Sophie Scholl and the White Rose

by Annette Dumbach

  Sippenhaft in Willi Graf’s case meant the arrest and detention of his sister Anneliese. She was put in a cell with Christoph Probst’s sister Angelika.

  After the initial round-the-clock cross-examinations were over at the Wittelsbach Palace, Willi Graf was taken to another Munich prison, Neudeck. During one of the exercise rounds in the yard when political prisoners were given their airing, Willi got a chance to speak briefly to Franz Müller, the Ulm high-school student who had helped Sophie Scholl and Hans Hirzel print and circulate leaflets.

  Afterward, they found themselves in the same cellblock; it soon became obvious that regardless of what had been done to him, Willi’s spirit had not been broken. In a few mumbled words the two young men considered a breakout; they had even gotten so far one day, as they stood in line at the water tap, to plan how to overwhelm the guards. But then Willi was abruptly transferred to another prison.

  The Schmorells were also imprisoned after their son’s capture. Alex, when he was betrayed in that cellar in Schwabing, had not known that Hans Scholl was already executed. The group as a whole had agreed, a long time before, that if any one of them was captured, he would take full responsibility for all the White Rose actions. It was no longer necessary for Alex to do that, but unaware of the true situ-ation, he did. He denied nothing; he refused to involve anyone else. The Gestapo kept at him day and night; brilliant lights were beamed into his eyes constantly as three voices questioned him in irregular, unpredictable patterns.

  Falk Harnack, after his arrest, saw Alex being escorted down the corridor of the Wittelsbach Palace. Alex’s eyes were burning holes, his face inflamed; as they passed each other, they “greeted each other mutely.”

  Kurt Huber, probably as an especially sadistic form of punishment for a sensitive, ailing professor, was put in a cell for some of the time with criminals, not political prisoners. He was stripped of his status as a university professor and civil servant, and his doctorate was declared null and void. This was not only a crushing humiliation for a man whose life was academic pursuits, but meant that Clara Huber and her children lost all rights to a pension and were left destitute. There is also some evidence—observations by other detainees in the case who saw Huber after interrogations—that he was physically beaten, perhaps worse.

  Regardless of his condition, the professor began to work feverishly in his cell, between sessions with the Gestapo, on articles about folk music and, most important, on his book about Leibniz. The plunge into intellectual creativity was probably the only way he could have endured, and he thought—hoped—that his writings could somehow be of financial assistance to his family.

  He did not know—and for some unknown reason, no one was allowed to tell him—that Clara Huber was also in Sippenhaft, along with his sister.

  Mrs. Huber had returned from food “hamstering” in the country, to find out from her distraught daughter that her husband had been taken. She ran around the city looking for lawyers, advice, support; there was none. Friends and neighbors crossed the street to avoid her; shopkeepers she had known for years ignored her presence. She went to the university and stopped a professor who had been fairly close to Huber. He hissed at her as if she were a leper: “My God, get away from me! Nobody must see you with me!”

  Unlike her husband, Clara Huber was ready when the Gestapo came; she knew in advance that she would be arrested. She had tried to bring food and toilet articles to the prison the day after her husband’s arrest. The guards refused her admission, but she overheard their conversation: one of them said that she was going to be picked up too.

  She came home, prepared mending, sewing, and darning that needed to be done, and got some warm clothes together. They came soon after that, and put her in a cell with Kurt’s sister, across the row from Angelika Probst and Anneliese Graf; she, too, got to know Else Gebel. She was interrogated seven hours at a stretch, but she really knew very little, and fortunately the men in charge were “rather stupid” and their questions not difficult to evade. She was made to write letters to her husband as if she were at liberty, and that “all was well.”

  Birgit Huber was ordered by the Gestapo not to tell anyone that her parents were in prison, but that they had gone on a trip. The twelve-year-old child was watched and followed at all times.

  Once, in a sudden and inexplicable act of mercy, she was permitted to visit her father—on two conditions: she was not to tell him that her mother was also imprisoned, and she was “not permitted to cry.” She promised she would do as they ordered.

