Sophie Scholl and the White Rose

by Annette Dumbach

  So it was that in their years of adolescence and early maturity the members of the White Rose had witnessed the choking off of all voices of moral protest. They had seen their own churches grow silent and rigid as the spirit animating them departed under the aegis of brute force.

  One of the next significant attacks on the churches came at a time when the Nazis were at the pinnacle of victory at war and popularity at home: from June 1940 till the invasion of Russia in June 1941. It was in this heady year of unrelieved triumph that the Nazis struck at Catholic Bavaria—a move that even ardent believers in the Führer agreed was counterproductive. In April 1941, Gauleiter Adolf Wagner of Upper Bavaria and Munich—who also held the post of Bavarian minister of culture—announced that all crucifixes were henceforth to be banned from schools. The reaction, for Germans under National Socialism, was violent. Schools in rural areas struck, meetings were held by enraged parents who had never before visited their children’s schools, and petitions and protest letters were written and signed without hesitation. People were not afraid to speak up. In some alpine villages farmers strode into schools and threw the mandatory picture of Adolf Hitler out of classroom windows.

  Everyone agreed that it had been a stupid move made by an exceptionally stupid and insensitive gauleiter; Wagner was tolerated by Hitler and his cronies mainly because he was one of the loyal “old fighters,” a participant in the legendary moment of creation when the Nazi brownshirts in Munich had battled with Socialists, Com-munists, and even occasionally with the police, back in the “decadent days” of the Weimar Republic. Adolf Wagner was so loyal he even sounded like Adolf Hitler; when he spoke on the radio, listeners were not sure if they had unexpectedly tuned in on the Führer. And in spite of Hitler’s reciprocal feelings, he did countermand Wagner’s crucifix decree. One thing had been made clear during this episode: Bavarians might accept persecution of Jews and all political oppos-ition, or at least look the other way when it happened, but when their own deeply felt religious traditions were at stake, they were prepared to fight.

  Toward the end of this period, in the summer of 1941, rumors began to spread throughout the country about special secret programs that were going on in mental hospitals and other institutions: rumors concerning murder. The idea of purifying the race, of preventing physical malformations through heredity and “cancerous growths” in the Volk community, were certainly not new in the Third Reich. One of the first laws passed by the National Socialists was called “The Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases”; it went into effect July 14, 1933, six days before the Vatican signed the concordat with Hitler. Among those to be sterilized were manic depressives, cripples, epileptics, and those with hereditary forms of blindness. Decisions to sterilize were made locally, and appeals could only be forwarded to special “eugenics courts.” But until the outbreak of war, the killing of the mentally and physically “defective” had not been fully instituted. While German troops were overrunning Poland and Russia, people at home were gradually becoming aware that “useless eaters” were being “weeded out”—this vocabulary had already become a part of school curricula and bureaucratic life, referring to Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals, as well as the mentally ill, the phys-ically handicapped, the incurably ill, and the old.

  Families all over the Reich related incidents to one another about friends or neighbors or colleagues who had close relatives in nursing homes and hospitals, and who had received official letters about the “sudden death” of the patient. In the usual peremptory tone, the bureaucratic message told the families to come immediately to collect the urn of ashes “or else it would be destroyed.” And as usual, the letters implied that the bureaucracy, the state, was doing the families a favor.

  By August 1941, as many as eighty thousand Germans had been murdered in the euthanasia program. In many cases they had been experimented on by physicians who had been trained in traditional medical schools and universities; these doctors tried a variety of poisons, gas, and injections to see which worked most quickly and effectively—this was the “humane” aspect of the program. The SS provided sealed “gas-vans” in which the exhaust from the engine was pumped into the van’s interior. This program was to serve as a model for Hitler’s genocide of the Jewish people.

