Sophie Scholl and the White Rose

by Annette Dumbach

  In Germany, the appeals for clemency dragged their way up to the highest echelons of the military. May passed into June, and finally word came back: “I reject all petitions for mercy.” It was signed by Adolf Hitler.

  July 13, 1943, was the date set for the execution of Kurt Huber and Alexander Schmorell. Willi’s name was not on that announcement.

  On that day, Alex was permitted to write to his parents:

  I’m going with the awareness that I followed my deepest convictions and the truth. This allows me to meet my hour of death with a conscience at peace. Think of the millions of young men who have lost their lives out in the field—their fate is the same as mine. . . . In a few hours I will be in a better life, with my mother, and I will not forget you; I will ask God to grant you solace and peace. Yours, Shurik.

  The lawyer came to see Alex that afternoon, to stand by him in his last hours. Alex was calm and reassuring; he said he not only accepted death but welcomed it, that if someone, like the guard, could die in his place, he would refuse. “I’m convinced,” he told the distraught attorney, “that my life has to end now, early as it seems, because I have fulfilled my life’s mission. I wouldn’t know what else I’d have to do on this earth.”

  Kurt Huber was working frantically, racing with time to complete the Leibniz book. After her release from prison, Clara Huber was allowed to visit him for ten minutes every fourteen days; she saw him four times before the execution. When the date was fixed, he sent a request to the People’s Court for a “short delay” so that he could finish the last two chapters of the book. The request was turned down.

  On July 13, he wrote a last letter to Clara and the children, thanking them for making his life rich and beautiful. “In front of me in the cell are the Alpine roses you sent. . . . I go in two hours into that true mountain freedom for which I’ve fought all my life. May the Almighty God bless you and keep you. Your loving father.”

  Execution was again scheduled for five in the afternoon, with Alex Schmorell going first.

  As the two men readied themselves for the end, they were told there would be an unexpected delay. Several SS officers had suddenly appeared at Stadelheim, informing the personnel that they were to be present at the executions. They had been ordered to observe the procedure and see how long it took for each man to die; they were to make suggestions on how the process could be lengthened or shortened, if desired. When they were told that the execution was not by hanging but with the guillotine, they were extremely put out. To make sure their visit was not a complete waste of time, they demanded a detailed explanation about how the mechanism releasing the ax actually functioned. Until the site visit was over, there would be no execution.

  Finally the officers left. The executioner was ready: at a signal, Alexander Schmorell, with his head high, walked across the courtyard to the small building.

  A few minutes later, Kurt Huber appeared and began crossing the yard, his leg dragging slightly. The chaplain who was watching this agonizing walk to death thought he saw Kurt Huber slip suddenly in his prison slippers, catch himself, then faintly smile. He disappeared through the door.

  After the terrible thudding sound, there was total silence. The priest, who had spent the afternoon with him, made the sign of the cross.

  But it was not over for Willi Graf. The Gestapo found significance in his trips to the Rhineland and the Saar and in his efforts to recruit old comrades from the Catholic youth movement. They wanted names; Willi gave them none. For months they interrogated him daily. He was the only one left. They played with him, promising to change his verdict to hard labor if he cooperated; they made threats against his family.

  Willi held on. Between sessions with the Gestapo, he read poetry and wrestled, as he always had, with “the ultimate question,” the exist-ence of a just God. He told himself that each day of agony was a day of hope; a day of life was a day of victory—a day closer to Allied liberation. The summer ended; it was fall again. Willi had been in solitary confinement for seven months. Suddenly the end came—with no warning.

  On October 12, 1943, just before Willi followed his friends through the courtyard to the open door beyond, he was able to write a letter to his family.

