Sophie Scholl and the White Rose

by Annette Dumbach

  Among these edifices, some of them designed by Albert Speer, was the Zeppelinwiese, or Zeppelin Field. For the 1936 rally it was enlarged and flanked with grandstands until it had the capacity to hold 400,000 people—only 20,000 less than the entire population of the city of Nuremberg. The grandstand consisted of 170 stone pillars and 34 evenly spaced towers; atop each tower were 6 flagpoles of imposing size; 150 powerful spotlights were installed to create a nighttime operatic spectacle, consuming 40,000 kilowatts of electricity in one evening. Additional klieg lights were strategically placed to light up all architectural features and the field itself.

  The result was colossal. Albert Speer himself had designed the special lighting effects: each of the 150 spotlights surrounding the grandstand were aimed into the heavens; columns of blinding white light shot skyward, extending the already massive structure vertically in a “cathedral of light.” The illumination emanating from this enormous arena was so bright that the reflection it made in the South German sky was seen as far away as Frankfurt.

  The spirit of National Socialism was captured in Leni Riefenstahl’s famous cinematic vision of the Nuremberg rallies, Triumph of the Will. Hitler’s private airplane is seen droning above the cloud cover. Through a break he sees below him the old clustered buildings of Nuremberg, and like Odin descending from Valhalla, he lands to greet his minions. Thousands have gathered, from every party formation and every walk of life, including the Hitler Youth. Riefenstahl’s camera follows the line of young Nazis at attention, sweeping past to trace the curve of their aquiline noses, their shocks of blond hair, the jut of their chins in profile.

  On September 13, 1936, Hans Scholl marched with these youths as they streamed past their Führer through the winding streets in an unending trail—a river emptying into the great arena on the Zeppelin Field. Walking to the side of each formation was a standard-bearer; for his Ulm company, it was Hans Scholl. The sky was a brilliant blue that day, the sun shone; it was inevitable that some Germans in the reviewing stands were commenting on the “Hitlerwetter” (Hitler-weather)—somehow the Führer had mysteriously regulated the climate for the benefit of his people.

  The Lower Bavarian Daily reported on the Youth segment of the 1936 rally in the breathless, portentous style of the Third Reich:

  young germany in nuremberg floods the führer

  with cheers . . . 50,000 boys and girls present

  This morning Germans are gathered again in the stadium before the Führer, to show him what they are made of, that they belong to him, that they are a part of him. . . . The broad oval of the stadium is one solid brown surface. . . . It seems as if youth does not want to be silent ever again, for the Führer—their Führer—stands before the microphone to speak to them. Every time Adolf Hitler tries to begin, the endless cheers of Heil roar again, subsiding only after minutes. Then the Führer speaks. . . .

  They were words like those that had often been heard before:

  Everything that we demand of Germany in the future, that, boys and girls, we demand of you. . . . In you will Germany live on, and should there ever remain nothing more of us, then you will have to bear in your clenched hands the flag which we raised on high out of the chaos. . . .

  You could not be other than bound to us, and when the great columns of our movement march singing through Germany, then I know you will join these columns, and then all of us will know: Before us is Germany! In us marches Germany! And behind us comes Germany!

  Once Hitler’s words had rung out, the German newspaper reporter wrote, the youths, spectators, and the Führer himself were overcome by “an exhilaration and a fervor for which there are no words. Everything else is forgotten. One thought only, one fire has consumed us all.”

  But unaccountably, something had been happening inside of Hans Scholl during these days of endless speeches, marches, and fervent displays. We do not know precisely how and why, but at some point during the course of this great spectacle, Hans no longer felt himself to be in step with those around him, a “living cell” in the great “racial body” of the German Volk. Instead he began to feel like an insignificant cog in the mechanism of a giant, faceless machine. At first he would challenge that machine lightly from within; next, less tentatively, he would try to turn his back on it and search for alternatives. But eventually he would come to the decision that there were no alternatives, and he would confront the machine face-on—this time with resistance in mind.

  FOUR

  THE STRONG PERSONALITY that had led Hans Scholl to leadership in the Hitler Youth also contained a strain of nonconformism. Inevitably, this meant conflict with figures of authority, and with their ideological positions. Although the full details of his Nuremberg experiences are not known, Hans did tell his sister Inge later that there had been no room at the rallies for a single “sensible conversation.” All he had experienced, he told her, was a continual attempt by those in power to brew enthusiasm, however mindless.

  Hans’s nature was outspoken and sometimes volatile; however, he also had a tendency to hold back his feelings in a dejected, even sullen silence until he had fully worked them out. When he returned from Nuremberg, his sisters and brother sensed that a subtle transformation had occurred within him, but they did not understand it at first. Perhaps Hans didn’t either—but several events rapidly brought it to fuller consciousness.

