Sophie Scholl and the White Rose

by Annette Dumbach

  Gisela Schertling, an attractive young woman whom Sophie had met at the castle-work camp during National Labor Service days, had also come to the university this semester, to study art history. Hans had always found her appealing, but now more than ever. Perhaps her rather serene and unruffled manner helped soothe his own inner tumult; the new liaison was probably a refreshing contrast to what had become a stormy relationship with Traute—which was now over. The group was probably surprised, but accepted Gisela into their midst—but not as a member of the White Rose. Traute continued her involvement, taking risks to spread the word of the White Rose in Hamburg and Vienna.

  Their double life was launched once again: lectures, clinics, roll calls, concerts; Willi took fencing lessons; he and Alex rehearsed the Messiah in the Bach Choir for the Christmas performance.

  Christoph Probst, who had not been assigned to the front, was transferred to Innsbruck with a Luftwaffe medic unit. His wife Herta was expecting their third child, and he was reluctant to leave Munich, which was close to his home, but he had no choice. This would mean that his sober judgments and sharp criticisms would no longer be available to Hans and Alex at a time of growing danger.

  The first issue at hand was how to proceed after a lapse of almost four months, although the stay in Russia had been a time of reflection and decision making for Hans, Alex, and Willi. Their outlook had changed; they wanted to break out of their Munich-student perspective and take on something larger, with more meaning and impact. They wanted to expand their activities to other German cities. They would build cells of resistance in major German universities; from there the word would go out to the German people, informing them about the realities from which they were sealed off—informing them that the war was lost even if the lies went on, and that they must, for the sake of their own dignity and conscience, now rise up against Hitler and the Third Reich. This new program required money—much more than they ever had before—and new members, to be recruited among friends and acquaintances in every city and town where they had connections.

  Most important of all, Hans and Alex felt, they had to link up with the national resistance movement. They knew now that one did exist. Listening to foreign broadcasts, they heard about the arrest by the Gestapo of Harro Schulze-Boysen and Arvid Harnack and scores of others, in Berlin, during August and September of 1942. A few hundred men and women were scooped up in a swift and terrifying move against the fluid resistance organization dubbed by the Gestapo “Die Rote Kapelle” (The Red Orchestra). The trials were held secretly; it was a subject not mentioned in the Nazi press; one never discussed it in public: if you knew about it at all, you would be under suspicion yourself.

  But for the White Rose, in spite of the horror of the arrests, the torture, the trials, and the imminent executions, the fact that the Rote Kapelle existed at all was immensely heartening. One of its leaders, Harro Schulze-Boysen, was an Oberleutnant in the Air Ministry; his mother-in-law, a countess, was a close friend of Field Marshal Göring himself. Arvid Harnack, coming from a distinguished family of scholars, was the other major figure in the clandestine circles working in and around Berlin. A fairly high-ranking official in the Economics Ministry, he had been primarily responsible for analyzing American and Soviet economic war plans.

  The unmasking of these well-known figures on the Berlin scene cre-ated a frenzied panic in Adolf Hitler: the enemies were no longer distant and formless abstractions called Communists or Social Democrats; now they were to be found right in his own lair, working in his minis-tries, scions of distinguished families he had almost come to trust.

  Die Rote Kapelle was a widely extended network of cells and groups; they carried out their activities not only in Berlin, but in occupied Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam, as well as in neutral Switzerland. They had begun their work in the thirties, and had even managed to survive the trauma of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Security Treaty, which temporarily turned those arch enemies, Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, into friends. They began their secret broadcasting after the invasion of Russia in 1941. Most of the members were secret Marxists and leftists of all sorts, as well as those we would call liberals. They disseminated underground newspapers and leaflets in the Berlin area, were in contact with the German Communist party—or what was left of it—in fac-tories in Berlin, and also had links with the foreign forced-labor communities living in barracks around the city. They helped forge papers and smuggle Jews and political fugitives out of Germany. Their major link abroad was with Soviet intelligence. They had key men placed in the higher echelons of the army, the Luftwaffe, and the navy, and were able to pass on reliable information to the Soviets on Nazi war plans.

