The White Rose did indeed go down in history.
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The Nazis suffered a devastating defeat in Stalingrad in 1943, and the Soviets captured many German soldiers.
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The White Rose’s final pamphlet discussed that loss and hoped it would incite fellow students at the University of Munich to rebel.
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Scholl bade farewell to fellow students heading to the eastern front in June 1942.
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Schools and streets have since been named for her and her brother Hans, and in 1963 a bust of Scholl was unveiled at the Sophie Scholl-Realgymnasium in Munich.
Iwo Jima’s Indians
The Navajo Code Talkers
With an Allied victory in jeopardy, Native Americans used their complex tribal language to foil Japanese code breakers
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Navajo Code Talkers used a field radio to transmit orders in the Pacific. The Navajo code proved undecipherable by the Japanese, which helped ensure American success. Since their native language contains no words for many modern weapons, the men created hybrid terms. The word for hummingbird, dah-he-tih-hi, was used for fighter plane.
“First wave hit beach at 0905 … shell fire light … no obstacles” was just one of hundreds of radio messages translated into English from the Navajo language during the U.S. invasion of Iwo Jima. Beginning on February 19, 1945, the brutal monthlong battle saw Marines fighting about 23,000 Japanese soldiers for control of the Pacific island—a strategic base coveted because of its proximity to Japan.
Another kind of warfare was involved: The Japanese had proven to be extraordinarily skillful code breakers. “Military communications were made available to the enemy like sand sifting through a sieve,” according to one war analyst. The result: the catastrophic loss of American lives that imperiled the possibility of a U.S. victory in the Pacific.
But that began to change after the attack on Pearl Harbor, when Philip Johnston, a World War I veteran, came up with the idea of using a code based on the Navajo language. The son of reservation missionaries, Johnston knew that the tribe’s language was infernally complex, practically unknown outside the Navajo, and—almost as important—strictly verbal. He presented his idea to military officials, and they decided to give it a try.
Beginning in May 1942, 29 Navajo men spent 13 weeks creating a code at Camp Elliott, a Marine base near San Diego. The men decided to replace American military words with Navajo and Comanche equivalents, but since they had no word for tank, for instance, they had to use metaphors. “One said it’s just like a turtle, you know,” said Chester Nez, part of the original team. “It has a hard shell and it moves and so we called it a wakaree’e, a turtle.” Similarly the word submarine became besh-lo (“iron fish”), and America became ne-he-mah (“our mother”).
This substitution code was used for 211 of the most common military words. To communicate others, the natives chose one Navajo word to represent each letter of the English alphabet, creating a system that used the Navajo language but sounded nothing like it. “So A, we took a red ant that we live with all the time,” said Nez. “B, we took a bear, Yogi the Bear; C, a cat; D, a dog; E, an elk; F, fox; G, a goat; and so on down the line.”
It worked. “The Japanese tried, but they couldn’t decipher it,” Nez told CNN in 2011. “Not even another Navajo could decipher it if he wasn’t a Code Talker.” Suddenly the military wanted Native American soldiers. Despite the discrimination the Indians had grown up with—they were frequently forbidden to speak their own languages at school—many enthusiastically enlisted, often motivated by native warrior traditions. Some were only 15 years old. “I found out they was recruiting 20 Comanches who could talk their tribe fluently for a special unit, and I told Dad, ‘I’d like to go,’” Code Talker Charles Chibitty told the National Museum of the American Indian in 2004.
From 1942 to 1945, up to 420 Navajo soldiers—along with members of other Native American tribes—transmitted and received thousands of secret messages, but Iwo Jima proved their finest hour. During the battle, six Navajo Code Talkers operated continuously, transmitting and receiving more than 800 messages without a single error. “Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima,” said Major Howard Connor, the Navajo’s signal officer at Iwo Jima.
