Sophie Scholl and the White Rose

by Annette Dumbach

  Apart from his family, Huber really cared about one other group of people: his students. They were the hope of the future, the only one he had left. He would transmit to them, as a professor, as a mentor, the German values that mattered; they would not totally be destroyed by barbarians and bombs. He loved his students in a distant, intellectual way, not with intimacy. But some, like his doctoral student Katharina Schüddekopf and Hans Scholl, would be invited to share coffee and cake with the family. But he never called anyone outside the family Du the intimate form of “you.”

  Kurt Huber was to come into contact with the White Rose through Hans Scholl. Although Sophie, Willi, Traute, Alex, and Hans all heard him lecture, none of them had met him personally. Although he was different from them in age, temperament, and in political and social outlook, he shared with them the rich heritage of the German intelligentsia. Kurt Huber and the others in the White Rose would undoubtedly have agreed on the definition of the perfect human being—a German definition, perhaps the one written by the nihilist-existentialist poet-philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in the year before he vanished into madness.

  Nietzsche held up as the standard of perfection that Olympian figure of German letters, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Given their backgrounds, their middle-class values and education, each member of the White Rose would have affirmed that Goethe was the model they would strive to emulate, however imperfectly.

  Nietzsche had written that Goethe was a man who

  did not desert life, but placed himself at its center. He was not fainthearted but took as much as possible upon himself, into himself. What he aimed at was totality; he fought against separating reason from sensuality, feeling, will. He disciplined himself into wholeness, he created every gesture, self-controlled, having respect for himself as a creature who might dare afford the whole range and wealth of being natural, of being strong enough for such freedom, the man of tolerance, not from weakness but from strength, because he knows how to use to his advantage what would destroy an average character. Such a mind, having attained real freedom, lives in the very center of things with a joyful and confident acceptance of fate, lives in the faith that only the particular in its separateness is objectionable, and that in the wholeness of life everything is affirmed and redeemed. He no longer negates.

  In June 1942 Kurt Huber was invited to a reading evening at the home of a Frau Doktor Mertens. Perhaps to get his mind off the war and the bombing raids, perhaps in the diminishing hope of finding some like-minded colleagues somewhere, he decided to go.

  A publisher was present, Heinrich Ellermann, and a writer and former actor named Sigismund von Radecki, a convert to Catholicism who was extremely adept and witty when he read prose aloud; it was almost as if one were at the theater. Some medical students had also somehow gotten themselves an invitation.

  After discussing the literary theme that had been read aloud, the talk, to the chagrin of the hostess, turned to politics. No one present knew each other well; the subject was dangerous.

  There was a general consensus that German culture was decaying. Someone ventured the opinion that the only way to cope with the situation—the Nazis—was not through protest but simply by hanging on, tending to one’s cultural obligations and tasks as scholars and just waiting out the nightmare.

  At that point a medical student broke in with a caustic remark. A dark and scowling Hans Scholl said, “Why don’t we rent ourselves an island in the Aegean and offer courses on world-views?” Considering his lowly status in relation to the academics and professionals who were present, one gets a glimmer of Hans’s enormous self-assurance and also of the passion that made him break out of the usual docile-student role required in traditional German society.

  The atmosphere must have turned glacial after such an imper-tinence. But Kurt Huber was becoming flushed. He was not offended by what Hans said; on the contrary, he was suddenly galvanized. He spoke loudly: “Something must be done, and it must be done now!”

  The silence was earsplitting. Hans stared at the older man with admiration. Their eyes met; neither would forget. When the evening ended they spoke to each other briefly, introduced themselves, and said they would meet again.

  The circle had been formed. Although Kurt Huber knew nothing about them, he was now almost a member of the White Rose.

  “

  TEN

  BEHIND THE SCENES that summer, the creative and the logistic aspects of the White Rose operation did not go smoothly. The contents of the leaflets were stringently criticized by the few people who knew the identity of their authors.

  One such person was Manfred Eickemeyer, who lent Hans his atelier on Leopoldstrasse in Schwabing. Eickemeyer worked as an architect for the German Generalgouvernement in occupied Poland, with offices in Cracow. He had seen the deportations that were taking place all over the country, and had watched the mass shootings of Jews. He described to Hans and Alex how special squads of the SS had rounded up men, women, and children, loaded them into trucks, brought them to the outskirts of town, ordered them to dig trenches, and then shot them in groups—one group after another, falling in layers on the bodies underneath. He told them that the Wehrmacht stood by and did nothing to stop it.

  He was shaken and appalled. On his intermittent trips to Munich, he would talk about it; he wanted the world to know what was going on—especially the German people. Informing people, he thought, was the only way to stop it.

  Eickemeyer was in town when the second leaflet appeared, during the third week of June 1942. Among its passages:

  . . . since the conquest of Poland 300,000 Jews have been murdered in a bestial manner. Here we see the most terrible crime committed against the dignity of man, a crime that has no counterpart in human history. . . . Is this a sign that the German people have become brutalized in their basic human feelings? . . . that they have sunk into a terminal sleep from which there is no awakening, ever, ever again?

