Sophie Scholl and the White Rose

by Annette Dumbach

  Please make copies and pass them on!

  * Public safety is the supreme law.

  The Fourth Leaflet

  There is an old maxim that we tell our children: “He who won’t listen will have to feel.” But a wise child will not burn his fingers a second time on a hot stove. In the past weeks Hitler has chalked up successes in Africa and in Russia. As a result, optimism on the one hand and shock and pessimism on the other have grown within the German people; this is quite inconsistent with traditional German apathy. One hears among Hitler’s opponents—that is, the better segments of the population—exclamations of despair, words of disappointment and discouragement, often ending with the question: “Will Hitler now, after all . . . ?”

  At the same time, the German offensive in Egypt has ground to a halt, and Rommel has to bide his time in a dangerously exposed position. But the push into the East proceeds. This apparent success has been purchased at the most horrible expense of human life, and so it can no longer be counted an advantage. Therefore we must warn against all optimism.

  Who has counted the dead—Hitler or Goebbels? Neither of them! In Russia thousands are lost daily. It is the time of the harvest, and the reaper cuts into the ripe grain with wide strokes. Mourning enters the country cottages, and there is no one to dry the tears of the mothers. Yet Hitler feeds lies to those people whose most precious belongings he has stolen and whom he has driven to a meaningless death.

  Every word that comes out of Hitler’s mouth is a lie. When he says peace, he means war, and when he blasphemously uses the name of the Almighty, he means the power of evil, the fallen angel, Satan. His mouth is the foul-smelling maw of Hell, and his might is at bottom accursed. True, we must conduct the struggle against the National Socialist terrorist state with rational means, but whoever today still doubts the real existence of demonic powers has completely failed to understand the metaphysical background of this war. Behind the concrete, visible events, behind all objective, rational considerations, we find the irrational element: the struggle against the devil, against the servants of the Antichrist. Everywhere and at all times demons have been lurking in the dark, waiting for the moment when man is weak; when of his own volition he leaves his place in the order of Creation as founded for him by God in freedom; when he yields to the force of evil, separates himself from the powers of a higher order and, after voluntarily taking the first step, is driven on to the next and the next at a furiously accelerating pace. Everywhere and at all times of greatest trial men have appeared, prophets and saints who cherished their freedom, who preached the One God and who with His help enabled people to reverse of their downward course. Of course man is free, but without God he is defenseless against evil. He is like a rudderless ship, at the mercy of the storm, an infant without his mother, a cloud dissolving into thin air.

  I ask you as a Christian who is wrestling to preserve his greatest treasure, if you are hesitating and playing games of intrigue and procrastination in the hope that someone else will raise his arm in your defense? Has God not given you the strength and will to fight? We must attack evil where it is strongest, and it is strongest in the power of Hitler.

  So I returned, and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power; but they had no comforter.

  Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet alive.

  Ecclesiastes 4.

  True anarchy is the generative element of religion. Out of the annihilation of every positive element she lifts her glor-iously radiant countenance as the founder of a new world. . . . If Europe were about to awaken again, if a state of states, a teaching of political science were at hand! Should hierarchy then . . . be the principle of the union of states? Blood will stream over Europe until the nations become aware of the frightful madness that drives them in circles. And then, struck by celestial music and made gentle, they approach their former altars all together, hear about the works of peace, and hold a great celebration of peace with fervent tears before the smoking altars. Only religion can reawaken Europe, establish the rights of the peoples, and install Christianity in new splendor visibly on earth in its office as guarantor of peace.

  Novalis

  We wish to make very clear that the White Rose is not in the pay of any foreign power. Though we know that the power of the National Socialists must be defeated by military means, we are trying to facilitate a renewal of the severely wounded German spirit from within. This rebirth must be preceded, however, by a clear recognition of all the guilt with which the German people have burdened themselves, and by an uncompromising battle against Hitler and his all too many minions, party members, Quislings, and the like. The chasm that separates the better section of the nation from everything identified with National Socialism must be split wide open wide with brute force. For Hitler and his followers, no punishment on this earth can be commensurate with their crimes. But out of love for coming gener-ations we must make an example after the conclusion of the war, so that no one will have the slightest urge to attempt such actions ever again. And do not forget the petty scoundrels in this regime; note their names, so that none will go free! Having played their part in these abominable crimes, they should not be able to rally to another flag at the last minute and then act as if nothing had happened!

  To reassure you, we want to add that none of the addresses of the readers of the White Rose are recorded in writing. They were picked at random from directories.

  We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace!

  Leaflets of the Resistance

  The Fifth Leaflet

  A Call to All Germans!

  The war is nearing its inevitable end. As in the year 1918, the German government is trying to focus attention exclusively on the growing threat of submarine warfare, while in the East the armies are constantly in retreat and invasion is imminent in the West. Mobilization in the United States has not yet reached its peak, but already it exceeds anything that the world has ever seen. It has become a mathematical certainty that Hitler is leading the German people into an abyss. Hitler cannot win the war, only prolong it. The guilt of Hitler and his minions exceeds all measures. Retribution draws closer and closer.