  The leader of Hans’s own Hitler Youth company found him one day reading quietly by himself. The book was not one of the limited volumes in the local Hitler Youth library, but Stefan Zweig’s banned Sternstunde der Menschheit (Mankind’s Stellar Hours). Despite state censorship, Robert Scholl had seen to it that the family bookshelves remained stocked with the German literature that he considered significant, and almost as a matter of course, all of his children con-tinued to read these books. This particular work was one of Hans’s favorites, a set of essays in which Zweig rhapsodized about great moments in human achievement, from Balboa’s discovery of the Pacific to the laying of the first transatlantic cable, from Handel’s Messiah to the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo. Above all, Zweig wrote of individuals following their own consciences and the idosyncratic needs of their own creativity, not in the name of any one tribe or nation, but as expressions of universal accomplishment.

  The book was torn from Hans’s hands. This filth is forbidden, he was told; the author is a Jew. Whatever Hans’s earlier attitudes might have been toward Jews in the abstract, he knew these people not as stereotypes but as actual human beings, colleagues and friends of the family whom Robert and Magdalena Scholl continued to see. And he found Stefan Zweig’s book far more compelling and thought-provoking than all of the countless speeches and Party lessons that he was coming to realize had not been designed to help him think, but to keep mind and body too busy to reflect.

  A more crucial disillusioning event came a bit later and was to cost Hans his position of leadership in the Hitler Youth. Shortly after returning from Nuremberg, Hans did something he knew was prohibited: he decided to help his squad design their own unique banner: The symbol they chose was a mythical animal, colorful and rare; it would say something special about them, how they differed from every other squad in the Jungvolk. By going against the rules in this manner, Hans was compensating, perhaps, for some reprimand he had received at the rallies from a Party superior for one of his irrepressible actions or comments. And surely he was testing, trying to see just how constraining the Hitler Youth was, how far he could go. While he had his boys dedicate their banner to the Führer, he also had them swear personal allegiance to this new flag, a symbol of their own small community.

  The reactions to this flag taught Hans that there was no room for alternate communities in the Hitler Youth, or in the Third Reich as a whole. One evening, the boys of Hans’s squad marched through the streets of Ulm beneath the glorious griffin leaping across their banner. But when they arrived at an assembly before a higher group leader, their pride was attacked as insolence. The youth leader was outraged at their
banner, a clear deviation from principle, and even more so by the brazen manner in which it seemed to be flaunted in his face. Hans’s personal leadership was being challenged; this was not another example of Aryan élan, but of insubordination. The Hitler Youth leader ordered the twelve-year-old bearing the banner to hand it over immediately. But the boy, shocked and torn between loyalties, stood paralyzed. Furious, the youth leader strode up to him and began to rip the banner from his hands. And then Hans Scholl gave the boys perhaps the most important lesson he had ever offered them, one which they were unlikely to see repeated. Acting, as he would again later, without concern for consequences, he dashed to the defense of his bullied charge and struck the youth leader, knocking him down.

  The 150 boys in the squad then watched their revered young leader stripped of his rank before their eyes. Hans could not have felt this a humiliation. It was one of those dramatic moments that make things clear in a flash; it was natural, inevitable, part of his new and rising opposition.

  At first it may have seemed that Hans was only shifting the focus of his teenage rebelliousness from his father and the older generation to the enforced conformity of the Hitler Youth itself. But once this shift had taken place, and as Hans’s judgment matured, his disillusionment and disgust with National Socialism grew rapidly, now aided and abetted by Robert Scholl.

  After this, events that previously Hans had ignored or dismissed began to have new meaning. A young Ulm teacher had recently disappeared; later the Scholls learned that he had been forcibly placed before a band of Storm Troopers, each of whom marched past him and on order spat in his face. Afterward he was hauled off to a concentration camp and never heard from again. The Scholl children asked the young teacher’s mother what he had done to deserve such treatment. “Nothing, nothing,” she told them in despair. “It’s just that he was not a National Socialist, he simply couldn’t go along with it—that was his crime.”

  Once disillusionment had occurred, no matter how or why, its effects became an inevitable part of daily life. With each passing day, Hans could not avoid noticing things about National Socialism that distressed him, things that corresponded to his father’s warnings and the whole tenor of his humanistic upbringing. Suddenly, Robert Scholl’s children were asking him about concentration camps, and whether the Führer could truly be aware of their existence. They were echoing the tendency of most people, whenever a new sign of Party corruption or brutality was revealed, to repeat the phrase, “If only the Führer knew!”

  “Could he not know of them,” Robert Scholl replied, “if they have already existed for years, built by his closest associates? And why hasn’t he used his power to disband them immediately? Why have those released been forbidden to talk about their experiences, under threat of the most terrible punishment?

  “This is war,” he told Hans. “War against the defenseless individual, war against the happiness and freedom of his children—a terrible crime.”

  Inge Scholl had the feeling, she reported later, of having lived in a clean and beautiful house, only to discover that unspeakable things were taking place in the cellar, behind locked doors.

  For every question the children asked him, Robert Scholl had an answer ready. Hadn’t Hitler kept his promise to eliminate unemployment? “No one contests that,” he told them. “But don’t ask, by what means! He has created the war industry, he’s building barracks. . . .” The quality of the relationship between father and children was changing. If their discussions took place after dinner, Robert Scholl might say, “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go and earn a jail sentence.” Hans and the others knew what he meant: their father was about to tune in to a forbidden radio station—perhaps Beromünster in Switzerland, or the BBC, both forbidden after the outbreak of war, in 1939—to get the kind of news that the Nazi media never reported.