  It seems that way . . . if the German does not arouse himself from this lethargy, if he does not protest whenever he can against this gang of criminals, if he doesn’t feel compassion for the hundreds of thousands of victims—not only compassion, no, much more: guilt. . . . Everyone shrugs off this guilt, falling asleep again with his conscience at peace. But he can’t shrug it off; everyone is guilty, guilty, guilty!

  The leaflet ends with some aphorisms by Lao-tsu and the request to circulate the information.

  Apparently Manfred Eickemeyer was quite disappointed in what he read. No detailed descriptions of the atrocities, no names or places, no specifics were given. The “Jewish Question” was summed up in a few sentences. He told that to Hans, told him that the leaflets were not informative or pragmatic; he wondered why precious space was given to Lao-tsu instead of to the brutal facts. It might not have been an easy critique for Hans to accept; he was pouring his heart out with every word.

  Nevertheless, the cranking out of the pages, the procurements and the mailings, still went on, now with the help of Sophie and Traute. Eickemeyer himself still had sympathy enough for the enterprise to contribute a few hundred marks and to continue allowing the White Rose to use his atelier, a not inconsiderable danger to himself.

  It may have been the third leaflet that was sent by the group to Professor Kurt Huber. It arrived in the mail at his home a few days before he received an invitation to a reading evening at the residence of Alexander Schmorell, whom he did not know.

  What he read must have shocked, upset, and provoked him; words like these had not been circulated or spoken aloud in the last ten years of his life.

  “Our state is the dictatorship of evil,” the leaflet began; it went on to describe the Nazi leadership as “criminals and drunkards.” The language got rather violent, almost out of control, and then subsided a bit in order to discuss how to fight back. The only means of oppos-ition, the leaflet said, was “passive resistance”—an expression the authors must have heard in relation to Mahatma Gandhi and the independence movement in India.
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br />   The leaflet continued, obviously now trying to be more precise about means and ends. The goal of the White Rose:

  to bring down National Socialism, and in this struggle we can’t shrink from any means, any act. . . . A victory for fascist Germany in this war would have inconceivable and terrible consequences. The first concern of every German is not the military victory over Bolshevism, but the defeat of National Socialism.

  Some of the “means” then suggested:

  . . . sabotage the armament industries, sabotage every assembly, rally, ceremony, and organization sponsored by the National Socialist Party . . . sabotage in every scientific and intellectual field involved in continuing this war—whether it be universities, technical colleges, laboratories, research stations or technical agencies.

  These were dangerous, if still imprecise, suggestions. Kurt Huber’s mind must have been agitated and confused as he set off that evening in June to Harlaching, to the Schmorell villa. Hans Scholl had come by to invite him personally, and even though he did not know what to expect, he could not refuse the opportunity to join his students.

  He was met at the streetcar stop by Hans and Traute Lafrenz; they stood with bicycles, waiting to escort him to Alex’s house. As they walked into the quiet residential area, its homes surrounded by trees in bloom and high walls that hid lavish gardens, Traute abruptly turned to Huber and asked if he had received a White Rose leaflet. He must have paused; the question, so pointed and direct, from a young woman he had never met before, must have startled him. He undoubtedly was put on guard: Kurt Huber was a man who did not find independent, sophisticated, and intellectual women sympathetic. He was comfortable with women who accepted the role that “nature” had given them: the comforter, the nurturer, the provider of sanctuary for the struggling man in a hostile world. As he saw it, women were there to pour coffee for the men as they talked over the serious issues of the world; women were not there for intellectual companionship or friendship, but for spiritual succor.

  He replied to the young woman that yes, he had received a leaflet. He didn’t say much beyond that, except that he doubted the impact of the leaflet was worth the terrible risks.

  They had by now arrived at the Schmorell home. Since the winter of 1941, with his parents’ consent, Alex had been hosting “reading and discussion evenings” at their home. Now it was summer; the garden was in bloom, and before entering the living room, the guests were clustered about the open veranda. After a few minutes, they entered the elegant salon. Tasteful and comfortable couches and armchairs were set in a semicircle for the discussion; a grand piano glistened on one side of the room, and the gold of an enormous icon, illuminated with special lights, gleamed in the pale evening.

  It may have been difficult for Kurt Huber to reconcile the affluence, the glowing good taste, and the young, handsome people now surrounding him, with the austerity of his own life and the grim issues of war and destruction that tormented him day and night.

  Huber’s guardedness continued during the evening; he contributed little of significance to the discussion. Talk turned to politics, to the endless apocalyptic prognoses of the future, to the latest outrage at the university or on the war front. All the White Rose members, among others, were present: apparently they were waiting for Kurt Huber to open up and express his real feelings; perhaps he would join them.

