They called themselves the White Rose, and their first mail drop was scheduled for a few months later, for that summer of 1942. There were no set rules or regulations for meetings or membership of the White Rose. No members list was formalized, and no one was sworn to secrecy or forced to place their hand on a Bible as they joined. It was understood that Hans was the driver of the organization and, as such, made the decisions about what direction the group was going. New members joined, always vetted by the existing ones, more on feeling than anything else. A Gestapo mole would mean arrest and prison, or worse, for all of them. The yoke of the Nazi state hung heavy on them, yet they laughed and had fun. They were still young.
None of the activities of the White Rose focused on the university, where most of them were enrolled. The group was an island in an ocean of Nazi loyalists, and they refused to take part in the university’s activities, all of which were sponsored or approved by the National Socialists.
Franka and Hans spent all their free time together now. There was more to their lives, more to their relationship than the politics of the White Rose. There was still time to be young and in love even as Germany sank deeper into the abyss.
In April 1942, weeks before the first mail drop, Franka and Hans walked hand in hand along the banks of the river. Other couples strolled past them. Some were teenagers, some were married couples with children scampering along in front of them, but none seemed fundamentally different from Franka and Hans. They passed an elderly couple sitting on a bench and staring out at the setting sun with contented looks on their withered faces.
“Do you think we’ll be sitting there together in fifty years?” She passed the words off as a joke, though the question behind them was quite deliberate.
“Of course,” he replied. “I could never imagine wanting to be with anyone else.” She was just about to say something when he spoke again. “In a way I’m jealous of other couples. They seem to be oblivious to the horrors around them. I can imagine there is some bliss in being able to remove yourself like that.”
“You could never do that, Hans. It’s not who you are. That’s part of the reason I love you so much.”
“That and my incredible good looks, right?”
“I didn’t want to say that first. I didn’t want to seem shallow.”
“Too late, I know now.”
“You’re different when we’re alone,” she said. “Lighter, somehow.”
“You see the real me, Franka—the person I want to be all the time.” He looked around to make sure no one could hear them before he continued. “You see the person that I’ll be for the rest of my life once the scourge of the National Socialist regime has been vanquished for good. That’s all I want—to live a quiet, simple life where I can be myself, with you.”
She believed him. She believed every word he said.
The leaflet was around eight hundred words. Franka spent her time poring over it like a starving person wolfing down food. Franka’s eyes clung to the third sentence, which read, “Who among us can imagine the degree of shame that will come upon us and upon our children when the veil falls from our faces and the awful crimes that infinitely exceed any human measure are exposed to the light of day?” It urged all those who adhered to German Christian tradition to “offer passive resistance—resistance wherever you may be, prevent the continuation of this atheistic war machine before it is too late.” The page ended with a poem of freedom, followed by directions to pass it on and to copy it as many times as possible. Across the top, the heading read: “Leaflets of the White Rose.”
It was Franka’s job to distribute a portion of the thousands they printed. She took a train back to Freiburg, the seditious papers in her suitcase. The leaflets were enough to have her executed. Nerves replaced the usual joy she felt on her trips home, but the train ride went without a hitch. Once back in Freiburg, she mailed the flyers to the list of addresses she carried. The mail from Munich was just as good, but the authorities wouldn’t be able to pinpoint where the White Rose was from if the letters were sent from Freiburg, Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, and Vienna. Franka returned triumphantly a few days later. No one was caught. Another leaflet followed, and then two more. They followed the same protocol, took the same precautions. Thousands of leaflets of the White Rose scattered across Germany. The authorities didn’t recognize their effect, but soon she began to hear whispers on the university campus and beyond. People were talking about the White Rose essays. The conversation that the members craved had begun. The typewritten sheets were passed hand to hand, leaving excitement and disquiet in their wake wherever they went. The readers were astonished by their content. Some people met the leaflets with disgust, others amazement or disbelief. A ripple spread from Munich across the country. More than one person went to the Gestapo—after all, it was best to report things such as this straightaway. No sense letting someone else take credit for reporting such seditious words. The Gestapo began the search for the originators of the leaflets, but the members of the White Rose remained untouched. Hans was determined that this was only the beginning.
