Sophie Scholl and the White Rose

by Annette Dumbach

  Hans Scholl and Alex Schmorell. Harnack mixed up those names—Scholl and Schmorell—although the two youths were strikingly different. Alex was tall, lean, had tawny brown hair; there was an ironic gleam in his gray eyes and he had a light, casual way that made people around him want to smile. One sensed in him that rare breed in the Third Reich, a man who held on to life with easy reins, not taking it too seriously, ready to break out onto new paths. He needed the spice of adventure or risk to make the daily humorless routine bearable. Alex was half-Russian and his friends called him Shurik, one of the Russian nicknames for Alexander. He was odd man out, the fair, feckless Slav in a gray Wehrmacht uniform. He wanted to be a sculptor even though he was a medical student—a kindred spirit to Falk, the artist in the gray phalanx. Falk and Alex had hit it off right away: if times were different, they might have become friends; actually, they almost looked like brothers.

  Harnack had first encountered Hans and Alex at his military base at Chemnitz when they journeyed there illegally to meet him. It must have seemed like years ago, but in fact it had only happened some four months before.

  Why had he agreed to meet them at all? His sculptress friend Lilo in Munich had asked him to, maybe that was the main reason, but perhaps he was also just a bit curious as to who they were: students in Munich—which was not exactly a bastion of resistance.

  Harnack himself had been a student at the University of Munich; he had watched the brownshirts take over the university and the city in 1933. He and his friends had fought back—but that was ten years before, early in the reign of terror. He, Günther Groll, and the others had also put out leaflets calling on the people to resist Hitler; they had tried to sabotage Nazi buildings in Munich, had had fistfights with brown-shirted students. They had not believed, could never have believed in those days, that Hitler would remain in power, that the country would watch in passive silence as the men and women who spoke up or fought back were destroyed, swatted to death, as if a crazed giant were annoyed by small and insignificant gnats.

  Harnack and his friends called for a university strike in 1938; it was a total failure. Soon after that he had left Munich for his theater activities at Weimar, having earned a doctorate in theater sciences.

  Hans and Alex had visited him on a Saturday morning last November. They met outside his barracks and went to the Sächsischer Hof, an inn in nearby Chemnitz, the same place where Arvid and Mildred had spent the night when they visited him.

  The three of them talked all day and through the night, in the small tavern downstairs and, later, up in their room. There had been no need to play conspiratorial games; trust was—and had to be—absolute. They handed Harnack copies of the White Rose leaflets written, duplicated, and mailed out in Munich since the summer of 1942; there were four of them, typed single-spaced and badly, on cheap duplicating paper; four leaflets of condensed rage.

  They waited impatiently for his reaction. He was blunt in his response; he told them that the leaflets were academic, intellectual, and much too flowery to have an impact on the masses. One could see immediately that they were created by intellectuals living in a world of literature and philosophy who didn’t speak the language of the working people.

  They agreed with him. They were determined to learn, to develop the skills of the underground; they realized leaflets were not enough, just a place to start, and they wanted to link up with the network of German resistance. They had been isolated in Munich, a handful of students, and a few of them had briefly been posted to the Russian front; that experience redoubled their determination. The war had to be stopped and Hitler destroyed: it was the only way to save Germany and restore it to its rightful place in the community of peoples.

  Harnack warned them that the resistance was not based on well-meaning intellectuals and their outrage, but on coldly rational premises. It had to be a wide anti-Fascist front in every city in Nazi Germany, from Communists on the left, through the Social Democrats and liberals, to the conservative and military opposition on the right. People who had loathed each other in the Weimar days had to forget the past and work together for one goal: kill Hitler, overthrow the government, and negotiate peace with the Allies.

  Alex and Hans seemed excited; it was likely they had not anticipated hearing such ambitious plans. The three talked on for hours, even exploring what the world would look like once they succeeded with their plans. Hans wanted to give up medicine after the war and go into politics. It is often the case that conspirators have a great need to be visionaries.

  Harnack’s plans for Hans Scholl in Berlin are not completely clear, but one appointment had been fixed: he would take Scholl to the Bonhoeffer residence immediately.

  Harnack had already paid a visit to Dietrich and Klaus Bonhoeffer at their flat that afternoon at four. He had come to know the distinguished pastor and his brother better after his brief and final visit to Gestapo headquarters before his brother Arvid’s execution: Arvid had instructed him to maintain contact with the resistance. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whether one was a committed Protestant or not, was a man who inspired enormous admiration. His very appearance, his warm face behind round, scholarly spectacles, invited trust and almost a sense of relief that such a man could exist in this time and place. Bonhoeffer had studied theology with Harnack’s uncle at the University of Berlin, and was one of the founding and leading members of the Confessing church, a segment of the Lutheran church of Germany that refused to accommodate itself to Hitler, Jewish persecution, foreign conquest, and murder.

