Hans, Sophie, and Christoph

When Hans Scholl decided to join the Hitler Youth in 1932, his father was not happy. The Nazis, Robert had warned his children, “are wolves and wild beasts.”

Hitler Youth sang songs with lyrics such as “The rotten bones of the world are trembling before the coming war!” and “When Jewish blood spurts from the knife, then things will go all the better!”

The sole purpose was to prepare them for war—to produce unthinking automatons who would shed blood for the Fatherland.

“My system of education,” Hitler said,

is a harsh one. Weakness must be stamped out. The world will shrink in trepidation from the youngsters who grow up in my fortresses. A violent, masterful, dauntless, cruel younger generation—that is my aim. There must be nothing weak and tender about them. Its eyes must glow once more with the freedom and splendor of the beast of prey.

In 1933, Sophie followed in Hans’s footsteps and joined the League of German Girls.

They had both been swept up by the spirit of the time. It wasn’t long, however, before cracks in their enthusiasm began to show.

For Hans it was at the 1935 Nazi rally at Nuremberg, where he led a regiment of over a hundred boys.

Afterward, family and friends noticed a marked difference in his demeanor. It was as if all the fire in his eyes, all of the previous passion, had been extinguished.

What was supposed to have been a morale-boosting ceremony struck Hans as nothing more than an exercise in conformity, a cold-blooded execution of the individual.

Sophie was no less disturbed at what was happening around her. Especially bothersome was the treatment of Jews, many of whom she considered friends.

Increasingly, the siblings watched in horror as their people were being herded like sheep toward a cliff.

“The majority would march blindly off without a word,” Hans wrote after the Anschluss of 1938.

When the war began, Sophie wrote in her diary that she

cannot grasp that now human beings will continually be put in danger of their lives by other human beings. I can never grasp it, and I find it horrible. Don’t say it’s for the Fatherland.

LEAVING MUNICH

Can anything be more ridiculous than that a man should have the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of the water, and because his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have none with him?

– Hans Scholl

When Germany invaded France in May 1940, Hans was ordered to the front to serve as a medic. It was a short battle, and he was back home by the Fall.

Beginning in March 1941, Sophie had to do six months at a work camp for the Labor Service. “For Sophie it was terrible,” writes Jud Newborn and Anne Dumbach.

The girls wore uniforms and had ideological training sessions run by fanatic women leaders. The rooms in the castle were huge, cold, and damp—she was always cold—and the meals consisted mainly of boiled potatoes in their skin. Surrounded by young women of her age, she wrote in her letters that she never felt so alone in her life. The others obeyed, they submitted, they asked no questions; in their free time they talked about nothing but boys and sex, giggling interminably.

Following the work camp, she served another six months in a kindergarten attached to a munitions factory near the Swiss border.

By the time she returned to Munich in May 1942, Hans had already begun the activity that would cost them both their lives.

FORMING THE RESISTANCE

I’m sometimes tempted to regard mankind as a terrestrial skin disease. But only sometimes, when I’m very tired, and people who are worse than beasts loom large in my mind’s eye.

– Sophie Scholl

As soon as the war began, Hitler ordered that all Germans with physical and mental disabilities be euthanized. A precursor to the Holocaust, this policy exterminated as many as 300,000 “useless eaters” in gas chambers.

When news about this monstrous program began to leak, the Bishop of Münster, Clemens August von Galen, gave sermons denouncing it.

Transcripts of these fiery sermons were printed on pamphlets and dropped in mailboxes in and around Munich. One of them found its way to the Scholl house, and Hans was outraged when he read it.

After studying the words for a long time, his sister Inge later wrote, he lifted his head and said “We really ought to have a duplicating machine.”

These pamphlets not only convinced Hans that he needed to take action, they also showed him a method for doing so.

His friend and fellow medic, Alexander Schmorell, helped with the crucial first step by acquiring a duplicating machine and a typewriter.

Alex despised the Nazis as well, and was eager to give them a black eye. “What are we waiting for?” he would ask Hans. “Until the war is over and everybody points to us and says we tolerated such a regime without protest?”

