Sophie Scholl and the White Rose

by Annette Dumbach

  The rather free and casual style of life of these young men during wartime—attending concerts, taking fencing lessons, and joining Bach choral societies—is surprising. Nothing like it happened in the United States during the Second World War, and one would expect even less to find that such freedom and informality existed in Nazi Germany.

  The informal and mobile life-style may help explain the form of resistance these young men had already chosen. They were planning to write, duplicate, and distribute leaflets in Munich, informing a selected audience of students, professional people, and intellectuals about the evils occurring in their midst, and warning that Hitler’s war would inevitably be lost.

  To be able to do that, one needed physical resources and time. The seed money came from Alex, whose father provided him with a generous allowance; and with that money and with whatever each of the others could afford, they procured a duplicating machine, a typewriter, stencils, and stationery. Through Hans and his large array of contacts, they were fortunate enough to find a place to store the clandestine equipment right in Schwabing, near Hans’s room.

  At Sophie’s party, no mention was made about leaflets or their development; at that point perhaps none had been printed or even written, but it is likely that the procurement process had begun—and it was no easy matter, regardless of the young men’s relative privileges.

  They broke open the bottle of wine, ate the cake, and settled in for a long and balmy evening together. The mood was light, the talk not particularly serious. Hans read poetry aloud and the guests tried to guess who the author was. There were “political” overtones in the conversation—political at that time meaning anti-Nazi—as there often were among like-minded people who quietly despised the regime.

  But even casual banter or a sarcastic remark or a joke about the war or Adolf Hitler constituted “malicious, anti-German activities,” if not treason, and they all knew it. Such gatherings implied total confidence in one another. Years of practice had sensitized their antennae: Hans often said he could tell immediately when he met a stranger if he was “PZ”—the initials for the German words meaning “polit-ically reliable”—and there was no question that Willi Graf, Christoph Probst, Alex Schmorell, Traute Lafrenz, and his sister Sophie were trustworthy; there would be no betrayals.

  This group of young people meeting that day to celebrate Sophie’s rise to adulthood and maturity, constituted—with Professor Kurt Huber, who was not present—the nucleus of “The White Rose.” But the scene is still not clear: their coming together and acting together were only the final links in a process of personal evolution that had begun years before for all of them.

  THREE

  SOPHIE SCHOLL was less than twelve years old at the time of the Nazi takeover; her brother Hans, a little over fourteen. Against their father’s advice, Hans joined the Hitlerjugend—the Hitler Youth—and Sophie followed, along with their sisters Inge and Elisabeth, and the youngest child, Werner. Boys and girls between the ages of ten and fourteen enrolled in the Jungvolk (Young Folk) and Jungmädel (Young Maidens); thereafter, boys were transferred to the Hitler Youth proper until age eighteen, while girls became members of the Bund der deutschen Mädchen (League of German Girls), or BDM. In 1933 membership was still voluntary—but of course Jews were excluded. Other youth organizations of the Weimar era con-tinued to exist, but these were under increasing pressure, not only from the state’s voracious official youth movement but, eventually, from the Gestapo itself, to dissolve their groups and join the Hitler Youth.

  For the first few years of Nazi rule, all of the Scholl children were infected by the excitement that permeated their schools and community—the wearing of uniforms, the marching in torchlit processions through the streets of Ulm, the camping out in the country—and felt themselves a part in the rebuilding of their deeply divided and demoralized nation.

  Inge Scholl, trying later to convey the gradual steps that had transformed her brother and sister into so-called Volksfeinde (enemies of the people), remembered the fervor of those early days: “We heard so much talk about the Fatherland and comradeship, the ‘Volk Community’ and love of one’s home—this impressed us, and we listened with rapture. . . . We were told that we should live for something greater than ourselves; we were taken seriously, in a strange sort of way.”