Franka had first met Hans’s little sister Sophie after she enrolled in the university in May 1942. She came to live with him. It was awkward at first. Franka had grown used to a certain sense of intimacy, which having Hans’s little sister there interrupted at times. But she was sweet and kind—if a little serious. Hans had never spoken of her joining the group. He thought it best to hide his illegal activities from her, but it wasn’t long before she came across some of the leaflets hidden in the apartment they shared. She demanded he let her join. Franka helped convince Hans. She felt emboldened by Sophie’s courage, and by her clearheaded determination to stand for what she thought was right. It was infectious.
Any refusal would have been futile, and Hans gave in after a few days of fighting. Within weeks, she had become Hans’s equal in spearheading the group. She took over completely while he, Alex, and Willi were sent to the Russian front with their units at the end of that summer.
Franka continued working in the hospital, her secret life as a seditious traitor hidden from all but her closest confidants. Doubt and suspicion overtook her relationships with her colleagues and casual friends. She examined every word they said, every gesture they made. No one could be trusted. And within this isolation, Franka felt the lack of Hans in her life even more. Her regular letters, coded and repressed as they were, referred to their work with the White Rose as “the building project.” There was much to tell him. The writing and publication of the White Rose leaflets had gone into hiatus pending their return, but still the activity continued in the background. A Hamburg branch of the White Rose had been founded to help distribute the leaflets. She closed every letter to Hans with a paragraph only about her, only about them. No matter what else, she wanted him to know she thought of him every hour of every day and was counting down until his safe return. There were some things she knew the Nazis wouldn’t censor in the letters to soldiers at the front.
Her father didn’t return to the cabin that summer. The heartbreak was too much for him. He came to Munich at Christmas, a pale reflection of the man he’d been before the National Socialists had broken him. His job in the factory had been given to a local Nazi half his age. He had been demoted and was considering early retirement. Father and daughter met on the platform of the train station. His face was unshaven, his skin sallow, and he smelled of whiskey. They went to dinner but spoke little, afraid of what the other might say. They went for long walks in the city, passing the rubble of the bombed-out buildings that were becoming more and more common, and past the air-raid shelters that were being constructed all over. They spoke about the old days, the golden times in the cabin, and her mother. That was all. They barely mentioned Fredi’s name. It would have been too painful. It had already drained so much from them. They had no more left to give.
She left her father at the train station late at night on that Sunday in January. The tears came again as she hugged him.
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“Will you be all right?” she asked as she drew back.
“Of course,” he said, but his eyes spoke a different truth.
“Would you consider moving here?”
“No, thank you. I’ll stay in Freiburg, where my work is, where your mother and brother are. I still visit her grave most days. I only wish I had somewhere to go to visit him. We’ll never know what those animals did with his body.”
Her father broke down on the platform, the tears gushing down his face. She offered to stay with him, to come back to Freiburg for a while, asked again if he’d stay, but he refused. They sat on a bench, waiting for the train, holding one another until the train finally arrived and she said goodbye.
When Hans came home from the Russian front, he was more determined than ever to spread the ideas of the White Rose. In his time as a medic on the front he had witnessed how the German soldiers had been stripped of any chivalry, mercy, or humanity. The career army officers who had once followed a strict code of honor now fully subscribed to the Nazi racial dogma that drove the Wehrmacht and SS forces alike. The war on the eastern front was sold as a defensive crusade against communism, but, Hans told her, it was actually a ploy to provide the living space that Hitler had promised the German people. The real crusade was against the Jews. Hans had spoken to dozens of soldiers who had witnessed the mass murder of thousands of Jewish civilians, lined up along the edge of mass pits that would become their graves. He was changed by what he’d seen. Franka held him as he lay shaking in bed on the first night he returned.