Despite their heroism, the men were ostracized and still discriminated against after returning home, and most did not receive the right to vote until years later. “Some turned to drinking or just gave up,” said Nez, who himself suffered post-traumatic stress syndrome that his father claimed had been caused by the spirits of dead Japanese soldiers.
The lifesaving, war-winning Navajo work went unacknowledged until the Code Talker program was declassified in 1968. In 2001, the men were belatedly honored when President George W. Bush presented the Congressional Gold Medal to Nez and the 28 other men who first developed the code. Five were still alive; only four were able to attend. In 2014, Nez, the last surviving original Code Talker, died at 93, having risked his life for ne-he-mah: “our mother,” America.
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On February 23, 1945, Marines scaled Iwo Jima’s Mount Suribachi and raised the Stars and Stripes.
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Victory on the tiny island 760 miles south of Tokyo was made possible by the work of the Code Talkers. Navajo communication soldiers like Corporal Oscar Ithma (left), with Private First Class Jack Nez and Private First Class Carl Gorman, were part of the first wave in the assault on Saipan in June 1944.
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Marine Code Talker Sam Holiday at a 2015 ceremony at Camp Pendleton, California, honoring his unit.
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Lucille Harris pointed to her father, Stewart Clah, in a 1944 platoon photo.
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In 2009, Lloyd Oliver displayed a portrait of his younger self. He died two years later.
The Japanese Schindler
Chiune Sugihara
When thousands of desperate refugees needed papers to escape Lithuania, a diplomat risked his life to help them
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Because of his fluency in Russian, the Japanese posted Chiune Sugihara to Lithuania to gather intelligence on German and Soviet troop movements.
On the morning of July 27, 1940, Chiune Sugihara—a Japanese diplomat stationed in Kaunas, then the capital of Lithuania—woke to find a crowd of desperate Polish Jewish refugees climbing over the fence outside his bedroom window. “They all looked so sad,” his wife, Yukiko, later said. “Some women were looking right at me with great sorrow. Some of them had their hands together begging.”
In fact, they were hopelessly trapped. They had fled to Lithuania after the Nazi invasion of Poland, but the Soviet Union—which was aligned with Nazi Germany at the time—had recently annexed the previously neutral Baltic state, leaving the refugees in dire straits. They urgently needed to escape, but where could they go now that the world had closed its gates on them? Curaçao, a Dutch colony in the Caribbean, did not require formal entrance visas, but the war had made it impossible to travel westward. There was only one way out: through Japan.
So they came to Sugihara to ask for transit visas. “They explained what had happened in their hometowns with the Germans,” he later said. “Poland had been bombed and occupied. I wanted to issue the visas, but I didn’t know how I was going to do it. I had to wire the home office for instructions.”
His superiors in Tokyo told him that transit visas could be issued only to people who already had official visas to their final destinations. But most of the refugees did not even have passports. What was Sugihara to do? “I spent an entire night plunged in thought,” he wrote in his 1983 memoir. “I came to the conclusion, after racking my brain, that the spirit of humane and charitable action takes precedence above all else.”
He began issuing the visas, but he had very little time: The Soviet annexation meant that he and his family needed to leave Lithuania by the end of August. So he worked 16-hour days, producing about 300 visas a day—even as his bosses kept warning him not to issue documents without due process, and the line of desperate refugees kept growing. “My fingers were calloused and every joint from my wrist to my shoulder ached,” he later wrote.
On September 1, 1940, Sugihara and his family finally left Lithuania after he had issued more than 2,000 “illegal” visas. He was exhausted, but more refugees followed him to a hotel and, later, to the train station, so he kept writing. “Once we were on board, they were hanging on the windows and he wrote some more,” Yukiko said in 2005. “When the train started moving, he couldn’t write any more. Everyone was waving their hands. One of them called out, ‘Thank you, Mr. Sugihara, we will come to see you again,’ and he came running after the train. I couldn’t stop crying. When I think about it even now I can’t help crying.”