  But what are the German people doing? They will not see and will not listen. Blindly they follow their seducers into ruin. Victory at any price! is inscribed on their banner. “I will fight to the last man,” says Hitler—but in the meantime the war has already been lost.

  Germans! Do you and your children want to suffer the same fate that befell the Jews? Do you want to be judged by the same standards as your critics? Are we to be forever the nation which is hated and rejected by all mankind? No. Dissociate yourselves from National Socialist gangsterism. Prove by your deeds that you think otherwise. A new war of liberation is about to begin. The better part of the nation will fight on our side. Cast off the cloak of indifference you have wrapped around you. Decide before it is too late! Do not believe the National Socialist propaganda that has driven the fear of Bolshevism deep into your bones. Do not believe that Germany’s welfare is linked to the victory of National Socialism for good or ill. A criminal regime cannot achieve a German victory. Separate yourselves in time from everything connected with National Socialism. In the aftermath a terrible but just judgment will be meted out to those who stayed in hiding, who were cowardly and hesitant.

  What can we learn from the outcome of this war—this war that was never a national war?

  Imperialistic designs for power, regardless from which side they come, must be neutralized for all time. Prussian militarism must never come to power again. Only in a generous, open cooperation among the peoples of Europe can the groundwork be laid for genuine reconstruction. All centralized power, like that exercised by the Prussian state in Germany and Europe, must be eliminated. The coming Germany must be f
ederalistic. At this juncture only a sound federal system can imbue a weakened Europe with new life. The working class must be liberated from its degraded conditions of slavery by a reasonable form of socialism. The illusory structure of autonomous national industry must disappear. Every nation and each man has a right to the goods of the whole world!

  Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the protection of individual citizens from the arbitrary will of criminal regimes of violence—these will be the bases of the New Europe.

  Support the resistance. Distribute the leaflets!

  The Sixth Leaflet*

  Fellow Students!

  Our people are deeply shaken by the fall of our men at Stalingrad. Three hundred and thirty thousand German men were senselessly and irresponsibly driven to their deaths by the brilliant strategy of our World War I corporal. Führer, we thank you!

  The German people are in ferment. Will we continue to entrust the fate of our armies to a dilettante? Do we want to sacrifice the remaining German youth to the base ambitions of a Party clique? No, never! The day of reckoning has come—the reckoning of German youth with the most abominable tyrant our people have ever been forced to endure. In the name of German youth, we demand Adolf Hitler’s state restore our personal freedom, the most precious treas-ure that we have, out of which he has swindled us in the most wretched way.

  We grew up in a state where all free expression of opinion has been suppressed. The Hitler Youth, the SA, and the SS have tried to drug us, to revolutionize us, and to regiment us in the most promising years of our lives. “Philosophical training” is the name given to the despicable method by which our budding intellectual development is smoothened in a fog of empty phrases. A system of selection leadership, at once unimaginably devilish and narrow-minded, trains up its future party bigwigs in the “Castles of the Knightly Order” to become Godless, arrogant, and conscienceless exploiters and executioners—blind, stupid hangers-on of the Führer. We “Intellectual Workers” are the ones who should put obstacles in the path of this caste of overlords. Soldiers at the front are regimented like schoolboys by student leaders and trainees for the post of Gauleiter. Gauleiters insult the honor of women students with crude jokes, and the German women-students at the university in Munich have given a worthy response to the besmirching of their honor. and German students have defended their female comrades and stood by them. . . . This is the beginning of the struggle for our free self-determination, without which intellectual and spiritual values cannot be created. We thank the brave comrades, both men and women, who have set us such a brilliant example.

  There is only one slogan for us: fight against the Party! Get out of all Party organizations, which are used to keep our mouths shut and hold us in political bondage! Get out of the lecture halls run by SS corporals and sergeants and Party sycophants! We want genuine learning and real freedom of expression. No threat can intimidate us, not even the closure of universities and colleges. This struggle is for each and every one of us, for our future, our freedom, and our honor under a regime that will be more conscious of its moral responsibility.

  Freedom and honor! For ten long years Hitler and his comrades have squeezed, debased, and twisted those beautiful German words to the point of nausea, as only the ignorant can, casting the highest values of a nation before swine. In the ten years of destruction of all material and intellectual freedoms, of all moral fibre in the German people, they have sufficiently demonstrated what they understand by freedom and honor. The frightful bloodbath has opened the eyes of even the stupidest German—it is a slaughter that they orchestrated in the name of the “freedom and honor of the German nation” throughout Europe, and which they start anew every day. The name of Germany will remain forever stained with shame if German youth do not finally arise, fight back, and atone, smash our tormentors, and set up a new Europe of the spirit. Women students! Men students! The German people look to us! Just as in 1813 when the people expected us to shake off the Napoleonic yoke, so in 1943 they look to us to overthrow the National Socialist terror through the power of the spirit. Beresina and Stalingrad are aflame in the East; the dead of Stalingrad beseech us!