  The Scholl family in Ulm heard more details about the euthanasia program from a Protestant sister, a friend of Mrs. Scholl’s who had herself been a religious nurse during the First World War. This sister worked in a nearby home for mentally retarded children. In agony she related what happened at the home to Magdalena Scholl. One day the SS came with a convoy of trucks, entered the building, and began pushing all the children out to the open vans. The sisters stood dumbstruck, utterly at the mercy of the armed men in black. The children did not understand; they were confused but not afraid. They asked the sisters where they were going. The head nurse said in despair, “You are going to heaven.” The children laughed with delight and waved as they disappeared down the road.

  The provincial bishop of the Lutheran church in the southwestern state of Württemberg, a Dr. Wurm, wrote an angry letter to Reichsminister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick. He said that the local population saw smoke rising from the crematorium near the nursing home in Marbach. He noted that wounded veterans of the First World War, epileptics, and “other people capable of working” were “involved.” The Catholic bishop of Limburg also protested to the minister of justice, sending along a copy to Minister Frick; he talked about the killings at Hadamar, a nursing facility, where the death toll had reached about ten thousand. He said the children in the area would stand and watch the hospital buses go by their villages in the direction of the home and would comment, “Here come the murder wagons.” They taunted each other while they played, saying that if they did not behave, they would be taken to “the baking ovens.”

  The Catholic bishop of Münster, Clemens August (Count von) Galen, could bear no more. He had long been a critic of the Nazis, and as far back as 1934 had spoken out against their racial policies. That July, in 1941, he stood up in his church and thundered his outrage at a program that was “against God’s commandments, against the law of nature, and against the system of jurisprudence in Germany.” He roared at his congregation, “These are our brothers and sisters!” and asked them how they expected to live if the measure of their lifespan was economic productivity. No one’s life was safe any longer, he said, and he then asked who now could have confidence in his doctor.

  The bishop inveighed against the seizure of monasteries, convents, and churches, and warned the people that “an enemy at home”—meaning the Gestapo—existed. But, he added, nothing must be done by force. The only way was “spiritual and moral opposition.” The people must “remain strong, be steadfast.”

  Bishop Galen’s sermons, transcribed and duplicated, began to circulate all over the country, appearing in home mailboxes—and not only those of Catholics. A copy arrived at the Scholl home one day with no return address on the envelope. It was an incredible voice of courage in the darkness: that a churchman dared to speak up and that others dared to take down his words and disperse them throughout the land was an event whose significance cannot be fully comprehended out of its time and place. Hans Scholl happened to be home in Ulm at the time, after serving with the occupation army in France; he was, at that point, already a medic-student at the University of Munich. He read the sermon over and over again. “Finally someone has the courage to speak,” he said to his family, and then added, “and all you need is a duplicating machine.”

  The Nazis had a choice: arrest Galen and the few others who protested, or stop the killing. They chose the latter. “Euthanasia” was officially halted, although throughout the war years persons with “defects” continued to disappear, including the babies of Polish and Russian forced laborers. Galen was left untouched—for the moment: Joseph Goebbels promised his friends that the bishop would be hanged as soon as final victory was achieved.

  As victory did follow victory in t
he plains of Russia, somehow there still remained small pockets of anger and niches of dissent in the Third Reich, and not least of all in Munich. Young men like Hans Scholl and Christoph Probst—neither of them Catholic—had begun to turn to theological and philosophical writings in their quest for means to cope with the ever-growing barbarism. They could not understand how their country had fallen into this chasm of terror and butchery; the heritage of another Germany was still strong in them. They found some guidance—and in some ways were able to identify with the authors—in Augustine’s Confessions, in the works of Thomas Aquinas, who obliquely justified the “murder of tyrants,” and in French Catholic writers like Pascal and Claudel. Perhaps if they had lived in Prussia they would have turned to other writers and confessional perspectives, but in Munich and in the south it seemed natural to seek answers in the body of Catholic thought that was most immediately available.

  Hans’s rage, and Willi’s terrible confusion, and Christoph’s sense of helplessness had been growing steadily for years. The war had not yet started, Kristallnacht had not yet taken place, when Hans expressed his deep revulsion for the people in Vienna, at their ecstatic jubilation as Hitler’s forces marched into their city on March 12, 1938, to attach Austria to the Reich. “I don’t understand people,” Hans wrote in his diary after listening to the howling roar of the masses over the radio; he was nineteen at the time. “I want to go out to some huge and empty plain and be completely alone.”