  Walking along the banks of the Danube with his children one spring evening, Robert Scholl suddenly turned to them. “All I want is for you to walk straight and free through life, even when it’s hard,” he whispered harshly.

  Although nearly three years separated Sophie Scholl from her older brother Hans, their relationship was special, enriched by a tacit understanding. What they experienced together was not so much a meeting of like personalities as of complementary ones; their rapport became one of the givens of their lives.

  When Hans joined the Hitler Youth, it was in keeping with their relationship that Sophie should follow suit. Her love of nature had also seemed compatible, at an early stage, with the BDM, the Hitler Youth’s female auxiliary: she enjoyed the camping-out and the hikes; she loved to watch the flicker of burning logs at night. Although she could write of nature in a lyrical manner not all that unusual for German youth, her descriptions also could reveal a sensuality and a desire for independence that deviated considerably from the social conventions established for women of the time:

  I could shout for joy that I am so alone, with the wild, rough wind drenching my body. I’d like to be on a raft, standing upright above the gray river, whose hurrying water the wind cannot disturb. . . . The sun comes out and kisses me tenderly. I’d like to kiss it back, but I forget that immediately because now the wind has leaped on me. I sense the wonderful firmness of my body; I laugh out loud for joy because I can offer the wind such resistance. I feel such strength in me.

  Sophie could sense, even at an early age, that she was not meant for a life dominated by marriage and motherhood; her letters to Fritz indicate an avoidance of such a role, which others probably assumed for her without question. By following Hans’s example, Sophie would soon participate in a life that offered greater meaning to her, a life in which her actions had effect in the world.

  And yet brother and sister differed from one another. While Hans seemed an impetuous if dark-haired version of the Aryan model, Sophie was thoughtful, even reserved at times, and her appearance was not quite right. One of the sayings of the day was “German girls wear braids!” It was consistent with the ideologically crucial role the Nazis had given the peasant, and was in keeping with their criticism of “decadent” female interest in cosmetics and elegant hairdos.

  Sophie’s hair was dark, like Hans’s, but she also sported a Bubikopf, a short, boyish bob. And she did not show the ready conformity of a girl being raised ultimately for Aryan motherhood; she was too firm in her own convictions, and quick to pick up inconsistencies in the attitudes of others. At times she tried to disguise her seriousness, but friends and family often noticed that certain look on her face, when she thought no one was observing her. It was a troubled look, withdrawn and concerned; it put frown lines in her forehead. It seemed to suggest depth of character, a wisdom that is surprising in one so young.

  Not that Sophie was morose. One of her teachers had even once called her frivolous—a misreading of Sophie’s laughter when she heard what she considered to be an absurd ideological comment intoned solemnly in class. She could not help but laugh—there were often contradictions that she found impossible to ignore. Even at the age of twelve, Sophie was already aware of anomalies that would take Hans years to recognize. “Why,” she asked her sister Inge about a favorite Jewish friend, “isn’t Luise Nathan allowed to be a BDM member, with her blond hair and blue eyes, but I am, with my dark hair and eyes?”

  Sophie’s relationship with Robert Scholl held a depth of mutual understanding similar to the rapport she shared with Hans; it con-tinued to exist despite the pain she caused her father by joining the BDM. Although he made his position on National Socialism clear—she could observe his distress when he watched Party displays on the cathedral square outside their Ulm window, or when he argued with Hans—her father had not tried to prevent her from joining. He knew that opponents to tyranny could never be created by force, only by personal experience.

  To Robert Scholl, his youngest daughter Sophie remained “the wisest of my women,” even when she had become a member of the movement. She must have begun to sense the truth very early, because indoctrination di
d not seem to have an impact on her. One time she went on a BDM field trip with Inge; it was State Youth Day, which meant songs and marching in uniform. After some of the festivities were over, Sophie and Inge took a walk through the woods on their own. In a secluded spot they came across a tent of boys not in uniform. Intrigued by the sight of youngsters who were not a part of the brown-shirted crowd, the girls struck up a conversation, which they turned to the subject of National Socialism, hoping to learn more about these boys by being provocative. But one of the boys suddenly grew silent. Sophie realized the reason in a flash: he was Jewish. Apparently he wouldn’t talk for fear that these girls in uniform would tell their leaders about an “underground” Jewish youth group located nearby.

  On another occasion, after Hans had returned from Nuremberg, an important BDM leader arrived from Stuttgart to conduct an evening of ideological training for the girls in Ulm. When the members were asked if they had any preferences for discussion, Sophie suggested they read poems by Heinrich Heine, one of her favorite writers. But the leader and her BDM comrades were aghast at the suggestion, and shocked by the personal revelation that she had unwittingly made: her suggestion meant that she still had on her bookshelf “degenerate” Jewish writings that had been burned and banned by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels in 1933. Despite the pressure and the possibility of repercussions, Sophie’s uncanny sense of self came through.