The newspapers were full of stories of heroic victories against the communist hordes on the eastern front. The Russians were portrayed in caricature as beasts, dismissed as uneducated subhumans unworthy of existence. Only the Jews were a lower form of life. Only they were more beastly, more inferior to the Russians, whom the dashing Aryan soldiers would vanquish with ease. The Battle of Stalingrad changed perceptions that the Nazis were invincible. The members of the White Rose took careful note. Hitler refused to give the order to let his men retreat, condemning them to death in a frozen city over a thousand miles from home. The German Sixth Army was wiped out. The official reports held that the hundreds of thousands who died were heroes, and stated that their sacrifice would lead the Reich on to greater victories to come. The members of the White Rose knew better. They knew that Nazi victory was no longer inevitable and that for the first time, Germany was looking defeat square in her cold, gray eyes. Hitler had tasted his first major loss. The White Rose wasn’t going to pass up such an opportunity.
Stories of the regime cracking down on any defiance, no matter how inconsequential, littered the newspapers. A man was put to death for stating that Hitler should be murdered for allowing so many German soldiers to die. The Gestapo beheaded a waiter for making fun of the führer and executed a businessman for daring to state out loud that the war was going badly for Germany. In Berlin, fifty people were executed for transmitting sensitive information to the Russians in what became known as the Red Orchestra affair. The men involved were not executed by guillotine—the official method of the Nazi executioners. They were hung on meat hooks and left to die in agony. The women, who were sentenced by the court to life in prison, were executed by guillotine on Hitler’s personal orders.
Franka knew several people arrested by the Gestapo for careless words, or writing the wrong thing in letters. The Nazi grip on Germany was tightening, even as it entered its death throes. Somehow the White Rose managed to avoid the sprawling tentacles of the Gestapo, but they all felt the pressure of what they were doing. Franka felt the fear of arrest in everything she did now. They all did, but it only made them more determined to press on. There was no talk of backing down. That would have meant giving in.
They wrote and printed more leaflets. Franka played her part once more. She read through the latest paper as she sat in the bathroom on the train to Cologne to distribute the latest set of flyers.
“We will not be silent,” the leaflets read. “We are your bad conscience. We will not leave you in peace!”
Thousands were mailed all over Germany.
The excitement she’d once felt was usurped by terror at the thought of her capture. Surely it was a matter of time. It was a question of who would capitulate first, the White Rose or the regime itself. The tides of war were turning against the Nazis—Stalingrad and the defeats since had proved as much—but the Gestapo was as formidable as it had ever been. Thoughts of leaving the group had been germinating inside her for weeks. They began to sprout. She made up her mind on the train back to Munich to take a break, to go away for a while, and to convince Hans and Sophie to do the same. They were operating with an abandon that would lead to their deaths. Nothing else seemed logical. Telling them was going to be the hard part. Hans and some of the others had begun a graffiti campaign on the walls of the University of Munich, daubing anti-Hitler slogans in tar on the walls and roads of the old university. They were going too far.
It was February 1943. The Allied bombers had taken the night off from their relentless pounding. Franka stole down the street in the darkness, came to the studio where they printed the forbidden leaflets. She gave the secret knock. Willi answered the door and greeted her with a kiss on the cheek. Sophie sat at a desk in the corner, writing. Hans was operating the stencil machine, his sleeves rolled up, his face red and sweating.
“Can I speak to you, Hans?”
He nodded and gestured to Alex to take over. Franka led him into the back room, where they sat down.
“I want you to stop,” she said.
“What are you talking about?”
“The Gestapo is closing in, and you know it. They’re asking questions all over the university. They know we’re based here. It’s only a matter of time before they find us. Perhaps it’s time to stop while we’re all still alive. You are no use to the resistance if you’re dead.”