  For the Scholl children, three or four years would pass before disillusionment set in; but the seeds of doubt and opposition had been there from the start, planted by Robert Scholl. The same could not be said for all young people. One Berlin youngster who went on to become a ferociously ambitious Hitler Youth leader recalled her feelings and experiences the night Adolf Hitler took power:

  At one point somebody suddenly leaped from the ranks of the marchers and struck a man who had been standing only a few paces away from us. Perhaps he had made a hostile remark. I saw him fall to the ground with blood streaming down his face and I heard him cry out. . . . The image of him haunted me for days.

  The horror it inspired in me was almost imperceptibly spiced with an intoxicating joy. “For the flag we are ready to die,” the torchbearers had sung. It was not a matter of clothing or food or school essays, but of life and death. . . . I was overcome with a burning desire to belong to these people.

  In the early thirties, even the Scholl children felt something of this thrill. Youth was to be the cutting edge in the struggle ahead for a new Germany; indoctrination was the means to hone that edge. “Our youth must be tough as leather, hard as Krupp steel, fleet as greyhounds,” Hitler had told the children at Nuremberg rallies as they stood immobile under the broiling sun, their arms rigidly outstretched in salute. Long before he came to power, he had already described his aims for youth. “My system of education is a harsh one,” he said. “Weakness must be stamped out. The world will shrink in terror from the youngsters who grow up in my fortresses. A violent, masterful, dauntless and cruel younger generation—that is my goal. There must be nothing weak and soft about them. Their eyes must glow once more with the freedom and splendor of the beast of prey.”

  On April 3, 1933, two months after the Nazi takeover, the Hitler Youth used Storm Trooper tactics with an expertise born of years of street righting. They occupied the Berlin headquarters of the Committee of German Youth Associations, booting out the manager and staff and ransacking the offices. The Hitler Youth thereby gained control of files containing information ranging from the ages and religious backgrounds to the political affiliations of six million German youths. Most disastrous was the seizing of the files on the Communist and Social Democratic youth organizations, which ultim-ately put serious opponents of the new regime in Gestapo hands.

  Like the Scholls, most German children joined the Hitler Youth with excitement. It had numbered a hundred thousand members at the end of 1932; it rose to almost four million by 1935.

  Unlike many other parents, who welcomed—or tried to believe they welcomed—Hitler and the Nazis, Robert Scholl loathed the National Socialists with every fiber of his being. He was not a political man in an ideological sense, and he was not a member of a formal political party; but he was liberal and open-minded. He was chagrined at the corruption, violence, and confusion that had characterized society in the Weimar Republic. But what came after, in 1933, was far worse.

  The Scholl children, especially Hans—who seemed to resemble his father in many ways—at first did not accept Robert Scholl’s views on National Socialism and the New Order. Controversy shook their home for years. The pattern was to repeat itself in uncounted German homes, where parents who were somehow immune to the fever of nationalistic furies and who privately opposed the new regime, watched in horror as their children slipped away from them. In many cases parents could no longer speak openly in their own living rooms, for fear that their children would report them to their teachers or youth-group leaders. Zealousness replaced reason, denunciation replaced loyalty and affection; a chilled silence invaded the home. As often happens, the gener-ations moved away from each other,
and a frozen space crystallized between father and son; but in this instance, ironically, it was youth that stood for state power and authority, while it was the older generation—or at least a fraction of it—that mutely clung to other values.

  But Robert Scholl did not remain mute. He expressed his opinions, often loudly and incautiously. “The Nazis are wolves, wild beasts; they misuse the German people terribly,” he told his hotheaded eldest son. Sophie, who loved and admired both her father and her older brother, would witness these scenes in silence.

  The Hitler Youth demanded that its members throw themselves into the national struggle, even if this only meant staying out of school to march about town with jaws set and eyes ablaze. Hans’s strong personality and good looks quickly made him stand out from the crowd; he seemed destined for leadership. Not long after his entry into the Hitler Youth movement, he was named a Fähnleinführer (squad leader) of a Jungvolk unit of about 150 boys.