During his time in the military, Alex had refused to take the oath of loyalty to Hitler. “If one wants to be the leader,” he charged,

one must be smarter, better, and at any rate not worse than those one leads. One’s character must be noble, even exceptional, and at any rate above average. Here, it is quite the opposite. Our supreme leaders—all of them—have facial expressions that remind one more of wild animals than of people.

Through Alex, Hans met Christoph Probst, with whom his fate would soon be tragically linked. A caring and conscientious man, Christoph was sickened by Nazism. “What has hate brought us?” he once asked in a rage.

Destruction, blood and death, and nothing either lasting or good. And what, by contrast, has love engendered? Upon love cultures have been built: cathedrals have risen up. Love is the bond between all men. Love makes all happiness possible.

Soon, they found another kindred spirit to bring into their inner circle: Willi Graf. Willi never trusted the Nazis. He kept a notebook of everyone in his neighborhood that joined the Hitler Youth—and crossed off their names.

Willi’s sister later wrote that he “worked himself up into a terrible rage against Hitler and Hitler’s murderous tyranny.” “You will see,” he told her, “something is going to happen!”

With the circle fast growing, it was time to act. The resistance movement, decided Hans, would be called the “White Rose.”

THE LEAFLETS

Even in the middle of the worst mess, it is up to individuals to reach their life goals and find happiness. This cannot be achieved by external accomplishments; only inner ennoblement.

– Christoph Probst

The White Rose collected hundreds of addresses, envelopes, and stamps—which was no easy task—and produced their first leaflet in mid-June 1942.

“Nothing is so unworthy,” the leaflet begins,

of a civilized nation as to allow itself to be ‘governed,’ without any opposition by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to its basest instincts. Who among us has any conception of the enormous shame that we and our children will feel when eventually the veil drops from our eyes and the most horrible of crimes—crimes that eclipse all atrocities throughout history—are exposed to the full light of day?

Copies of the leaflet were mailed to those with influence: teachers, professors, booksellers, clergymen. Others were distributed throughout universities, left in phone booths, and placed on the windshields of parked cars.

Sophie came across one at university, and when she read it, she knew exactly who the author was.

She went to Hans and demanded he let her join. I don’t care about the danger, she told him, you are not doing this without me.

From that day on, Sophie was all in.

The White Rose produced three more leaflets, in rapid-fire succession, and blanketed the city with them.

Hundreds of shocked citizens turned them over to the Gestapo, afraid if they didn’t, they would be arrested for even looking at them.

“We will not be silent,” the final line of the fourth leaflet reads. “We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace!”

BACK TO THE FRONT

Sometimes you can’t just go where favoring winds send you. Sometimes one must take a direction which isn’t that easy. You can’t allow yourself to be continually blown about.

– Willi Graf

In July, the Student Medical Company ordered Hans, Alex, and Willi to the Russian front, halting their operations.

Sophie met them at the train station and said her goodbyes, hoping they would all come back in one piece.

By the time they arrived, the war in the East had become a theater for the most brutal atrocities imaginable.

Hitler saw Slavs as subhuman, and told his generals they should forget about the rules of international law when dealing with them.

This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful, and unrelenting harshness. All officers will have to rid themselves of obsolete ideologies. I know that the necessity for such means of waging war is beyond the comprehension of you generals but . . . I insist absolutely that my orders be executed without contradiction.

After four long months, the students were sent back to Munich. Hans learned that his father, Robert Scholl, was in prison for calling Hitler a “scourge on mankind.”

The White Rose immediately resumed their activities, spending the next couple of months recruiting, expanding their network, raising funds, and linking with other resistance cells.

After enjoying the holidays, the members met back up in January and began working on the next phase of their campaign.