His hand was shaking as he picked up his coffee mug. “We can’t stop, not now that we have the nation’s attention. Perhaps the Gestapo is getting closer, but that only raises the stakes. We have a platform that we must use while we can. No one has ever had the chance to do what we’re doing. We can’t waste that. That’s exactly what the Nazis want.”
“Everyone admires what you’ve done.”
“What we’ve all done. We’ve all played our part, you included, Franka.”
“Of course, thank you. I’m proud to have been a part of this, in some small way, but what can we achieve if we’re dead or in jail?”
“You don’t think I know the risks? A child knows that anyone who speaks out against the regime is dead. But does that not necessitate our work even more? Does that not inflate the importance of what we’re doing? We’re the only people spreading ideas of freedom in a country that needs them more than any other. We’re giving bread to the starving minds of the masses. If we disappear, then so does the dream of a better nation.”
“Do you really think that you can bring down the most powerful regime in Europe with a few leaflets?”
“Do you appreciate anything we’ve been trying to do here?”
“Of course, I do . . .”
“I don’t think that we can change anything alone. We can only change if the entire German nation stands with us against the Nazis. That’s what this is about. That’s what this has always been about—spreading the idea of freedom and planting the seeds of truth in people’s minds.”
“I don’t want to see you die, Hans. I love you.”
“And I love you, Franka, but this is bigger than us. We’re creating a dissonance that has the power to challenge the greatest evil ever to befall our country, or maybe even the world.”
“Can’t you just stop for a while?”
“Not now. Perhaps the Gestapo is closing in, and perhaps I will die soon, but history will not judge me kindly if I don’t take this opportunity we’ve been given. And how could I leave my sister to do this alone anyway? You’ve seen her. If anything, she’s more
passionate about this than I am. There’s only one way for me, and for the White Rose, and that’s forward.”
“It seems that nothing I can say will change your mind.”
His bloodshot eyes remained unmoved.
“Just promise me you’ll be careful.”
He stood up to embrace her. She held him against her and kissed him one last time. He walked her to the door as the others said good night, and then he closed it behind her.
Hans and Sophie were arrested at the University of Munich on February 18, 1943. A handyman, empowered by the Nazis, and in his spare time a goose-stepping storm trooper, saw them tossing leaflets over the balcony like confetti. He had been briefed by the Gestapo to watch for any suspicious behavior—even more so than usual. It must have seemed like the best day of his life when he saw the two students tossing the forbidden flyers off the balcony. He arrested them himself, doubtless excited about his upcoming promotion and the cash reward that awaited him. Hans and Sophie were taken from the university campus to the Gestapo headquarters at the Wittelsbach Palace, the former royal palace of the Bavarian monarchs in the center of the city. They were charged with high treason, violent overthrow of the government, the destruction of National Socialism, and the defeat of their own army in wartime. Christoph was arrested a few hours later. The Gestapo found all the evidence they would ever need in their apartments, and any trial would be a sham.
The news of Hans and Sophie’s arrest spread throughout the university. Franka was at work that night when Willi came to tell her. She cried all night. There would be no mercy, only retribution, and it was just a matter of time before the Gestapo came for them too. The newspapers reported the arrest of the traitorous students the next day. The editorial trusted that swift justice would follow, and so it did. Roland Freisler, the notorious chief judge of the People’s Court, which only tried cases of treason and subversion, was brought down from Berlin. The trial began just four days later, on February 22. Franka waited along with the other members, praying for some form of leniency. The trial lasted a few hours. Hans, Sophie, and Christoph were convicted and sentenced to death. They were taken from the courtroom to jail, and guillotined. Christoph’s wife, who was sick in the hospital at the time, didn’t find out that he’d been executed until several days later. Hans and Sophie’s parents, who were present at the trial, went home to Ulm after the guilty pronouncements, planning their next trip back to see their children a few days later. They were not told that their son and daughter were to be executed that very day.
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