  It is difficult to imagine Hans straying too far from the humanism with which he grew up in the Scholl household—all the more so when one remembers at what cost he returned to these values later. Nonetheless, to attain such a position of leadership in the Hitler Youth as Hans did meant having the right ideological attitude and an eagerness to express it in action.

  Hitler Youth had their chance to do so when, dressed in full uniform, they entered the classrooms of those teachers not yet properly “coordinated” with the movement. A squad leader in a position like Hans’s commanded more than a hundred smartly outfitted boys, while a schoolteacher did not have more than perhaps forty pupils in a class. The Hitler Youth leadership provided new guidelines for teachers, reminding them that although Hitler Youth were pupils, their authority was not to be impaired in the eyes of their classmates. “Should a remark against the Hitler Youth be uttered in the heat of the moment,” teachers were cautioned, “the trust between pupils and teaching staff will be damaged and not easily restored. But the more effort a teacher makes to enter into the spirit and code of the Hitler Youth, the greater will be his success.”

  In reality, the Hitler Youth tried to coerce teachers to develop the “correct” spirit. One section leader used the best beer-hall tactics of the Storm Troopers to physically disperse a meeting of a local teachers’ association; another group broke the windows in the apartment of a Latin teacher reputed to have given out unpopular grades. “Youth is, in a higher sense, always right,” the Hitler Youth leadership told teachers who stood aloof from the spirit of the new age. Soon, however, even the leadership had to concede that stringent regulations were necessary to control unruly boys and permit political “coordination” to develop more smoothly.

  The year 1936 was a signal one for the Hitler Youth. Ever since 1933, each year had been devoted to one goal or another, be it phys-ical training or leadership; 1936 was designated “The Year of the German Jungvolk.” The entire age-group of boys and girls born in 1926 and now eligible for membership in the Jungvolk would be the object of a major recruitment campaign, the goal being to have them “volunteer” en masse. On April 20, Hitler’s forty-seventh birthday, the lines of bare-kneed ten-year-olds would be presented to him as a gift; by the end of the year, membership in the Hitler Youth would become compulsory for all.

  Hans’s duties as squad leader meant the physical training and ideological indoctrination of his charges, passing on to them what he himself had received. This usually included “comradeship evenings” in the clubhouse—evenings spent listening, for example, to the nationally broadcast radio program of the Hitler Youth; its words blared out of the Volksempfänger—the official Nazi radio sets that Hitler had made available to the public as cheaply as possible, but which could only be tuned to ideologically pure (and that meant domestic) radio stations.

  A Nazi propaganda film of the time, Youth of Iron and Steel, showed Hitler Youth marching resolutely through a craggy alpine landscape, their voices raised to chant a song that compared them to the steel being produced out of raw German iron ore for tanks and armaments. In like fashion, boy leaders across the country guided their squads over hills and through fields, drilling them in the official Hitler Youth Anthem:

  Forward! Forward!

  resound the fanfares brightly.

  Forward! Forward!

  Youth knows no danger! . . .

  We’re marching for Hitler through night without dread,

  with the flag of youth, for freedom and bread.

  Our flags lead us on,

  our flag is the new age . . .

  Yes, the flag means more to us than death!

  Youth! Youth!

  We are the future soldiers! . . .

  Yes, we’ll drop anyone with our fists

  who tries to stand against us.

  Führer, we belong to you,

  we your comrades.

  But Hitler Youth boys often demanded a song popular all over Germany, written by a former member of the Catholic Youth.

  The rotten bones of the world

  are trembling before the coming war.

  We’ve broken the back of the terror,

  for us this was a great victory!

  We’ll go on marching forever,

  even if everything falls to pieces.

  For today, Germany belongs to us—

  and tomorrow the whole world.