After the war, Sugihara was forced to resign as a result of his “insubordination.” He never spoke of his heroic actions in Lithuania, and he had no idea if his visas had helped anyone—until 1969, when one of the people he had saved finally found him. Hundreds more followed.
In 1984, Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Israel, declared the former diplomat Righteous Among the Nations for his aid to the refugees. “I may have disobeyed my government,” said Sugihara, who died at 86 in 1986, “but if I didn’t I would be disobeying God … In life, do what’s right because it’s right, and leave it alone.”
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As desperate Jewish refugees flocked to his office and even his home, he started to grant them transit visas, like this one, so they could escape from Europe and pass through Japan on their way to safety abroad.
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Sugihara’s grandson Chihiro Sugihara said before that visit, “I hope the visit serves … to hand down the story of a man’s acts from generation to generation.”
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Throughout Europe, Jews, like this family in Memel, Lithuania, fled their homes as their neighbors jeered them. The Lithuanian Home Guard assisted German forces in rounding up Jews in July 1941.
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Discredited in the eyes of his superiors, Sugihara was forced to resign in disgrace after he returned to Japan. His efforts have since been recognized. In 2007, Japanese emperor Akihito paid his respects to Sugihara when he visited a monument to the consul in Vilnius, Lithuania.
Hitler’s Would-Be Assassin
Johann Georg Elser
The German carpenter risked everything to build a homemade bomb that could have saved millions of lives
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Johann Georg Elser, in an undated photo, feared the Nazis’ murderous goals and sought to kill Hitler while he spoke at the November 1939 anniversary of the Nazis’ failed 1923 putsch.
On November 8, 1939, Adolf Hitler came to Munich to give a speech at the Bürgerbräukeller beer hall honoring the anniversary of the Nazi’s failed 1923 “beer hall putsch”—an event that had led to Hitler’s imprisonment and subsequently became part of the party’s mythology. The speech was an annual event, but this year would be different: An unlikely hero named Johann Georg Elser—a 36-year-old southern German carpenter, amateur zither player, and enthusiastic ladies’ man—had hidden a time bomb on the stage.
Driven by a deep sense of social justice, Elser was concerned about Hitler’s inexorable drive to war. Though he knew his assassination attempt might kill innocent people, “I wanted through my act to prevent even greater bloodshed,” he later confessed to the Gestapo.
The carpenter spent a year patiently building his bomb with explosives filched from the weapons factory where he worked. In early August 1939, after he had finished constructing a model of the weapon, Elser quit his job and moved to Munich. Every night, he dined at the beer hall, hiding in a storeroom until the venue had closed. Then he went to work building and installing his bomb behind a column on the stage, but “the smallest noise rang loudly in the empty hall at night,” he told the Gestapo. So he timed his efforts to coincide with the toilets that flushed automatically every 10 minutes. On November 6, he finally finished his work.
The bomb was set to go off on November 8 at 9:20 p.m. in the middle of Hitler’s speech. But that night, a thick fog caused the closing of Munich’s airports. Eager to catch the night train back to Berlin to avoid being stranded, Hitler began his speech early and finished 30 minutes ahead of schedule. He left the Bürgerbräukeller at 9:07 p.m.
Thirteen minutes later, Elser’s bomb exploded as planned, killing eight and wounding many more. Those 13 minutes were the costliest in the history of the 20th century, according to the German publication Der Spiegel. “Within a period of less than six years … they cost humanity 50 million lives and virtually wiped European Jewry from the map,” Der Spiegel wrote.
“My leaving the Bürgerbräukeller earlier than usual is proof to me that Providence wants me to reach my goal,” Hitler said when he learned of Elser’s attempt on his life, adding, “A man has to be lucky.” He himself certainly had been, having risen from frustrated artist to charismatic demagogue and sociopath who galvanized Germany after the humiliating defeat of World War I. Less than two months before Elser’s explosion, Hitler had effectively incited World War II by attacking Poland.