  They were betrayed by a parachutist from the Soviet Union who was caught by the Abwehr, German counterintelligence, and turned over to the Gestapo. He broke under torture and the Red Orchestra was totally shattered.

  This was the first real information Hans and Alex were able to obtain about an organized resistance in Germany, and furthermore, one that had extended into the loftiest ranks of the German High Command.

  The destruction of the network was a devastating blow to the German resistance movement. It had taken years to build, years of scrupulous planning, enormous caution, and training for its participants—not only in dissembling, but in coping with the tremendous risks involved, as well as in how to conduct oneself under torture and cross-examination. The men and women involved had lived a life of lies and deceit for almost a decade.

  When Arvid and Mildred Harnack went on a visit to the United States in the thirties, at a time when Arvid still was considered a rising star in the Economics Ministry, their American friends pleaded with them not to return to the Third Reich. They refused to listen; many thought that Arvid’s success had gone to their heads, that they had become Nazis. It was only when their terrible executions were made known that their friends abroad finally understood.

  But to the handful of young Munich students, alone and without contacts, the news of these events was a wind that buoyed them up. There was resistance high up in the Wehrmacht, in the government itself. They were determined to somehow make contact.

  Through Alex they found the link: his artist friend Lilo Ramdohr was very close to Falk Harnack, Arvid’s younger brother. Hans and Alex asked her to contact him at his military unit and set up a meeting. She agreed.

  At first they were concerned about traveling to Chemnitz, a city near the border of Czechoslovakia, where Harnack was stationed. They had no pass or travel permit. The controls on the trains were intensifying: the military police, the criminal police, and the Gestapo were regularly boarding trains and checking the papers of all travelers—especially trains passing near the borders of other countries. If they were picked up, they would be charged with desertion.

  But they made the decision to go, and from Hans and Alex’s point of view, the meeting in Chemnitz turned out to be a great success. Harnack considered himself a link among all the remaining resistance groups now that his brother was dead, and he welcomed the White Rose actions.

  After some fairly severe criticisms of the White Rose leaflets they had brought along, he explained that the resistance was being built—or rebuilt—as a kind of united front, representing the military on the right and ranging all the way to the Communists on the left.

  The young men agreed with this principle. They poured out a flood of questions: Was there really a military resistance? How big was it? What were they planning?

  Harnack was careful not to reveal names or locations, but he did say that there was a military group planning a putsch. They intended to kill Hitler and overthrow the government.

  Hans and Alex were overwhelmed. As much as they had talked and hoped, they never quite believed it would take place. Now they wanted to become part of the movement, to introduce themselves personally. They would go to Berlin.

  Harnack promised to see what he could arrange, and said he would keep in touch.

  With that special feeling of belonging to
something larger than oneself, they returned to Munich with new confidence and authority.

  Now they would build their own student and academic sub-network of the German resistance, creating university cells all over that would distribute White Rose leaflets or, if they chose, write their own.

  One of the first stops on the new road they took was Stuttgart. Hans and Alex paid a visit to Eugen Grimminger, a friend of Robert Scholl’s, who had been kind enough, as a certified public accountant (or roughly its German equivalent), to take over Mr. Scholl’s office while he was in prison. Grimminger was an avowed, if cautious, anti-Nazi. He was desperate to see the end of the war and the demise of the Nazis; his wife Jenny was a “full-blooded Jewess” and in constant danger of arrest and transport to a concentration camp.

  They could not risk having their conversation with Grimminger overheard; they could not meet in any enclosed space—whether it be a home, a café, a restaurant. Instead, they took a long walk through the city, finally ending up at a freight-loading area on the outskirts of town.