“It has become a mathematical certainty,” they wrote in the fifth leaflet,

that Hitler is leading the German people into an abyss. Hitler cannot win the war, only prolong it. The guilt of Hitler and his minions exceeds all measures. Retribution draws closer and closer. But what are the German people doing? They will not see and will not listen. Blindly they follow their seducers into ruin. ‘Victory at any price!’ is inscribed on their banner. ‘I will fight to the last man,’ says Hitler—but in the meantime the war has already been lost.

The first four leaflets had been printed by the hundreds. Now, they were printing them by the tens of thousands.

Day and night, they cranked on their duplicating machine, even as the city was being bombed all around them.

Copies spread through the underground like wildfire to Sweden, France, Britain, and even to the concentration camps in Poland, where inmates received a moment of encouragement—“there are still human beings in Germany!”

Resistance was ignited in Berlin, Hamberg, and every other major city in Germany.

Willi Graf, writes Peter Waage,

was able to increase his radius of activity. He set out on a five-day-long trip through the Rhineland, Saarbrucken, Freiburg, and Ulm with not only leaflets but also a duplication machine in his luggage. He was a mobile, subversive production unit all on his own.

Growing bolder, the students began covering the city in anti-Nazi graffiti. Slogans such as “Down with Hitler!” and “Freedom! Freedom!” now blared at millions of passerbys.

The regime was becoming increasingly worried and investing enormous resources into hunting down the culprits. A special task force was set up in Munich to work on the case.

The White Rose met regularly at a studio owned by Manfred Eickemeyer, an architect sympathetic to their cause.

Hans asked his philosophy professor, Dr. Kurt Huber, if he would like to join them in the studio. Their discussions ranged from literature to philosophy to politics.

One day, when discussing the current political climate, Professor Huber got so worked up he slammed his fist on the table.

“This government is no government!” he yelled. “It is a criminal regime! No one should feel any sense of duty to it!”

Following this outburst, Hans revealed the true purpose of their meetings and asked the professor for his support.

At first, Professor Huber was furious at what he heard. He declared that what they were doing was too risky and not enough. “If blood doesn’t flow,” he said, “it will not work!”

A few days later, after learning that 300,000 German soldiers had been slaughtered at Stalingrad, the professor had a change of heart. He sat down at his typewriter and furiously drafted what would become the sixth—and final—leaflet.

“The German people are in ferment,” he wrote.

Will we continue to entrust the fate of our armies to a dilettante? Do we want to sacrifice the rest of German youth to the base ambitions of a Party clique? No, never! The day of reckoning has come—the reckoning of German youth with the most abominable tyrant our people have ever been forced to endure!

While this leaflet was being prepared, Sophie went for a walk with her boyfriend, Fritz Hartnagel. He was a soldier and was returning to the front later that day.

Sensing what she had been up to, he turned to her and asked, “Do you know that this could cost you your head?”

“Yes,” Sophie replied.

It was the last time they saw each other.

THE ARREST

Nothing is more beautiful than the freedom to think for one’s self and to use one’s own will for self-reliance, assuming one is not afraid to do so.

– Alex Schmorell

Hans and Sophie entered the University of Munich just before noon on February 18th, 1943. Popping open a suitcase, they began pulling out stacks of leaflets and placing them on ledges, staircases, window sills, and in front of lecture hall doors.

They finished on the second floor just before class was let out and made a break for the exit. As they reached the top of the staircase, Sophie paused. She turned back and quickly shoved a pile over the ledge so they would rain down as students filed into the atrium.

Ducking through the crowd, the siblings froze as they heard a man yell, “You’re under arrest!” It was the custodian, Jakob Schmid, and he had seen Sophie’s stunt.

Schmid was a member of the Nazi party and a Gestapo informant, and now he was going to receive a cash reward that was larger than a year’s pay.

“You’re under arrest!” he repeated, dragging them to the chancellor’s office.

The staff locked the doors, and no student was allowed to leave until all of the leaflets had been collected.

Soon, the Gestapo arrived and took the Scholls into custody.

A rough draft of what was to be the seventh leaflet was in Hans’s coat pocket. When he attempted to rip it up, an agent saw him. The agent picked up the pieces and put them in an envelope.