  On this day I’m leaving this life and entering eternity. What hurts me most of all is that I am causing such pain to those of you who go on living. But strength and comfort you’ll find with God and that is what I am praying for till the last moment. I know that it will be harder for you than for me. I ask you, Father and Mother, from the bottom of my heart, to forgive me for the anguish and the disappointment I’ve brought you. I have often regretted what I’ve done to you, especially here in prison. Forgive me and always pray for me! Hold on to the good memories. . . . I could never say to you while alive how much I loved you, but now in the last hours I want to tell you, unfortunately only on this dry paper, that I love all of you deeply and that I have respected you. For everything that you gave me and everything you made possible for me with your care and love. Hold each other and stand together with love and trust. . . . God’s blessing on us, in Him we are and we live. . . . I am, with love always,

  Your Willi

  The Graf family did not know of the execution that day. They found out when a letter they had sent to Willi was returned, stamped “deceased.”

  Today Willi Graf’s grave lies in an old cemetery in the center of Saarbrücken, his hometown—perhaps by coincidence, right near the graves of Russian forced laborers.

  Coincidence or not, Willi would have liked that.

  THE AFTERMATH

  ANOTHER TRIAL was held on the very day of Alexander Schmorell’s and Kurt Huber’s execution. The accused were all friends of the White Rose: Josef Söhngen, the bookstore owner; Harald Dohrn, Christoph Probst’s father-in-law; Wilhelm Geyer, an Ulm artist who was temporarily staying in the Schwabing atelier just before the Scholls were arrested; and Manfred Eickemeyer, the architect whose studio had been such a vital part of the White Rose operation.

  They all received three to six months in prison.

  After his release, Harald Dohrn took part in “Action Freedom,” a last-ditch resistance against the Nazis just before the Americans moved into Munich. Dohrn and his brother-in-law were seized by the SS and shot in the woods near Stadelheim Prison on the day the American tanks arrived. They are buried a few hundred yards away from Christoph, Hans, and Sophie.

  In the fall of 1943, about the time of Willi Graf’s execution, another chain of arrests took place, this time in Hamburg; the students arrested were “The Hamburg Branch of the White Rose.” They had taken up the resistance that had been so brutally cut off in Munich, reprinting and circulating the White Rose leaflets in North Germany.

  Hans Leipelt was one of that group, although he was studying in Munich. He was “half-Jewish,” one of the students who had found sanctuary in Professor Wieland’s Chemistry Institute in Munich. After Kurt Huber’s execution, Leipelt had taken up a collection in Hamburg and Munich for Clara Huber and her children. Mrs. Huber never met him; the money was secretly handed over to her by a priest in her neighborhood. Leipelt’s actions were reported to the Gestapo and he was arrested. After a year in prison, he was tried and sentenced to death. He was beheaded—like the White Rose, whom he had never met—at Stadelheim, on January 29, 1945.

  In all, seven members of the Hamburg group were executed. One of its more active figures, Heinz Kucharski, was given a death sentence in April 1945, but by that time the Allies were deep inside of Germany; Kucharski was able to escape from a train on the way to the execution site in the last days of the war.

  Fritz Hartnagel learned about the events in Munich when he received a letter in Poland from Mrs. Scholl saying that Sophie had been arrested; he managed to get permission to return to Germany. But when he telephoned from Berlin on his way to Ulm, he found only Werner at home, who told him that Sophie had been executed and the rest of the family was under arrest.

  Knowing Sophie had transformed Hartnagel. Af
ter the war ended, he married her sister Elisabeth; he became a judge, an adviser to youthful conscientious objectors, and an active member of the antinuclear movement.

  Robert Scholl was released from prison two years after the execution of his children; he was soon appointed mayor of the city of Ulm under the American occupation. His son Werner never came back from Russia, and his wife Magdalena, her heart strained beyond endurance, died not long after the war ended.

  Eugen Grimminger, also released from prison by the Americans, found that his wife Jenny had been taken to Auschwitz and murdered there in December 1943.