  It was a brief interlude of controlled anguish for both of them. As she walked up the stairs to leave, he stood below, looking up at her. She turned back; his eyes were on her, watching her, drinking in her every movement, her every gesture. She knew she would never see him again.

  But she didn’t cry.

  TWENTY-TWO

  ON SUNDAY, April 18, 1943, New Yorkers and other Americans sitting down to their Sunday breakfasts opened the New York Times and read, “Nazi Slur Stirred Students’ Revolt—Woman, Brother and Another Soldier Beheaded for Issuing Anti-Nazi Tracts” (see appendix 9). This was the first news of the White Rose to reach the American public; despite the wartime blanketing of information, the story had somehow been leaked, reaching Stockholm only a week or so before. The Times article told of the riot over Gauleiter Giesler’s insulting remarks to female students, and reported that the day following his speech, Munich house walls bore the inscription, “Revenge for Stalingrad! We want our liberty back!” Kurt Huber’s leaflet was paraphrased, with its condemnation of the National Socialist suppression of freedom of thought and speech, and its call to German youth, in the name of liberty and honor, to establish a new Europe.

  The next day, in Munich, the second trial of the White Rose was held. On April 19, one day before the Führer’s next-to-last birthday, a green paddy wagon wended its way to all the prisons of Munich, picking up the fourteen men and women who would be tried. In the van, it was almost like a reunion; some of the accused had not seen each other since their arrest some two months before, and others met for the first time. The van was sealed shut, but rays of sunlight and glimpses of the city in spring came through the narrow slits. “Beautiful Munich,” Falk Harnack murmured, somewhat ironically. Kurt Huber missed the irony, replying somberly, “Whom the gods love, they punish.”

  The trial was not conducted in haste: two months of interrogations, analyses of files, and cross-references of dossiers were all laid out neatly for the prosecution and the judges. It was to be a show trial, a clean sweep of the White Rose. The three major defendants were Alexander Schmorell, Willi Graf, and Kurt Huber. All were charged with high treason.

  The Palace of Justice was cordoned off by the police as the fourteen prisoners got out of the van.

  Again Roland Freisler had come from Berlin, again he presided over the special Munich session of the Volksgerichtshof, the People’s Court. The courtroom was packed, this time not only with brown and black uniforms; even the lord mayor of Munich was in attendance, as well as generals of the army and the Luftwaffe.

  The trial started at nine in the morning and went on for fourteen hours; the defendants were given no refreshments, except for mugs of water brought to them by a kindly guard when everyone else was on a lunch break.

  After the accused each took a seat between two guards, the five judges filed in, three of them in uniform. Roland Freisler, as always ablaze in scarlet, seated himself in the center of the panel of judges.

  The names of the accused and the charges against them were read aloud. In addition to the main defendants, accused of aiding and abetting them in their subversive activities, were Eugen Grimminger from Stuttgart; Heinz Bollinger and Helmut Bauer, Willi’s contacts in Freiburg; Hans and Susanne Hirzel from Ulm; Franz Müller and Heinrich Guter, also from Ulm; Traute Lafrenz, Gisela Schertling, and Katharina Schüddekopf, all students in Munich; and, finally, Falk Harnack. Most of the defendants were in their early twenties; two were middle-aged, and fo
ur were teenagers.

  As the White Rose leaflets were read out loud to the court, an angry undertone began to swell in the spectators’ ranks. Sud-denly Kurt Huber’s attorney, selected by Huber because of his useful connections in the Party and government, shot out of his seat, his arm raised in the German salute. “Heil Hitler!” he cried. He addressed Freisler; he said he could not serve as defense attorney in this case, he had to withdraw. As a German and as a guardian of German law, he could not tolerate listening to insults against his Führer.

  Freisler was gratified. He gave his consent for the attorney to leave. The man bowed stiffly at Freisler, turned on his heel, and marched out of the courtroom—to a great round of applause.