  Perhaps in ordinary times these young people would have remained unaffected by religious beliefs—with the exception of Willi Graf. But the times were extraordinary; the world was going straight to hell; no one, inside or outside of Germany, seemed able or willing to stop it, and they strained with every fiber of their beings to find a meaning to life. Without a religious structure it was difficult; without God it was becoming impossible.

  Christoph Probst was not born a Catholic, although he was to be baptized one, minutes before his execution. His short life seems like a terribly abbreviated Tolstoy biography. He moves from a world of urbane sophistication, from a family of freethinkers and sensitive intellectuals into an atmosphere of rustic simplicity, rollicking babies, and an austere faith in the Christian God. His father, Hermann Probst, came from a merchant family and had inherited private means. He was able to devote much of his time to scholarly pursuits; he was an esthete who did not want to be tied down to aca-demic or civil-service posts. In his last years of life, he was particularly attracted to Eastern religions, and studied Persian and Sanskrit in order to be able to read classical testaments in the original.

  The Probst home was filled with friends, books, and ideas that were to be driven out of Germany after 1933. The bookshelves were filled with volumes concerning the Mahabharata and the Bhagavad Gita. Among Hermann Probst’s friends in Munich were artists like Paul Klee and Emil Nolde—whom he introduced to each other. Both were later to be banned, with Klee hounded into exile. Nolde painted young Christel with his sister, Angelika; the portrait of the two children who were so deeply attached to each other was prominently displayed in the Probst living room.

  Christoph’s parents were divorced when the children were small; both remarried and they remained on good terms. Christel and Angelika were sent to progressive and liberal boarding schools around Bavaria, and to gymnasium (humanistic high school) in Nuremberg and then Munich—where Christel first met Alex Schmorell. In the twenties, these schools had kept aloof from the enthusiasms and conformities of the various youth movements that were becoming raucously nationalistic. Even in the mid-thirties, when Christel was at school, many of these institutions managed to evade linkage with the Hitler Youth or the forced feeding of their pupils with Nazi ideology.

  Christel was formed not so much by crushing disillusionment, as was Hans, or by anarchistic revolt, as was Alex, but by humanistic Western values that were part of his everyday life as he grew up; until 1936 he was insulated in a direct, personal way from Nazi brutality and terror. But then, when he was seventeen, his father, in a depression, committed suicide. We cannot fathom Christel’s innermost reactions, but regardless of his own feelings and grief, he did try to comfort his stepmother. Her life was now in serious danger; she was Jewish and no longer had the protection of an “Aryan” husband. Mrs. Probst continued to live in their home in the rural community outside Munich; the villagers must have had high regard for her, for they tried to make sure that she was not molested or harassed by the Nazis.

  Christel loved both sets of parents. At no time did he express anger or resentment at the divorce or at the boarding-school existence he led, although it was by no means an ordinary childhood and adolescence by German middle-class standards. Unlike the British, the Germans have traditionally preferred to mold their children at home. The reality was that his home consisted of dormitories almost all his life, and that he and Angelika clung to one another as if holding on to a life raft. He never had a real and lasting home till he married Herta Dohrn when he was twenty-one.

  He passed his Abitur at the relatively early age of seventeen; he was then required to serve in the National Labor Service before entering university. He chose to study medicine, a choice made at least partly as an act of rejection of the Nazi sterilization programs, and he served simultaneously, as did Alex, Hans, and Willi, as a medic in the military—in his case, in the Luftwaffe.

  A tall, good-looking, and athletic youth, Christoph radiated an essential sweetness and kindness that was combined with intellectual curiosity, introspection, and an astounding maturity. He was never afraid to show tenderness and love. He believed that “the life of the mind,” or Geistesleben (which can also be translated as “life of the spirit”), was the focal point of a man’s being. His interests in literature, music, and the arts began to expand into philosophical regions as the years of Nazi power wore on. Learning and knowledge had meaning only if they related to ethical behavior; for Christoph there never seemed to be a cleavage between the word and the deed.