  Hans told Grimminger of their plans, spoke obliquely about a coming putsch, and apparently suggested, or at least hinted, that Grimminger could be of major importance in the new government after Hitler’s fall, perhaps selected for a key political office. Hans already knew that Grimminger had contacts with industrialists in Southwest Germany who were talking about a new postwar government.

  The three men paced up and down behind a deserted loading ramp, arguing intensely. Finally, on their way back to town, Hans asked Grimminger for a financial contribution. If they didn’t get money, he said, the plan could not work. Grimminger hesitated, pulling back. He asked for time to think it over.

  He did—and several weeks later made one of the most incautious decisions of his life. He sent a check to Hans for 500 reichsmarks, a considerable amount. But the check could be traced—and later it was—by the Gestapo.

  Traute Lafrenz went home to Hamburg, bringing with her a batch of White Rose leaflets to show her old friends Heinz Kucharski and Greta Rothe. Like the Munich group, these young people and their friends met regularly to discuss the arts and the dismal state of affairs. Unlike the White Rose, however, they were aficionados of American swing and jazz.

  This kind of American music had a secret, cultlike life of its own in Nazi Germany among certain groups of youths. Because it was officially frowned on and prohibited as a “racially inferior product” of the Afro-American blacks, it exerted a magnetic allure. Its free rhythms, its wild expression of feeling in sound, and its erratic and improvised beat charged up young people and drove them to find records, listen to them together, and become almost embryonic cells of conspiracy. The contrast between Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, and Louis Armstrong and the eternal drumbeat of German military marches was so enormous that the very admission that one admired this alien form of music was a subversive statement.

  At one time, Goebbels had distributed a film in Berlin showing American blacks dancing in a completely uninhibited way; the purpose of its release was to show the German public the degraded and “animal-like” behavior and movements of the black race. The film showings were always sold out; some young people went to see it ten or fifteen times. They came out smiling, they felt alive; it was an experience they would never forget. Goebbels took the film off the market, although he continued to privately screen American movies, especially Hollywood musicals, for his own pleasure.

  In any event, Traute Lafrenz’s friends read the leaflets with interest, said they would consider circulating them, but first would have to talk the idea over with others in the group. Some of them turned out to be willing; later, they would become known as the “Hamburg Branch of the White Rose.”

  Although not directly involved in White Rose affairs, Jürgen Wittenstein, the medic-student who had shared front-line experiences with Hans, Willi, and Alex in Russia, agreed to go to Berlin and contact Helmut Hartert, another mutual acquaintance, who was studying at the university there. Hartert, as it turned out, was much more cautious than Hans Scholl, and although he agreed to support the Munich group and build up a “cell” in Berlin, he wanted to write his own leaflets. He did not agree with the antimilitary tone of the White Rose. He told Wittenstein that one could not let down one’s side when they were fighting for their lives, but he was willing to write leaflets urging the overthrow of the Nazis. He did get a duplicating machine and set to work.

  In early December, Hans and Alex paid Kurt Huber a call at his home in the Munich suburb of Gräfelfing. The time was ripe to tell Huber the truth about the authors of the White Rose leaflets. When they did, the professor was surprised, but was still skeptical about the usefulness of leaflets when more drastic action was needed. In the small heated room where his daughter Birgit was doing her homework—the only heated room in the house—he told the young men: “If blood doesn’t flow it will not work!” He went on to say that the Wehrmacht was the only institution capable of destroying the Nazis. Hans replied that the White Rose had contacts in Berlin with people connected to the military. Huber was astounded; he had known that there were resistance groups in the army, but he didn’t know any details. Hans told him about the plans for a putsch. The professor became excited; this was good news indeed; and yes, now he certainly would support the White Rose.

  The circles were widening. Another man won over by the persuasiveness of Hans Scholl was Josef Söhngen, owner of a bookshop on Maximilianplatz, right in the heart of the city. For the informed, his bookshop was the place to go if they wanted something by Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, or many of the other banned writers. It was also a place for like-minded, Einwandfrei—“reliable”—customers to meet, exchange news, and share rumors and ideas.