  Bonhoeffer was resistance. His execution in 1945 in the Flossenbürg concentration camp days before Allied liberation had a kind of somber inevitability—the destiny of a man who stood for everything decent and creative his nation had produced and now rejected. An inmate in prison with him in the last years of the war reported later that “when he walked into a room you could no longer be a coward.” He believed in direct engagement with and for one’s fellow man; he believed that piety alone was not Christianity, but a hollow excuse to ease the conscience. Bonhoeffer, in February 1943, had links with the officers, government officials, and aristocrats who, in 1944, would be involved in the plot to take Hitler’s life, as well as with leftists like Arvid Harnack and his circle. Bonhoeffer was committed to a united resistance, and its ideological and sectarian roots were secondary, if not irrelevant.

  During Harnack’s visit that afternoon, Bonhoeffer had undoubtedly expressed his heartfelt condolences at the loss of Arvid and Mildred; what probably remained unspoken was the fact that both Bonhoeffer and the Harnack couple had refused the chance to escape. On separate occasions they had all visited the United States in the late thirties. All three had been offered refuge; friends begged them not to return to Germany. They had turned down the offers. Bonhoeffer wrote to Reinhold Niebuhr at the Union Theological Seminary in New York that he could not stay in America, that he had to share the trials of the German people in order to have the right to take part in the reconstruction of a moral and just German society after the war.

  Harnack returned to the meeting point at seven. Scholl was not there. The minutes were crawling by. It had been only three weeks ago, in early February, that Harnack had gone to Munich and seen Scholl. He met the group during a period of two days at Scholl’s rented room on Franz-Joseph-Strasse in Schwabing, the bohemian section of town not far from the university. Hans Scholl lived in typical student digs: French-impressionist prints tacked on the walls, piles of books and manuscripts. It was a provisional chaos, the sort perhaps permitted only students— if anyone—in the tidy and organized society of the Third Reich.

  Alex informed Harnack that the leaflets had made an impact in Munich. Students had staged an improvised protest when the gauleiter (district party leader) of Bavaria had given an offensive and boorish speech at a university commemoration in January. The leaflets surely had helped give them the courage. Schmorell and Scholl and their friend Willi Graf had now gone even further: they were painting anti-Nazi graffiti on the walls o
f the university and other major public buildings at night—and carrying loaded guns to protect themselves. The Nazis were using forced female laborers from the East to scrub away the words “Down with Hitler” and “Freedom,” but the traces were still visible.

  Harnack felt the overcharged tension in the room; these people seemed to have been without sleep for days. He was uncomfortable about various objects in the room that indicated carelessness: handwritten essays that might have been drafts for new leaflets, and lists of names and addresses.

  The next day, Hans insisted that Harnack go with him to the university and persuade Professor Kurt Huber, the one academician who sympathized with them and had even gone so far as to help them create leaflets, to join them for a group meeting at Hans’s room that afternoon. They waylaid him after his seminar. He was reluctant to come, and obviously felt wary about Harnack and his leftist politics. But Hans was persistent and Huber came.

  With the exception of Christoph Probst, the core of the group was there, all in heavy coats and mufflers; the building had run out of heating fuel.

  Sophie Scholl, Hans’s sister, was dark, serious, and quiet. She listened intently but made no contribution to the discussion. Willi Graf, with thinning blond hair and deep blue eyes, was intent and silent, probably the least accessible personality in the group. Professor Huber was haggard and upset; Harnack had attended his lectures years earlier and was very aware of Huber’s deeply conservative political and social attitudes.

  The discussion quickly turned into conflict, Harnack saying little, although it seems clear that he was the focal point of the dissension. Schmorell argued with Huber, but the bitter encounter was between Huber and Hans Scholl, the student he had encouraged, supported, and inspired. The moment of ideological rupture had arrived: now it was not just a question of resistance. Huber refused to work with Communists on any level. He believed that the Nazis were a domestic version of Bolshevism, and it was for this reason that he detested them.

  Harnack finally left; the atmosphere was filled with tension. But the date of meeting in Berlin had been agreed upon—today, Thursday, February 25, 1943: the group was determined to go on.

  It was now almost 7:20 pm . . . the second meeting-time had passed some time ago.

  Hans Scholl was not coming.

  Harnack didn’t know why, but he must have known that something had gone wrong. He could not have known how wrong. The news had not yet reached the general populace in Berlin.

  Three days earlier, Monday, February 22, 1943, Hans Scholl, his sister Sophie, and their friend Christoph Probst had been tried for treason by the People’s Court in Munich. At five o’clock in the afternoon of the same day, they were beheaded.

  Falk Harnack could also not know that of all those present at that last meeting in Munich, he would be the only one left alive by the end of the year.

  ONE

  The first week of May 1942

  AS THE TRAIN pulled out of the Ulm railway station, Sophie Scholl sat back in her seat. It was an unusually warm day for early May and the trip promised to be a pleasant one. She was alone in the compartment as the train began to move in the direction of Munich, some 150 kilo-meters to the southeast. On the rack above her head was a suitcase; next to her on the seat was a small bag containing a bottle of wine and a cake.

  There was nothing exceptional about the young woman’s appearance; she was slender, with shoulder-length brown hair and brown eyes. She was dressed simply, in a chocolate brown pleated skirt and a pink pullover; perhaps the fresh daisy she wore behind her ear was unusual, and it did make her look younger than her twenty-one years. She was neat and respectable-looking, wore no makeup, setting no great store on physical appearances.

