be done to secure their release. It was in vain. Throughout their ordeal, the brother and sister, who each shared cells with one other political prisoner of their own sex, remained calm and fatalistic. Neither of them was broken by the experience. The trial was set for 22 February. Roland Freisler, Hitler’s hanging judge, flew down from Berlin specially to preside. This was an indication of the importance the Nazi leadership considered the White Rose to have. The war was lost; the Allies were already bombing Munich; but protestors still had to be smashed.

The hearing started at 9a.m. and lasted until 4p.m. It was a closed trial, and those without passes, including Hans’s and Sophie’s parents, were not admitted, though Robert was able to force an entrance briefly. The Scholls were tried together with Christoph Probst. None of them flinched under the sarcastic, hectoring onslaught of the judge. The verdict was a foregone conclusion: death by the guillotine. They were taken from the court to Stadelheim Prison immediately after judgement had been passed.

By a miracle the parents had a last opportunity to see their children. They saw Hans first. Robert embraced him saying, ‘You will go down in history. There is another justice than this.’ Hans asked them to say farewell to his friends, and only when he mentioned one name very special to him did he weep, bowing his head so that no one should see. Sophie, when her turn came, accepted some little cakes that her brother had refused, saying, ‘Lovely. I didn’t get anything to eat at lunchtime.’ She looked wonderful, fresh and full of life. Her mother said, ‘I’ll never see you come through the door again.’ ‘Oh mother,’ she answered, ‘after all, it’s only a few years’ more life I’ll miss.’ She was pleased and proud that they had betrayed no one, that they had taken all the responsibility on themselves. Her main concern was that her mother should be able to withstand the deaths of two children at the same time. But, for herself, she was completely composed.

The parents left and returned to Ulm, thinking that something might still be done to help — at least to get the sentence commuted. But in the Nazi State, punishment normally followed sentence with terrifying speed. By 6p.m. Sophie and Hans were dead.

The following day, Inge Scholl was able to visit the flat in Franz-Josef-Strasse and there she found Sophie’s diary, which had been overlooked by the Gestapo. Inge saw it as a gift from heaven. The family, in accordance with Nazi custom, was placed under arrest for being related to the malefactors. Kurt Huber, Willi Graf and Alexander Schmorell, who were arrested later, were sentenced to death on 19 April.