  The show was under way. Freisler ordered another attorney present to represent Kurt Huber. This lawyer protested that he didn’t know the case, had not examined the evidence. Freisler waved away the objections.

  Kurt Huber was visibly shaken by this turn of events. It was the second enormous blow he had received that day. A prominent aca-demic, well-considered in Party circles because of his studies on race, was supposed to have served as his character witness, but he had notified the court he could not attend; he was “out of town.”

  The first major defendant to face the court was Alexander Schmorell. He tried to explain his emotional attachment to Russia and his Russian mother. “Drivel!” shouted Freisler, “and what did you do on the front?”

  “I took care of the wounded as was my duty as a physician in training,” Alex replied. He then explained why he could not shoot at Russians and why he had tried to refuse to take the oath to the Führer.

  At first Freisler drummed on the table impatiently, and then, hearing Alex’s explanation about why he felt “absolved” from the oath, he flew into a rage. “Traitor!” he screamed, pointing at the defendant. He went on shrieking and abusing him, and finally waved him away, dismissing him. Alex, haggard and pale, returned to his seat, sighing deeply.

  Willi Graf was summoned to the dock. He stood tall, pale, his features closed, his blue eyes remote. Freisler, for some reason, chose not to attack the stoic, tight-lipped young man. Willi said almost nothing in his defense, but Freisler remarked with begrudging admiration that Willi “had almost gotten away with it,” he had effectively evaded Gestapo questions. Freisler smiled at Willi, and then said teasingly, “But we are smarter than you after all!” He dismissed him.

  Willi sat down, his eyes blank; it was as if his spirit had left the chamber.

  Next came Kurt Huber. He had gotten over the shock about his defense attorney, and now, trembling slightly in all his limbs, he came forward and prepared the notes he had worked on for weeks as a defense speech. He stood erect and began to read it aloud. “I may state that the accusations do correspond to the spirit of my actions. I do not take a word back.” He tried to explain his sense of responsibility as a German professor: “I see it not only as my right, but my natural duty, to share in the molding of the German destiny. . . . What I had in mind was the awakening of students, not through organizing, but through the power of the sheer word, not to arouse them to acts of violence, but to give them insights into what heavy damage has been done to our political life.”

  His goals were, he said, “a return to our own basic values, to a state based on legality, to a return of trust between man and man.”

  Throughout the speech, Freisler was demonstrating his boredom and disgust. He cut in time and again. At one point he shouted, “No political tirades!” At another, he interjected, “I don’t know any Professor Huber or any Dr. Huber. I know the Defendant Huber. He doesn’t have the right to be a German. He’s a bum!”

  Huber went on with his speech: “I am staking my life to make this warning, to plead for a return [to German values]. I demand the revival of freedom for the German people. We don’t want to spend our brief lives in the chains of slavery, no matter if the chains are made from the gold of material abundance.”

  Then the professor’s tone changed; his voice grew quieter. “I am leaving behind a broken wife and two unfortunate children in misery and grief.” He looked up at the judges. “Won’t you at least allow my poor family a small stipend so that they can live in a manner that fits the rank of a German professor?”

  That was the nearest he came to asking for mercy. The words were greeted by a cold silence.

  Kurt Huber paused, then lifted his voice again. “The inner worth of a university teacher, the open and courageous professing of his beliefs and his views on the state, cannot be taken away from him in trials of high treason.” His voice was clear and rang through the chambers now.

  I acted as an inner voice had me act. . . . I take the consequences upon myself as expressed in the beautiful words of Johann Gottlieb Fichte:

  And you must act, as if

  On you and your actions alone

  The fate of the German matter depends,

  And the responsibility were yours.

  He turned and walked to his seat. Freisler was obviously bored; one of the other judges dozed off intermittently, but the proceedings continued. One after another, each defendant rose and had his interchange with Freisler.

  It seemed like the middle of the night—it was after ten—when Freisler and the four assisting judges went to chambers to decide on the verdicts.

  The tension rose in the courtroom; now all attention was focused again on Kurt Huber, Willi Graf, and Alexander Schmorell.

