Saints and Villains

by Denise Giardina

  That night, seated at her desk wearing the necklace over her nightgown, she wrote in her diary

  It’s true I don’t love him. But I know I will love him.

  Christmas 1942

  MUNICH. Dietrich Bonhoeffer walked down the Ludwigstraße past the Ludwig-Maximilian University. His hat was jammed tightly on his head because of the stiff wind, and the lower part of his face was hidden by a gray scarf. He was on his way to Abwehr headquarters with papers from Hans von Dohnanyi, but his mind was not on his mission. He walked with his head down and allowed himself a furtive glance at the wall on his right. A trio of women prisoners were busy scrubbing at the plaster beneath the watchful eye of a guard, but had not yet been unable to obliterate the words, three feet high, scrawled in black paint

  DOWN WITH HITLER!!

  At the end of the block Dietrich turned and retraced his steps. Again the furtive glance. The words were no mirage, were real, even though the DOW was fading beneath the application of turpentine. The other letters would soon vanish as well, but their ghosts would remain unless the wall was painted. Dietrich’s eyes narrowed to slits and tears caught at the corner of the lids. He turned his head and walked on. Other people passed him, walking quickly with heads down, whether from fear or anger he could not tell.

  Three hours later he stepped into a phone booth in Munich’s Am Platzl and spied the corner of a mimeographed sheet protruding from the telephone directory.

  A CALL TO ALL GERMANS!

  Leaflet of the White Rose

  Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized nation as allowing itself to be “governed” without opposition by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct. It is certain that today every honest German is ashamed of his government.

  He looked around quickly and then slipped the sheet of paper into his pocket. Not until he was back in his hotel room did he smooth out the crumpled page and read it carefully.

  If the German people are already so corrupted and spiritually crushed that they do not raise a hand; if they surrender man’s highest principle, that which raises him above all other God’s creatures, his free will; if they are so devoid of all individuality, have already gone so far along the road toward turning into a spiritless and cowardly mass—then, yes, they deserve their downfall.

  If everyone waits until the other man makes a start, the messengers of avenging Nemesis will come steadily closer. Therefore every individual, conscious of his responsibility as a member of Christian and Western civilization, must defend himself as best he can at this late hour, he must work against the scourges of mankind, against fascism and any similar system of totalitarianism. Offer passive resistance—resistance—wherever you may be, forestall the spread of this atheistic war machine before it is too late. Do not forget that every people deserves the regime it is willing to endure.

  Dietrich arrived in Berlin just before dark the next day and went straight to the Dohnanyi house in Sacrow. Dohnanyi was usually at home in the evenings. Events were moving quickly now; a definite plan for Hitler’s assassination had been developed and would soon be set in motion. Dohnanyi preferred to busy himself with mundane affairs while under the watchful eyes of the SS and Gestapo men who now seemed omnipresent in the Abwehr offices at the Tirpitz-Ufer. At four he would pack his briefcase and go home. He would share a light supper with Christel and the children, then retire to the quiet of his study overlooking the Havel for his real work.

  He was smoking his pipe and writing a new report for the Vatican when Dietrich entered and handed him the leaflet. Dohnanyi glanced at it and turned pale, sat up straight with one hand gripping his eyeglasses, and read it more slowly.

  “My God,” he said at last. “The Gestapo will be going crazy.”

  “God have mercy on whoever wrote this,” Dietrich said. “If they’re caught it will go hard.”

  “They’ll be caught,” Dohnanyi said, “especially if they keep at it.”

  “There’s something else,” Dietrich said, and told him about the walls near the university and the English Garden covered with the slogans DOWN WITH HITLER and FREEDOM.

  “Students,” Dohnanyi said.

  “I wondered.”

  “Just the sort of thing young people would do.”

  “But the leaflets. It would take resources to print and distribute them.”

  Dohnanyi shook his head, lost in thought.

  “Whoever did it,” Dietrich said, “it means something’s stirring.”

  “Yes. Unfortunately the Gestapo will be so on edge they’ll be shooting at their own shadows. A dangerous time for us already, since they’ve just smashed the Rote Kapelle. Poor Arvid and Mildred.” He paused, thinking of the Harnacks, who were awaiting execution for espionage. He could feel the rope about his own neck but shook the thought away as though shooing a bee. “I’ll have to talk to Oster first thing in the morning. Funny no one in the Tirpitz-Ufer has mentioned anything about this.”

  “It even caught Müller by surprise,” Dietrich said, “and he’s had his ear to the ground in Munich.”

  In fact the leaflets were the talk of the office when Dohnanyi arrived the next day. They had been found in Hamburg and Saarbrücken and Cologne as well as all over Munich, in libraries and public rest rooms and telephone booths, were even turning up in the mail, addressed to attorneys and members of university faculties. The Gestapo was analyzing the paper and ink to determine their source, inventorying large-scale purchases of stationery and stamps, and searching for unauthorized mimeograph machines. Hitler was said to be in a rage. No wonder, Oster pointed out. It was the first word of public dissent since the Olympic Games of 1936.

  Arvid and Mildred Harnack and their fellow Communist conspirators were waiting to be hung by the neck with piano wire. With the knowledge of their fate looming over him, Dietrich Bonhoeffer decided to write a Christmas message to his own fellow conspirators. He sat for hours at his desk in the attic room of the Marienburger Allee house, scribbling a few lines and then marking them out, pausing to scratch aimlessly at the frosted windowpane with his fingernail, or wander to his pianoforte and play a few bars of Bach. He thought almost constantly of Maria. He heard again Frau von Wedemeyer stating her opposition to the engagement, demanding that he not see Maria for an entire year.

  A year he might not survive.

  Only when he had forced himself to face this possibility could he write his Christmas gift to the conspiracy.