Elser, by contrast, had failed. Thirty minutes before the detonation, he was arrested while trying to escape over the Swiss border. Found carrying bomb-making plans, incendiary implements, and—most damningly—pictures of the beer hall, he was sent to Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. Trying to force him to name accomplices that did not, in fact, exist, the Nazis tortured him: exposing him to intense heat, depriving him of liquids, hypnotizing him, and injecting him with methamphetamine.
“I would have preferred it if they executed me right away,” said Elser, whose eventual confession led to his imprisonment in Dachau concentration camp.
“You know what Elser’s problem was?” said Arthur Nebe, the head of the police investigation, with fascist disdain. “This man of the people loved ordinary people; he laid out for me passionately and in simple sentences how, for the masses in all countries, war means hunger, misery, and the death of millions. Not a pacifist in the usual sense, his reasoning was quite simplistic: Hitler is war—and if he goes, there will be peace.”
Four weeks before the end of the war—on April 9, 1945—Elser was executed in Dachau.
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The Nazi leader left the Munich hall early and avoided assassination.
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Elser’s bomb ripped through the Bürgerbräukeller, the Munich beer hall, 13 minutes after the Führer departed.
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Hitler attended a funeral service for those killed. It was held at the Feldherrnhalle, a 19th-century memorial to the Bavarian Army.
Political Heroes
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Days before the D-Day invasion, the general faced a foe that rivaled the Nazis: weather
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“We cannot afford to fail,” said General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, addressing his chiefs of staff in June 1944. He was speaking about the Battle of Normandy, the Allied attempt to take Western Europe back from the Nazis. Code-named Operation Overlord, the invasion was set to launch from southern England and cross the English Channel to attack German forces in Normandy, France. It had been meticulously planned for at least a year, but nobody had counted on bad weather.
The Allies needed a full moon for visibility and low tide to help spot German underwater defenses, but those conditions would be available only from June 5 to 7. Based in Portsmouth, England, Eisenhower chose June 5 as D-Day, but Allied meteorologists warned him that heavy clouds and
high winds were swiftly moving in over the North Atlantic. As soldiers awaiting orders in their crafts docked in southern England became seasick, the reluctant general agreed to postpone the invasion until June 6. If the weather remained foul, he would have to wait another two weeks—a potentially disastrous move.
On the evening of June 4, rain was pelting Portsmouth when Eisenhower’s chief meteorologist, Group Captain James Stagg, told him the weather was improving—there might even be a window for the invasion. Should Eisenhower postpone again or move ahead? “A bad forecast would jeopardize the entire operation,” John Ross wrote in The Forecast for D-Day. “If he gave the word to ‘go,’ and the weather turned sour, the lives of thousands of men and massive amounts of equipment would be lost. If he did not go and the weather was good, Germans might have spied the massive buildup in southern England.”
Atmospheric conditions remained far from ideal, but Eisenhower eventually said go. On the morning of June 6, more than 150,000 young men stormed the beaches of Normandy, the largest amphibious invasion in history. The unspeakably brutal battle on D-Day led to the loss of 4,413 Allied lives, according to the U.S. National D-Day Memorial Foundation, but it could have been far worse. The Germans had not expected an attack in the bad weather. “German Supreme Headquarters had not the slightest idea that the decisive event of the war was upon them,” one Nazi chief of staff later wrote. (On the eve of the invasion, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel was blithely picking wildflowers for his wife in Herrlingen, Germany.)
According to German admiral Friedrich Ruge, invading Normandy before the weather cleared was “one of the truly great decisions in military history.” But Eisenhower was typically modest about his accomplishments—even after he’d served two terms as President of the United States. Just before his successor, John F. Kennedy, was inaugurated, the young man asked the former general the secret behind the success of the invasion. “We had better meteorologists than the Germans,” Eisenhower said.
LIFE Heroes of World War II: Men and Women Who Put Their Lives on the Line Page 3