  The judges filed back. The sentences for the three were read. Death. There was silence, then the other defendants heard their verdicts: Eugen Grimminger, ten years; Heinz Bollinger and Helmut Bauer, seven years; Hans Hirzel and Franz Müller, five years; Heinrich Guter, eighteen months; Susanne Hirzel, six months; Traute Lafrenz, Gisela Schertling, and Katharina Shüddekopf, one year each. Falk Harnack was released, Freisler explaining that his special and difficult circumstances as the “only remaining son” in the Harnack family were “extenuating.”

  Dizzy from hunger, tension, and exhaustion, the prisoners were herded back into the green van and taken to Stadelheim. They were giddy, puffing frantically at cigarettes; the trial was over. Kurt Huber took out photographs of his children and stared at them.

  The van arrived in the prison yard. They were ordered out in groups: “Those sentenced to death, to the right side!” shouted a guard. “Those to prison, on the left!”

  Harnack was ordered to follow the three men walking to death row. They walked through the long corridor; on each cell a board was posted with the notice: “Death sentence.” Harnack noticed boxes outside each cell, intended to hold the condemned men’s clothing. They were to sleep naked, manacled.

  Harnack was ordered to go on. He grabbed Kurt Huber’s hand and said desperately, “It was not in vain.” He tried to reach Willi but the guards came between. Alex called out to him, “Give my best to Lilo, tell her I think about her often—”

  The gate slammed shut. Harnack was left alone in his cell, with instructions to report to Gestapo headquarters the next day. He paced all night, interrupted once when the peephole was pushed back and a mouth appeared. “Death sentence?” the mouth asked.

  “No,” Harnack replied. “I report tomorrow to the Gestapo.”

  “Have fun” was the laconic reply as the peephole cover slammed back. He continued pacing, tortured with uncertainty about his own fate and about his friends in the other cellblock.

  The next morning, he walked out of Stadelheim; for the moment, and maybe for a few hours, for some inexplicable reason, he was free.

  Alexander Schmorell, Kurt Huber, and Willi Graf did not know, and would never find out, that on the very day they had faced the hanging judges—April 19, 1943—the remaining Jewish inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto rose up against the Nazi murderers. The news would have helped them stand even straighter under the onslaught of abuse and degradation they endured that day; it would have helped warm them in their cells all the days that were left to them. When the powerless and the oppressed, no mat
ter how hopeless their situation, refuse to accept the will of their oppressors, we are all touched with grace.

  TWENTY-THREE

  THE THREE MEN waited in their solitary cells in Stadelheim; although they had been told by fellow inmates that each day they stayed alive was a form of victory, they had little faith in the petitions for clemency that had been filed on their behalf. The glimmers of hope were undoubtedly an even more terrible agony than waiting for death itself.

  Alexander Schmorell was gradually transformed; as he sat alone in his cell, his restlessness, his need to move on from place to place, activity to activity, slowly disappeared. He became quiet, almost serene. He had accepted death.

  He wrote his parents that “this difficult ‘misfortune’ was necessary to put me on the right road, and therefore was no misfortune at all. . . . What did I know until now about belief, about a true and deep belief, about the truth, the last and only truth, about God?”

  His defense attorney, Siegfried Diesinger, unlike so many of the other lawyers, did not forget Alex after the trial ended. He visited him as often as he could in his cell, and his respect for the young man grew with each visit. When he first came, he was upset and nervous at the idea of seeing a young man on the brink of a terrible death, but Alex’s serenity calmed him. The prisoner emanated an inner peace that affected the older man greatly. He told the attorney to inform his father “that I forgive Marie-Luise everything” (she was the young woman who had turned him in at the air-raid shelter). There was no rancor, no anger, no hatred left.

  On Sunday, April 25, only one week since its previous report of the White Rose executions, the New York Times contained another article on the group. The execution of three German students, it said, “furnished the first sure sign that German morale was affected not only by the military sledgehammer blows of Germany’s adversaries in the field but by the ruthless methods followed by the Nazi regime itself.”