  “Up, up, my people, let smoke and flame be our sign!”

  Our people stand ready to rebel against the National Socialist enslavement of Europe in an impassioned uprising of freedom and honor.

  A map of Germany showing the major cities where the leaflets were distributed

  * This leaflet was written after the devastating defeat of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad (January 31st 1943). It proved to be the last leaflet published by the White Rose. Hans and Sophie Scholl were spotted distributing it in Munich University on February 18, 1943, and were immediately arrested by the Gestapo.

  Soon after their execution, Hans Leipelt, a fellow member of the White Rose, and a chemistry student at the university, together with his future fiancée Marie-Luise Jahn, started reproducing it on a portable typewriter with the new heading, “Despite everything, their spirit lives on!” They distributed them in Munich and in Hamburg, and arranged for copies to be smuggled out of Germany, as a result of which the Royal Air Force reproduced them and dropped them in their thousands all over Germany. Hans and Marie-Luise were arrested in October that year, and Hans Leipelt was later executed.

  Draft of The Seventh Leaflet*

  Stalingrad! 200,000 German brothers were sacrificed for the honor and glory of a military fraud. The conditions of surrender set down by the Russians were not disclosed to the soldiers who were sacrificed. For this mass murder, General Paulus received the Oak Leaves [medal]. High-ranking officers escaped the slaughter in Stalingrad by airplane. Hitler refused to allow those who were trapped and surrounded to retreat to the troops behind the line. Now the blood of 200,000 soldiers who were condemned to death accuses the murderer named Hitler.

  Tripoli! They surrendered unconditionally to the British Eighth Army. And what did the English do? They allowed the citizens to carry on living their lives as usual. They even let the police and public officials remain in office. Only one thing did they undertake systematically: they rid the great Italian colonial city of every barbaric leader. The annihilating, irresistible superpower is approaching on all sides with absolute certainty. Hitler is less likely than Paulus to capitulate: there will be no escape for him. And will you be deceived like the 200,000 who defended Stalingrad in a hopeless cause, to be massacred, sterilized, or robbed of your children? Roosevelt, the most powerful man in the world, said in Casablanca on January 24, 1943: “Our war of extermination is not against the common people, but against the political systems.” We will also fight for an unconditional surrender. More contemplation may be needed before a decision can be made. This is about the lives of millions of people. Should Germany meet the same fate as Tripoli?

  Today, Germany is completely encircled just as Stalingrad was. Will all Germans be sacrificed to the forces of hatred and destruction? Sacrificed to the man who persecuted the Jews, who eradicated half the Poles, and who wanted to annihilate Russia? Sacrificed to the man who took away your freedom, peace, domestic happiness, hope, and joy, and instead gave you soaring inflation? This will not, this must not happen! Hitler and his regime must fall so that Germany may live. Make up your minds: Stalingrad and defeat, or Tripoli and a future of hope? And once you have decided: act!

  The hand-cranked mimeograph machine used to duplicate the leaflets

  * This draft of the seventh leaflet (presumably written after President Roosevelt’s radio broadcast on February 12 announcing the Allies’ agreement at the Casablanca Conference to demand Germany’s “unconditionable surrender”) was never finished or distributed. When Hans and Sophie Scholl were seized by the Gestapo on the morning of February 18 1943, Hans was carrying a draft of this leaflet in his pocket, which he had ripped to shreds in the hope of destroying the incriminating evidence. When questioned by the Gestapo, Hans insisted it was given to him by an unknown student in the crowd.

  However, the Gestapo
matched the handwritten draft to a sample of Christoph Probst’s writing found in Hans’ apartment, and immediately arrested him. Over the weekend, the Gestapo worked to piece it together, and the day before Christoph was executed, they showed him the reconstructed leaflet, carefully transcribed, asking him to confirm their work and fill in any gaps. The Gestapo transcript, including Christoph’s additions, was discovered in East German archives after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and appears in full here for the first time.

  APPENDIX 2

  Indicted Persons Related to the White Rose

  First Trial

  February 22, 1943, Munich

  Christoph Probst

  Hans Scholl

  Sophie Scholl

  Second Trial

  April 19, 1943, Munich

  Helmut Bauer

  Heinrich Bollinger

  Willi Graf

  Eugen Grimminger

  Heinrich Guter

  Falk Harnack

  Hans Hirzel

  Susanne Hirzel

  Kurt Huber

  Traute Lafrenz

  Franz Josef Müller

  Gisela Schertling

  Alexander Schmorell

  Katharina Schüddekopf

  Third Trial

  July 13, 1943, Munich

  Harald Dohrn