The lead investigator, Robert Mohr, later said he was immediately struck by how calm the suspects were, “especially the girl.”

Hans and Sophie were interrogated for seventeen hours and denied everything.

Mohr was tempted to believe them, and was considering their release.

Once the results of the search came back, however, everything fell to pieces.

The Gestapo had uncovered a large cache of stamps in their room, the same as those used for mailing the leaflets.

They also found some letters written to Hans with handwriting identical to the draft found in his pocket. The letters were from Christoph Probst.

They would now be charged, and a third member would be joining them.

When evidence of their guilt was presented, Hans and Sophie reversed course. They attempted to put all of the blame on themselves, hoping to spare their friends.

“When I decided to make and spread the leaflets,” Hans told the investigator,

I was fully aware that my actions were directed against the existing state. I was fully and completely determined that I would act out of my innermost convictions and that this inner conviction was a higher calling than the oath of allegiance that I took as a soldier. I was completely clear that that was what I was doing and that I would likely lose my life as a result.

Sophie was no less defiant.

“I am now as before of the opinion,” she said, “that I have done the best I possibly could have done for my people. I am not sorry for my actions and will accept the consequences.”

On the day of their arrest, Joseph Goebbels gave his infamous “Total War” speech at the Sportpalast.

Framing the war as an existential battle against “International Jewry” and its Bolshevik hordes, the Propaganda Minister went on for close to two hours, whipping the nation into a frenzy.

Do you want total war? If necessary, do you want a war more total and radical than anything that we can even imagine today?

“Do you agree,” he bellowed, “that those who harm the war effort should lose their heads?”

THE FIRST TRIAL

How can we expect righteousness to prevail when so few people are willing to sacrifice themselves for a just cause?

– Sophie Scholl

They were to be tried in the People’s Court. Roland Freisler, the “hanging judge,” was flown in.

A rabid Nazi, Freisler was known for bullying defendants, screaming like a maniac, and summarily handing out death sentences by the thousands.

A reporter who had snuck into the courtroom, Leo Samberger, described the scene as follows:

The attitude of the accused made a deep impression—and likely not just on me. Here were people who were clearly committed to their ideals. The answers they gave to the sometimes shameless questions from the court’s foreman, who during the entire trial behaved shamefully more as an accuser than as judge, were calm, considered, clear, and brave.

As soon as Freisler sat at the bench, he launched into one of his hysterical tirades, seething, snarling, and berating the defendants.

“Somebody had to make a start!” Sophie interrupted, looking him dead in the eyes. “What we said and wrote is what many people are thinking. They just don’t dare say it out loud!”

Visibly rattled, Freisler choked out the verdict. All of them, he barked, would receive the death penalty, “for the protection of the German people and of the Reich!”

The entire process lasted no more than an hour. No witnesses were allowed to be called, no evidence was considered, and no jury was present.

“Soon, you will be standing where we stand now!” Hans shouted before they were taken away.

THE GUILLOTINE

Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go. But what does my death matter if by our acts thousands of people are alerted and stirred to action?

– Sophie Scholl

Later that same day, Hans, Sophie, and Christoph were guillotined in the basement of Stadelheim Prison.

Prior to execution, Hans carved a phrase that was a favorite of the Scholl family on his cell wall: “Hold steady in the face of despotism.”

All three of the condemned, the prison guards later testified, “bore themselves with marvelous bravery.”

“I did not know,” Christoph remarked, “that dying could be so easy.”

The executioner, Johann Reichhart, who had been responsible for the death of over 3000 people, said he never saw anyone “meet the end as bravely” as Sophie did.

The final words of Hans, spoken just moments before his death, echoed through the prison’s corridors:

“LONG LIVE FREEDOM!”

THE SECOND TRIAL

In a state where the free expression of public opinion is throttled, a dissident must necessarily turn to illegal methods.

– Professor Kurt Huber

An $8000 reward was put out for the capture of Alexander Schmorell.

A few days later, he was identified in a bomb raid shelter and was turned over to the Gestapo.