  But he was put off. Often an incautious man in the open arena of the lecture hall, now he was distant, holding back, sitting amidst these young and lively students in the quiet elegance of a private home. He finally did speak, lamenting the decline of intellectual standards in the schools and the universities, and about the suppression of real scientific investigation in virtually all fields, but he lapsed again into silence, and left the gathering early.

  The others were disappointed, probably Hans most of all; but determined as he was, Hans Scholl would try again.

  The fourth and last leaflet in the short explosion of printed fireworks in Munich appeared in mid-July, just before the group disbanded for the more than three months’ semester break.

  Practical measures were put aside for the time being; the authors talked at length about Christian obligations to resist, and quoted extensively from Novalis, a romantic writer. The leaflet assured its readers that “the White Rose is not in the pay of any foreign power,” and added that recipients should have no fear that their names appeared on any secret lists, for they had been chosen randomly from telephone directories.

  The last line of this leaflet was to become the summing-up, the distilled essence of what the Munich group was all about: “We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace!”

  ELEVEN

  WHILE THE LEAFLETS were being cranked out at night, life went on as usual during the days of a languid Munich summer. The city looked drearier than before; the facades of the buildings were dingy in the sunlight, and the streetlamps were blacked out at night in the event of air attacks.

  But the ostensibly casual, if hectic, life of the medic-students continued. They attended lectures, went to their clinics, met at the Lombardi for a cheap but good Chianti after a concert or a stroll in the English Garden. All of them played instruments and were quite good at it; occasionally some of them came together as an informal chamber-music group. Some weekends they took trips into the mountains; the long hikes and fresh air helped relieve the tensions and exhaustion. On the way back to Munich, they might make a stopover at Christel’s home in Ruhpolding.

  The easy and pleasant student life they led was only apparent; their nerves were crackling with tension. In reality, there was only pretense and secrecy and lying to their families and friends, and never enough time to sleep and still show up at all the places they were supposed to be.

  Alex Schmorell turned to his first love, art, to distract himself from medical studies, the tedious routine at the base, and the terrible nighttime stress. He took courses with his friend Lilo Ramdohr, in drawing and sketching. Often the two of them would invite a Munich tramp to Lilo’s flat to pose for them in exchange for a hot meal and a bath. Alex’s penchant for bums and vagabonds, although he didn’t know it and probably never would, had already turned into a grotesque nightmare: much later it was revealed that the posing tramp was a Gestapo informer. The young man-of-the-world with the Russian soul and the light charm could no longer smile so easily; the pressure was taking its toll. He turned to sculpting as his true vocation, spending hours alone, creating form and life out of masses of clay. “Without work (and by work I mean only sculpting),” he wrote about this time, “Germany is the most unbearable situation I can imagine for myself. A terrible restlessness is my most stubborn companion. . . . Only work is peace.”

  Alex’s restlessness was to end soon enough; before the end of July he was sent to Russia, along with Hans and Willi and their friends Jürgen Wittenstein and Hubert Fürtwangler from the medic-student company. At last Alex was going home; as a medic in a German uniform, he would finally see the ravaged and suffering land he considered his real home.

  Rumors that the company would be posted to the front during the semester break coursed through the Bergmann School early in the month; they were confirmed by mid-July.

  It was time to dismantle the White Rose operation; depression overcame the small circle of friends. They had finally begun to act, and the entire painstaking and difficult process had to be stopped before they had gotten anywhere. The machine had to be taken away, all vestiges of the project hidden or destroyed. Hans, Willi, and Alex were going to Russia.

  A date of departure was announced, then changed, then a new one issued. They had to pack, see families, store books, and say farewell—temporarily, one hoped—to friends.

  They decided to throw a farewell party, and with Manfred Eickemeyer’s consent, it was held at his atelier. About fifteen people were invited to the studio in Schwabing on the evening of July 22. The men were due to leave at seven the next morning on a troop transport train
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  Among the guests were Kurt Huber and all the members of the White Rose. Pillows and chairs were scattered around the large, open studio; tea, cake, wine, and schnapps were served. As night fell, the blackout curtains enhanced the intimacy and bohemian atmosphere.

  As usual at these kinds of affairs, art and literature were discussed by the group at large. As the evening wore on, the talk turned to polit-ics. Alex, perhaps flushed with wine and the idea of Russia, was more voluble than expected; he said that passive resistance was the only way to deal with the present realities. Suddenly Kurt Huber spoke up, loudly and nervously; he agreed with Alex that “active” resistance was impossible, that they were not “industrial workers who could go out on the streets and strike.” No other means were available, he said, except for intellectuals to boycott Nazi functions and wait out the death of fascism. He was beginning to tremble all over.

  Hans disagreed with Kurt Huber. The bitter isolation of indi-viduals from one another would not prepare the ground for an overthrow of the regime. The only way, he said, was working together, in groups, cooperatively.

  The discussion heated up, talk turned to the destruction of German cities in the air raids. What would be left of that great cultural tradition they wanted to save from the Nazis if they were bombed into the ground?