  Inge Scholl, who opened a progressive school founded on humanistic ideals after the war, dedicated herself to the preservation of the memory of the White Rose and, in particular, the role of her brother and sister. All of the surviving family members—Willi Graf’s sister Anneliese, Clara Huber and her daughter Birgit (who became a psychologist), Alexander Schmorell’s brother Erich and his wife, the Probst family, and the Hamburg White Rose survivors—strove to keep the spirit of the White Rose alive in publications, by granting interviews, and through the annual commemoration service held at the University of Munich every February 22, the anniversary of the first executions.

  The plaza in front of the university’s main building is named after Hans and Sophie Scholl, and the one across Ludwigstrasse is called Professor-Huber-Platz. In the university’s courtyard there is a white rose carved in marble; above it, the names of those whose lives were taken.

  But the status of individuals who resisted the National Socialist regime and were condemned as traitors was still ambiguous long after the war ended. The members of the White Rose were not specifically cleared until the 1980s, and some ex-Nazi judges were still serving in the court system well into the 1960s— including one of the judges who helped put the White Rose under the blade.

  Roland Freisler himself was killed in an Allied bombing raid over Berlin while the People’s Court was in session. Paul Giesler, the gauleiter of Munich, and his wife and children, committed suicide as the American troops approached the city. Jakob Schmid, the diligent custodian at the university, was arrested by the Americans and given a prison sentence. He immediately issued an appeal. He couldn’t understand, he said, why he was being punished for doing his duty. He would have arrested anyone disturbing the orderly functioning of the university premises, and had even arrested Nazi students who had distributed leaflets and defaced walls before 1933. If he had not arrested the Scholls, he claimed, he would have gotten into trouble and lost his job. He was a poor man who had worked hard all his life to support his family, and therefore had to do his duty. He had no idea that the Gestapo would be called, nor was he aware of the reward money available, nor did he expect a promotion. Moreover, he could not understand why he was in a POW camp, while the rector of the university and other high officials were walking around free, some still holding office. His punishment, he felt, was unfair and unjust.

  The name of the executioner at Stadelheim was Johann Reichardt. He had been at his job since 1924 and continued on under the Nazis; in the twelve years of the Third Reich, he had executed about three thousand political prisoners. Shortly after the war ended, he was reinstated. He was sent to the American war-crimes prison in Landsberg, where he hanged Nazis found guilty of crimes against humanity. He retired from his civil-service position somewhat later; he died quietly, a pensioner.

  Clara Huber, shortly after her husband’s execution, received a bill from the government for 3,000 marks—the cost of the execution, including “depreciation costs of the apparatus.” She was destitute and she never paid. Her pension and Kurt Huber’s rank and titles were restored under the American occupation.

  Falk Harnack had escaped the executioner. A special deal had apparently been struck between Freisler and the Gestapo: Freisler would let him go free and the Gestapo would stalk him, in hopes he would make contacts with other resistance groups. Several months after his release, Harnack was transferred from Chemnitz to the front lines in Greece; heavy fighting was going on between the partisans and the Wehrmacht, which was now on the defensive. Suddenly Harnack was ordered arrested—under the personal instructions of Heinrich Himmler. He was warned by one of his superiors and was just barely able to escape. He joined the partisans and fought with them till the German collapse.

  In spite of all the terrible executions, the indescribable tragedies, and the unrepented brutalities, the White Rose leaflets made their way throughout Germany and occupied Europe, bringing hope into the cells of condemned prisoners and into the last arena of humanity itself—the concentration camps. From Berlin they were also smuggled into Sweden and Switzerland, and from there were sent on to London.

  News of the White Rose, and the spirit of their resistance, reached the American public as well, despite the blanket of silence and Gestapo intentions. On August 2, 1943—three weeks after Alexander Schmorell and Kurt Huber had gone under the executioner’s blade, and while Willi Graf still lingered in prison, awaiting the same fate—an editorial appeared in the New York Times under the title “Young German Martyrs.” It concluded with the following words: “. . . these Munich students, few or many, representative or otherwise, rose gloriously . . . protesting in the name of principles which Hitler thought he had killed forever. In years to come we, too, may honor [them].”