  The train began to pick up speed, clattering through the outskirts of the city. From her window the young woman would be able to see the sweep of Ulm’s tall cathedral spire, soaring hundreds of feet above the old city center to the northeast; beneath it, on the square surrounding the cathedral, was the home of her parents.

  Although her face may not have shown it, the departure from her home had aroused strong feelings in her. In a few days she would cele-brate her twenty-first birthday, and the trip to Munich was a pivotal one. She was going to study at the university there, a goal she had worked and waited for since she was eighteen and had finished her Abitur, the high-school graduation exam.

  The train roared over the Danube, whose surface glistened in the sun; the river vanished. Already the outskirts of the city were opening up to fields drenched in the golden yellow of dandelions. No matter how excited she was, she would make a mental note of these flashing images to record later in her diary.

  The world of nature meant a great deal to her: the sight of a stream or the rolling contours of the land gave her a sense of peace and provided a pathway to some inner haven of calm; her diaries, letters, and old school essays were filled with descriptions of nature.

  Just as I can’t see a clear brook without at least stopping to dangle my feet in it, I can’t see a meadow in May and simply pass by. There is nothing more seductive than such fragrant earth, the blossoms of clover swaying above it like a light foam, and the petal-bedecked branches of the fruit trees reaching upward, as if they wanted to rescue themselves from this tranquil sea. No, I have to turn from my path and immerse myself in this richness. . . .

  When I turn my head, my cheek grazes the rough trunk of the apple tree next to me. How protectively it spreads its good branches over me. Without ceasing the sap rises from its roots, nurturing even the smallest of leaves. Do I hear, perhaps, a secret heartbeat? I press my face against its dark, warm bark and think to myself: homeland, and am so indescribably happy in this instant.

  Sophie Scholl’s lyrical thoughts may not have been the musings of an average German girl in the spring of 1942, in the midst of total war, but they were not extraordinary either. Since the late nineteenth century, young people in Germany had been turning to nature to escape the constricting society they found around them. The Wandervogel (birds of passage) were groups of youths, especially students, mostly male, who hiked through the mountains and across the hills, camped along lakes and rivers, sang folk songs and recited poetry into the night. They had become a German tradition and a way of life. To commune with living things, to move with the sun and the water and the creatures of the earth, was a way to find freedom, a way to protest the rules and restrictions of bourgeois society, a way to reject the ugly smear of factories and mill towns that were eroding the meadows and the forests, a way to affirm youth and purity.

  Literature and philosophy as well as song and poetry had grown out of this tradition, and until the onset of war in the early years of the 1940s, an unceasing stream of young people spent their summer and winter holidays scaling the mountains and trudging together through the valleys of their country, some even going abroad for a tramp through Finland, Yugoslavia, or Italy. Perhaps in no other country in the world was nature—not just its existence, but the idea of grappling with it as a group, trying to become a part of it, taking on its severe challenges and searching for its deeper truths—more profoundly a part of life than it was among the educated youth of Germany in this century.

  Their yearning for freedom did not, however, translate into political activity or movements for social change. Their deep admiration for “exotic” folk cultures all over the world did not necessarily imply an acceptance of ethnic minorities at home. And their otherworldliness ultimately left them ill prepared to cope with those who later would abuse their hopes and appropriate the forms of their protest.

  After 1933 and the establishment of the Third Reich, aspects of this youth movement were incorporated into National Socialist ideology and into Hitler Youth programs and excursions. Protesting this, some young people formed clandestine youth groups, which they tried to maintain in defiance of the Party and at no small cost to themselves.

  By the spring of 1942, however, there were few young people at home with concerns like these.
Most of them were in the military—a considerable number of them fighting in Russia—or in compulsory activities related to the war effort. After training as a kindergarten teacher, Sophie Scholl had been stationed for six months at a work camp that was run like an army barracks; from there she was sent into the fields, helping out farmers whose labor supply was running short after total mobilization. Then she had to work yet another half-year in the kindergarten attached to a munitions factory in Blumberg.

  But all this was behind her; now, the landscape danced by in a golden shimmer. In a few hours she would celebrate her birthday with her older brother Hans, who would be waiting for her when the train arrived in Munich.

  Sophie Scholl was an unusually reflective young woman. Her diaries and her letters to her unofficial fiancé, Fritz Hartnagel, an officer on the front lines in Russia, showed a deep concern with the realities of war and a fierce unwillingness, no matter how difficult things might be for her, to feel self-pity, or indeed any form of egotism, when men and women were suffering and dying in a savage and meaningless war. Even her own profound pleasure at finally achieving the long-sought goal of entering the university—not an easy matter in a nation where the quota on female students had been limited to 10 per cent of the student body—was probably mixed with feelings of guilt, as well as concern for Fritz and all her other friends at the front. These ambivalent feelings about experiencing pleasure, about having the right to enjoy oneself when others were in agony, had become characteristic of the entire Scholl family.