MB Eric reminds us: [Update: Sorry. You know how married people start to look alike after a while.]
It’s White Rose Day. On this day in 1943 Sophie and Hans Scholl and Christoph Probst were guillotined.
The Nazis executed Probst (right) and the Scholls (left) for blogging, or at least for getting as close to it as they could gven the technology of the day. From the Jewish Virtual Library:
One day in 1942, copies of a leaflet entitled “The White Rose” suddenly appeared at the University of Munich. The leaflet contained an anonymous essay that said that the Nazi system had slowly imprisoned the German people and was now destroying them. The Nazi regime had turned evil. It was time, the essay said, for Germans to rise up and resist the tyranny of their own government. At the bottom of the essay, the following request appeared: “Please make as many copies of this leaflet as you can and distribute them.”
The leaflet caused a tremendous stir among the student body. It was the first time that internal dissent against the Nazi regime had surfaced in Germany. The essay had been secretly written and distributed by Hans Scholl and his friends.
Another leaflet appeared soon afterward. And then another. And another. Ultimately, there were six leaflets published and distributed by Hans and Sophie Scholl and their friends, four under the title “The White Rose” and two under the title “Leaflets of the Resistance.” Their publication took place periodically between 1942 and 1943, interrupted for a few months when Hans and his friends were temporarily sent to the Eastern Front to fight against the Russians.
The members of The White Rose, of course, had to act cautiously. The Nazi regime maintained an iron grip over German society. Internal dissent was quickly and efficiently smashed by the Gestapo. Hans and Sophie Scholl and their friends knew what would happen to them if they were caught.
People began receiving copies of the leaflets in the mail. Students at the University of Hamburg began copying and distributing them. Copies began turning up in different parts of Germany and Austria. Moreover, as Hanser points out, the members of The White Rose did not limit themselves to leaflets. Graffiti began appearing in large letters on streets and buildings all over Munich: “Down with Hitler! . . . Hitler the Mass Murderer!” and “Freihart! . . . Freihart! . . . Freedom! . . . Freedom!”
The Gestapo was driven into a frenzy. It knew that the authors were having to procure large quantities of paper, envelopes, and postage. It knew that they were using a duplicating machine. But despite the Gestapo’s best efforts, it was unable to catch the perpetrators.
One day, February 18, 1943, Hans’ and Sophie’s luck ran out. They were caught leaving pamphlets at the University of Munich and were arrested. A search disclosed evidence of Christoph Probst’s participation, and he too was soon arrested. The three of them were indicted for treason.
A few years back I read some letters from Hans Scholl to his sister. One of them struck me: it was a heartfelt paean to a quintessentially German piece of music, one whch Scholl felt expressed all that was good in the German people, something worth holding on to even in the darkest of times. I post part of that piece here, as a small remembrance of their sacrifice.
There is a powerful and moving film about this, “Sophie Scholl—The Final Days.” The dramatization uses transcripts from Sophie’s interrogation and trial.
I’ll second the recommendation of Sophie Scholl: The Final Days. It’s understated and extraordinarily powerful.
I haven’t stopped by in some time. I love the redesign.
This is a wonderful post. Thanks so much for
sharing. This reminds me of the Egyptian blogger who’s just been sentenced to 4 years of jail time for insulting the president and questioning Islam.
As a very young girl, we lived next door to an elderly German couple who’d escaped the Nazis, and their entire family, who’d refused to leave their property and belongings behind to come to America, was murdered in the death camps. Mr. Rothman still suffered some physical disabilities from a beating by the SS. Mrs. Rothman made me German food and let me hang out with her in her garden. They had a long driveway that I rollerskated up and down and where I learned to ride a bicycle. Knowing the Rothman’s story was my first glimpse at a very early age of that kind of evil.
These young german people were very brave in the face of terrifying oppression.
Pax. Kimberly
Oh, crap. I remember reading about Hans and Sophie Scholl in German class, but I didn’t remember them dying.
I saw the movie “Freedom Writers� not long back. Hilary Swank plays an idealistic young teacher who gets a job at an inner-city school with severe racial problems. She gets the kids thinking about their gangs by talking about “the biggest and toughest gang of all� – the Nazis. They tour a museum (the Simon Wiesenthal Center?) and part of the interactive display was when they entered, they each got a card with a picture of a kid on it. They had to find the kid somewhere in the museum displays and learn about their lives. And then at the end of the tour, they put the card in a card reader and it told them whether their kid lived or not.
One of the students, writing about it in his journal, talked about how shocked he was when he found out “his� kid died.
Oh, man, why do people even DO this shit? I guess I know all the reasons, but ... Argh.
Britney Spears and Michael Jackson are good object lessons in part of it: You give young people wealth and fame, and remove all possibility of serious backpressure from outside, and they go slowly insane. Without some very strong internal guides of their own, they tear themselves apart.
Dick Cheney and Karl Rove are good object lessons in another part: You give people wealth and POWER, and no rational convictions of their own about morality, and they go slowly insane too. But in their cases, it’s OTHER people who get torn apart.
Drop Dick or Karl back in late-1930s Germany and I have no doubt they’d fit right in. They’d find positions of power and influence, and would soon be literally walking over corpses ... and sleeping well at night afterwards. And today we’d be seeing Ubersturmfuhrer Cheney and Reichsleiter Rove pictured in the Simon Wiesenthal Center, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with uniformed thugs in front of barbed wire enclosures.
History has placed some curbs on the way people like them can achieve their results, but the results are the same: people die, and die ugly ... and Dick and Karl still sleep well at night.
Just a followup comment:
From recent news: “Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) said he was reviving a failed 2005 effort to grant citizenship to the Holocaust diarist [Anne Frank] in the wake of the revelation this week of documents showing that Frank’s father made multiple attempts to flee Nazi-occupied Holland for the United States. The legislation would make Anne Frank the seventh honorary U.S. citizen; others have included Winston Churchill, Raoul Wallenberg and Mother Teresa.� – JTA Daily Briefing
I can’t figure whether to see this as the gesture of a generous American legislator, or an unthinking but complete insult to Anne Frank’s memory, and to all the Germans and Jews who had to endure what she endured.
The part that offends me is the possible attempt to rope in Anne Frank as a feel-good symbol of America at a time when our own country is maintaining barbed-wire-enclosed torture facilities that Anne Frank herself, or Hans and Sophie Scholl, would have absolutely hated and denounced.
The issue brings to mind an image of George Bush, standing with legions of flag-draped coffins behind him, making grand speeches about how we must honor them by continuing the ugly war in which they died.
I do take into account the role the US played in stopping the Nazis and rescuing the millions more who would have died in their hands. But ... I can’t help but also take current events into account.
In my own possibly-confused mind, and in this moment in history, Iraq has so soiled us that to bring in Anne Frank and say “She was one of us� is to dirty her in retrospect rather than to honor her.
As a parent I can’t begin to imagine those last family visits and their last day. That the mighty Reich felt compelled to answer pamphlets and graffiti with the guillotine speaks eloquently of their collective madness and their fear.
It is almost too convenient to acknowledge the suffering of people in Europe during WW2, so as to “overlook� the massive evil committed in our names here in the US.
I have written on this blog, over the years, about the evils done to many different people, the indigenous people of the Americas emphatically included.
I think I’ve written about the holocaust maybe once.
Could I be doing more to educate people about the ongoing genocide against NDNs? Absolutely. But I’d like to think that adults could have a discussion of one historical event without the argument being made that every single other historical event of like magnitude needs to be mentioned in ritual fashion in the same discussion.
Incidentally, it was a post at Wampum that reminded me of White Rose day.