Soon, Willi Graf and Professor Kurt Huber, along with many others who had been involved in the resistance activities, were arrested.

They, too, were brought before Freisler’s kangaroo court.

Freisler spat venom at the notion of having a fair trial.

The case before us concerns the worst incident of highly treasonous propaganda that has ever occurred in the Reich during the war. We need no laws. We need no rules of procedure. We need nothing! Anyone who opposes us will be destroyed!

The defendants were barely allowed to speak.

Professor Huber was the exception. He stood up and gave a rousing speech, expounding at length on the moral principles of the great German philosophers that guided his actions.

“What would happen,” he asked the court,

if these subjective maxims governing my actions were to become universal law. To this there can be but one answer: public order, security, trust in the government and in our political life would be restored. Every morally responsible person would raise his voice in concert with ours against the threatening rule of raw force over justice, against mere arbitrariness over the will to the moral good.

“You call yourself a professor,” Freisler interjected—his face beet red—“I don’t see a professor before me, I see a scoundrel!”

Alex, Willi, and Professor Huber were sentenced to death. All but one of the rest received a lengthy prison sentence.

Shortly before his execution, Alex Schmorell told his attorney:

You are likely surprised to find me so calm in this situation. But I can tell you that even should you bring me word that someone else, like this guard, is to be executed in my place, I would choose to die. For I am now convinced that my life, even if it can seem premature, must be finished in this moment, since through my actions I have completed my life’s work. I would not know what more I could do in this world, not even if I were set free now.

Over the next few months, as many as fifty other White Rose members were arrested. The leader of the Hamburg Branch, Hans Leipelt, was executed, and seven others died in concentration camps.

A poem was found in Professor Huber’s cell. He had written it in his final hours.

When I ask myself: What do I leave behind?

I leave drafts, sketches, and papers, but scarcely a final draft.

Death is the final draft of my life—and it was not in vain.

AFTERMATH

Good, splendid young people! You shall not have died in vain; you shall not be forgotten. The Nazis have raised monuments to indecent rowdies and common killers in Germany—but the German revolution, the real revolution, will tear them down and in their place will memorialize these people, who, at the time when Germany and Europe were still enveloped in the dark of night, knew and publicly declared: ‘A new faith in freedom and honor is dawning.’

– Thomas Mann, from a radio broadcast in exile

Despite the arrests, students continued distributing copies of the leaflets, now with the heading “And their spirit lives on!”

The words “Scholl lives! You can break the body, but never the spirit!” were painted on the side of the University of Munich.

Resistance leader Helmuth James von Moltke smuggled the leaflets to London, where they were read over the BBC.

The Allies then printed hundreds of thousands of copies and dropped them all over Germany.

Following the war, both sides of Germany issued stamps commemorating the Scholl siblings.

In 2000, German readers chose Sophie as “the most significant woman of the 20th century.” Countless plays, films, and books have been produced in their memory.

The square where the University of Munich’s central hall is located has been renamed Scholl Siblings Platz, and the one opposite Professor Huber Platz.

Outside the building where they were arrested, a memorial to the White Rose leaflets is embedded in the pavement.

They are a symbol of resistance and have been a source of strength and inspiration for countless oppressed peoples worldwide.

As long as there continues to be injustice, the White Rose will never die.

---

Selected Bibliography

Sophie Scholl and the White Rose, Jud Newborn & Annette Dumbach

A Noble Treason: The Story of Sophie Scholl and the White Rose Revolt Against Hitler, Richard Hanser

Long Live Freedom!: Traute Lafrenz and the White Rose, Peter Waage

At the Heart of the White Rose: Letters and Diaries of Hans and Sophie Scholl, Inge Jens (Editor)

The White Rose: Munich 1942 – 1943, Inge Scholl

Defying Hitler: The Germans Who Resisted Nazi Rule, Gordon Thomas & Greg Lewis

Education in the Third Reich: A Study of Race and History in Nazi Textbooks, Gilmer W. Blackburn