  Songs like these were a mainstay of the Nazi movement. Each formation had its own songbooks; even the SS. For the Hitler Youth these songs were especially important, and accompanied every activity. Their subjects were those of national pathos; sometimes they seemed childlike and naive, but often, in the same breath, arrogant, brutal, even crude: “Wave flag, wave from your tower—whoever spits on you is a worm, and like a worm he’ll be squashed, with no chance to pray!”

  A young Berliner who, unlike the Scholls, remained true to the Nazi movement, recalled marching through the streets of the city singing an unofficial but popular song: “When Jewish blood spurts from the knife, then things will go all the better” (Wenn das Judenblut vom Messer spritzt . . .). Of her BDM troop leader she wrote: “She would often make us march in three ranks along the Kurfürstendamm and cover part of the distance on the double. When doing this we had to stamp our feet as loudly as possible. ‘This is where the rich Jews live,’ she would say. ‘They need a bit of waking up from their afternoon naps.’”

  Anti-Semitism had no place in Hans’s family, and in any event his horizons were less parochial than those of the usual Hitler Youth. Hans displayed this breadth of character even then, accompanying himself on the guitar as he sat with his boys around the campfire, singing not only the standard songs of the movement, but lilting Norwegian tunes and the poignant strains of Russian folk songs he had collected on his own. His youth-movement superiors chastized him for this; such songs were forbidden. Hans laughed over the restriction until he found himself threatened with punishment—an early confrontation that raised within him doubts about the organ-ization to which he was devoting so much of his being. It was an organization that had no room, he would find, for the things that ultimately were the most important to him.

  As a leader among boys, Hans Scholl had an opportunity in 1936 not only to participate fully in the year’s important events, but to assume the tools of totalitarian power and make them his own. For many leaders of the Hitler Youth, the SS was only a step away; the temptation to join the cream of the racial and party elite was one few young men could resist.

  The Nuremberg Party Rally of 1936 began on September 8, and Hans was chosen to bear the banner of his Ulm Hitler Youth section in the festivities. The distinction did not come as a surprise to many; Inge Scholl remembered how the girls in Ulm would say to her, “Your Hans, he looks so handsome—he’s the right one to carry his company’s banner at the rallies.” But although Hans set out enthusiastically for Nuremberg on the gaily bedecked special train, when he returned to Ulm, his sisters and brother would note that a change had taken place in him.

  Nuremberg had bee
n selected as the site of the Party rallies for good reasons. The home of the great Renaissance painter Albrecht Dürer, Nuremberg had enjoyed a long history as an important center of commerce and German culture since the Middle Ages, and later came to be thought of as a quintessentially German city. In the modern period, Nuremberg was remembered most vividly as the medieval home of the Meistersinger, the master singers who had organized their lives into a seemingly flawless guild society. Richard Wagner glorified Hans Sachs and the Mastersingers of Nuremberg in his famous opera of the same name. Wagner re-created a total, organic world, where craftsmen and shopkeepers were men of culture; they moved easily in the social circles of nobility to whom they paid homage—and were in turn respected. With its populist pageantry, its parade of proud shoemakers and milkmaids, The Mastersingers of Nuremberg helped bolster the egos and rationalize the insecurities of Germany’s lower middle class. But its appeal was broader, for this class and its perceptions had become a paradigm for the whole nation. Not surprisingly, it was one of Hitler’s favorite operas.

  The city of Nuremberg itself was a swath of red-tiled roofs huddled along narrow, winding streets, nestled beneath the pro-tective flanks of a massive romanesque and gothic fortress. This medieval city provided the Nazis with a marvelous stage set—but its picturesque roofs were not enough. In keeping with the Party’s grandiose schemes, the spirit of National Socialism would have to be created in the city’s outskirts, in the form of gigantic arenas, halls, and neo-Roman stadia. Within these vast spaces—constructed partly with stone quarried by concentration-camp inmates—the Party faithful would gather, lending flesh and voice to this newest model of Germany’s greatness.