  Most of the White Rose group frequented the bookshop, but Hans became closer than the others to the proprietor, who was considered to be an eccentric bachelor. Söhngen lived alone in a flat over his shop, and there were times in the middle of the night when Hans would appear, exhausted and pale, collapse into a chair, ask for a glass of wine, and fall into a deep silence.

  Söhngen had connections with an art historian, Giovanni Step-anov, who lived on Capri and had links with the Italian anti-fascist underground. Söhngen agreed to set up a meeting with Hans the next time Stepanov was in Munich on a lecture tour. An inter-European resistance movement seemed in the offing; the prospects were heady.

  But it was not to be: the art historian did come to Munich, but during the Christmas holidays when Hans was home in Ulm. Stepanov was supposed to come to Munich again, in February 1943, but he ran into visa problems; the journey was postponed. When he did come again, it was too late: Hans Scholl was gone.

  With frantic energy and by trial and error, the group continued to develop. Sophie was put in charge of the treasury; she doled out the money where it was needed, and tried to keep some kind of records. When she went to Ulm on weekends or holidays, she worked together with the gymnasium student Hans Hirzel and his classmates Franz Müller and Heinrich Guter; they printed leaflets and mailed them out. The work was done behind the organ in the Martin Luther Church, where Hirzel’s father, who knew nothing about all this, was pastor.

  Willi Graf was less persuasive with his old friends from the Gray Order—Fritz Leist, Adalbert Grindl, and Hermann Krings. They all were studying in Munich, and Willi spent a good deal of time with them; they prayed together, discussed theological questions, and worked on revising the liturgy. But Willi’s friends were convinced that the ends do not justify the means, and that the use of force reduced the perpetrator to the level of the criminal. Hitler would be destroyed, they felt, by the very forces of war he had unleashed. They would not interfere in the process.

  Willi’s disappointments and possible self-doubts grew even stronger when he went home to Saarbrücken over the Christmas holidays with the intention of recruiting friends in the Saar and the Rhineland. At a reunion in Saarbrücken of one of the Catholic youth groups he had belonged to years before, he talked to man
y of his old comrades, now officers in the Wehrmacht. The general consensus among them was that the war must be won, and that something could be done about getting rid of the Nazis afterward.

  Willi was disheartened by this attitude, but he did succeed in making one useful contact at the reunion. Heinz Bollinger, an assistant to a philosophy professor at the University of Freiburg, spent some time talking with Willi. They sensed their isolation from the others and the mutuality of their opinions instantly. Willi visited him a few days later. Bollinger informed him that there were anti-Nazi professors in Freiburg, and that he and his colleague Helmut Bauer were establishing a small circle there.

  The young academician also introduced Willi to his brother Willi Bollinger, a medic stationed at the Saarbrücken military hospital. Willi Bollinger declared himself ready to distribute leaflets in the area, and showed Willi Graf the small depot of machine guns and pistols he had been accumulating.

  Because of the Bollingers, the trip had not been a total failure. Willi Graf returned to Munich somewhat discouraged. He was determined, however, to make further recruiting attempts in the Rhineland, and intended, as soon as possible, to get a duplicating machine to Willi Bollinger in Saarbrücken.

  Within a matter of two months—from November 1942 to early January 1943—the White Rose operation had been transformed from an isolated and quixotic action performed by idealistic and romantic students into an expanding network that was spreading through Southwest Germany, up to the Saarland, and was making tentative but promising leaps into the north, to Hamburg, and, most important, to Berlin.

  FOURTEEN

  THE GROUP reassembled in Munich in January 1943 after celebrating Christmas with their families at home.

  Now was time to write another leaflet, the fifth. Contacts had been made in other cities as well as in Munich, and some money had been raised. Now “the plan” was operational. It was a new year, a year of hope for the White Rose: they believed the Allied invasion was nearly upon them, and they had a new approach that was pragmatic and had meaning.