  “It’s a mistaken conclusion that the intellectually developed person can take less because of his greater tenderness,” Christel wrote his half brother in 1942. “My viewpoint is that the intellectual can take more—even if he is physically handicapped and is suffering. Precisely because he is part of the kingdom of the spirit can he live fully and completely.”

  In 1940, Christel married Herta Dohrn. At first the young couple lived with Christoph’s Jewish stepmother in Zell bei Ruhpolding. Children came quickly: by 1942, at the age of twenty-three, he had two sons, and a daughter would follow shortly. He was completely paternal; he adored his children. Through them he had found a haven, a place of warmth and laughter and predictability—one that seemed to have been lacking all his life. On weekends when he was off duty, he spent a great deal of time with his children and with his father-in-law, Harald Dohrn, an educator and scholar, and a passionate convert to Catholicism. It was during this period that Christel met Hans Scholl; they were introduced by Alex, who had known Christel for years and considered him his closest and dearest friend.

  Clean-cut, with a wide grin, pipe-smoking (as was in vogue among all the young men), Christel seems like the quintessential Lancelot: supple and strong, kindly, virtuous, and fervent—but without the need to prove himself. If one dares speculate who among the White Rose was truly loved by the others, then Christoph’s face appears, caught in a snapshot, head lifted in semiprofile, laughing up at his little son slung on his shoulder: he is the unanimous focus of a deep and genuine affection.

  In the summer of 1941, Hans Scholl introduced himself to the distinguished Catholic editor Carl Muth; Hans appeared at the door of his home in the Munich suburb of Solln carrying a letter of introduction provided by Otl Aicher, who had become acquainted with Muth not long before. There was an immediate attraction between the fra-gile, white-haired scholar and publisher of seventy-four and the darkly intense student of twenty-three. This friendship and the relationships catalyzed by it were crucial in the evolution
of the White Rose.

  Carl Muth lived without a family in a small house nearly bursting with books, journals, and manuscripts. He had founded the journal Hochland (Highland), as a voice of Catholic progress, in 1903. It was totally banned by the Nazis in 1941, shortly before Hans met Muth. It must have been a cruel blow to a man who had managed, since 1933, never to mention the name of Adolf Hitler in his publication, and in all those years had gotten away with it. Now and then issues had been confiscated, but his right to publish had not been challenged. By focusing on historical subjects like Hellenic Greece, the Middle Ages, and the Enlightenment—as did those few serious anti-Nazi publishers still functioning in Germany—he had made indirect and adroit attacks on the regime; its intellectual capacities were generally too limited to even notice—until 1941.

  Muth’s home, with its small garden, was to become a sanctuary for Hans, as well as for Sophie and Inge Scholl, who were introduced to Muth by Hans soon afterward. Hans was utterly fascinated by him, undoubtedly having heard about his reputation for integrity, depth, and wisdom before finding a way to meet him. Muth had struck a chord in Hochland that echoed: its circulation, which was never large-scale or intended to be, had risen from five thousand in 1933 to twelve thousand in 1939.

  The Scholls came by to see the old publisher regularly. They all felt about him as Hans did, regardless of their Protestant affiliations, and they seemed to cling to him and his private world of inner exile as if it were their whole anchor to sanity. Muth’s magic was not only his philosophical sweep of knowledge or his deep hatred for National Socialism, but his youthful, almost playful sense of ethical and metaphysical exploration. He not only listened to young people, he wanted to live and share their experiences; he wrote letters in detail to explain his point of view when doubts seemed to arise. As Inge Scholl later put it, Muth swung “between excommunication and sainthood.” Hans meant a great deal to the old scholar too, perhaps more than any other young person: he represented the “other” Germany, the young Germany that had miraculously remained uncorrupted. The Scholls’ presence in his home was a deep source of satisfaction and even joy.