  Once they reached the West, the leaflets of the White Rose were reprinted—now in the tens of thousands—and dropped from Allied aircraft over the cities of Germany.

  The Gestapo summoned Clara Huber one day to the Wittelsbach Palace to reproach her for this; she hadn’t known, till they told her, that Kurt Huber’s leaflets were being scattered by Allied planes. She left Gestapo headquarters secretly and deeply proud; she only wished her husband could have known that his words, instead of bombs, were raining over the cities he loved.

  The leaflets made people like Thomas Mann, in exile, weep with happiness. For those who read them or heard about them, inside or outside of Germany, they brought a sense of joy that is hard to express. They were testimony to the fact that there were Germans, locked inside the Third Reich’s fortress of death, who still cared, who did not look away, who stood up, who fought back.

  Ambassador Ulrich von Hassell, who himself would soon stand before Freisler to be reviled and sentenced to death for his complicity in the July 20, 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler, had this to say in his diary: “I have read the simple, splendid, deeply ethical national appeal which brought them to their death. . . . It is important for the future that such an appeal would have seen the light of day. . . . [They] died on the gallows, courageous and upright martyrs.”

  Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, a member of the nobility soon to be executed at Dachau for failing, at age sixty, to answer a civil-defense conscription call, saved a special place for the White Rose in his diary.

  I never saw these . . . young people. In my rural isolation, I only got bits and pieces of the whole story of what they were doing, but the significance of what I heard was such I could hardly believe it. . . . They died radiant in their courage and readiness for sacrifice, and thereby attained the pinnacle of lives well lived. . . . We will all of us, someday, have to make a pilgrimage to their graves and stand before them in shame.

  Ilse Aichinger, a poet, was a young woman at that time, living in Vienna; she was “half-Jewish.” Later, after the war, she tried to describe her reaction when she first heard about the White Rose. One day she saw a familiar sight, a wall poster proclaiming the names of people who had been condemned to death.

  “I read the names of the White Rose,” she recalled.

  I had never heard of any of them. But as I read those names an inexpressible hope leaped up in me . . . and I was not the only one who felt this way. . . . This hope—which made it possible for us to go on living—was not just the hope for our survival. . . . It helped so many that still had to die: even they could die with hope. . . . It was like a secret light that expanded over the land: it
was joy. I remember one day I went out on the street to meet a friend and he said: “Don’t look so radiant, they’ll arrest you!”

  We didn’t have much of a chance to survive, but that was not what it was about. It wasn’t survival. It was life itself that was speaking to us through the death of the Scholls and their companions. . . . You can live without owning anything. But you can’t live without having something ahead of you, ahead of you in the sense of something inside of you. You can’t live without hope.

  The impact of the White Rose cannot be measured in tyrants destroyed, regimes overthrown, justice restored. A scale with another dimension is needed, and then their significance is deeper; it goes even beyond the Third Reich, beyond Germany: if people like those who formed the White Rose can exist, believe as they believed, act as they acted, maybe it means that this weary, corrupted, and extremely endangered species we belong to has the right to survive, and to keep on trying.

  APPENDIX 1: LEAFLETS

  Leaflets of the White Rose

  The First Leaflet*

  Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized nation as to allow itself to be “governed” without any opposition by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to basest instincts. It is certainly the case today that every honest German is ashamed of his government. Who among us has any conception of the enormous shame that we and our children will feel when eventually the veil drops from our eyes and the most horrible of crimes—crimes that eclipse all atrocities throughout history—are exposed to the full light of day? If the German people are already so corrupted and spiritually crushed that they do not raise a hand, unquestioningly trusting in the dubious legitimacy of historical order; if they surrender man’s highest principle, that which raises him above all of God’s creatures: his free will; if they abandon the will to take decisive action and turn the wheel of history and thus subject it to their own rational decision; if they are so devoid of all individuality, have already gone so far along the road toward becoming aspiritless and cowardly mass—then, yes, they deserve their downfall.