  Death has become familiar to us, he wrote. We calmly hear of the deaths of our acquaintances. We come to expect our own deaths and welcome each new day as a gift. Life is too precious for us to romanticize its ending. But death cannot take us by surprise now, and we have seen enough of it to know that goodness and life can come from it. And it is after all better to die while living fully than in some trivial way.

  Something else we have learned that we might otherwise have missed. We have learned to view life from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the transgressors, the mistreated, the defenseless, the persecuted, the reviled. It is important that we are not bitter or envious. For we have learned that personal suffering unlocks more of the world than does personal good fortune.

  And when he had written these words, he also knew he could not agree to Frau von Wedemeyer’s demands. When he had done with the Christmas message, he took up another sheet of paper and posted a letter to Pätzig, asking Maria von Wedemeyer to become secretly engaged to him. She agreed.

  The White Rose

  December 1942–February 1943

  MUNICH. THREE MEDICAL STUDENTS hurried along blacked-out streets in the university quarter of Schwabing. One cradled a bottle of schnapps inside his coat. Though the hour was late, no one noticed these particular young people, for many others like them were out celebrating the end of the winter term, blundering through the blackout in drunken bliss as students are wont to do, war or no.

  The medical students slipped into an alley off Leopoldstraße and stopped before a large wooden door set
in what looked like a garage. Shurik, so nicknamed because his dead mother was Russian, produced the key and in a moment they were inside, drawing blackout curtains, turning on lights and gas heaters. It was an artist’s studio belonging to a friend of Shurik’s who was a corporal with the army in France. Paintings hung on plaster walls and a half-finished canvas, livid with reds and purples, stood on an easel in one corner surrounded by metal pails crammed with tubes and bottles and brushes. Shadows draped the room like blankets.

  “Music?” Shurik asked, going to the phonograph.

  Hans Scholl shook his head no. He shrugged out of his coat and set the bottle of schnapps on the edge of a table littered with magazines. Willi Graf found four glasses, wiped them with the tail of his shirt. They pulled four chairs into a circle and sat, stared nervously at the empty seat. Willi took out a pack of cigarettes and offered it around.

  “Will you pour then?” Shurik asked.

  “No,” said Scholl. “Not yet. We want clear heads.”

  “I’m telling you, he’s okay. Lilo says—”

  “Lilo says, Lilo says.”

  Shurik was mad about Lilo (among a number of other women he was mad about), and the others were weary of hearing about her. Lilo, an artist like most of Shurik’s friends, who daubed great swatches of color on canvases ten feet high from a homemade pallet of berries and roots since oils were scarce, who wore her black hair straight and her fingernails purple, who could find hashish even in wartime.

  “He’s an old friend of hers,” said Shurik—and thinks, An old friend she’s been sleeping with.

  “Another artist,” said Scholl.

  “He’s in theater,” Shurik corrected. “He once directed the National Theater in Leipzig.”

  “So of course he’s okay.”

  “He has been in Dachau,” Shurik said.

  “And he got out,” said Willi Graf. He spoke so seldom that they usually stopped and paid attention to him. He looked from one to the other. “I’m not saying anything against him. But there may be a reason.”

  “He got out during the Olympics,” Shurik said testily. “Dear old Adolf let everybody out during the Olympics.”

  “Not everybody.” Scholl leaned back and blew smoke at the ceiling. “They didn’t change Dachau into a resort during the Olympics.”

  “You know what I mean,” Shurik said. “They let a lot of people out. He was lucky enough to be among them.”

  They were interrupted by three soft knocks at the door, followed by two louder raps.

  “Him,” Shurik said. He jumped up and went to the door. Willi Graf leaned forward expectantly, and Hans Scholl watched with narrowed eyes through a curtain of smoke.

  A man in the uniform of a Wehrmacht officer stepped through the door, blinking as he came into the light.

  “Gentlemen,” Shurik said, announcing the newcomer’s name for the first time, “I’d like you to meet Falk Harnack.”

  He brought a whiff of death with him. When they studied his thin face with its long, aristocratic nose, they could not help see the face of his brother staring at them from the newspaper photographs. Arvid Harnack and his American wife, Mildred, were only days away from their execution in Plötzensee Prison for their part in the Red Orchestra conspiracy.

  Falk rubbed his face wearily. “I only have two hours,” he said. “Then I have to catch the night train to Vienna.”

  Even Hans Scholl was awed. Here was a man who not only slept with Lilo the Artist but traveled to Vienna in military uniform despite being brother to the most famous traitor in Germany.

  “Lilo says—” Shurik’s voice broke and he cleared his throat, embarrassed. “Lilo says you know things.”

  Falk almost smiled. He accepted a glass of schnapps from Willi. “And if I know ‘things,’ why should I tell them to you?”

  “Lilo has spoken to you,” Shurik said.

  “Yes, of course, or I wouldn’t have come here. But are you serious? Or are you little boys looking for an adventure?”

  They glanced at one another. Hans Scholl would have to make the decision. He took a deep breath and said, “That chair you’re sitting on. Is it comfortable?”

  “It’s hard for a chair with a cushion,” Falk said, “and there’s a sort of ridge pushing on my balls. Most uncomfortable, I would say.”

  “Because there’s a mimeograph machine inside,” Hans said.

  “Surprise surprise.” Falk twisted his rump to a more comfortable position. “And possession of a mimeo machine is a capital offense. But of course you know this.”

  “So our lives are in your hands. Would you like to see the machine?”

  “I know what one looks like,” Falk said. “But I would like to know what you do with it.”

  “Tell us something first,” Hans Scholl demanded. “Something that would put you in danger. To show we can trust you.”

  Falk studied his fingernails, then looked up. “Someone is going to kill Hitler,” he says.

  To a young person who had only known Hitler as sun and moon, it was as though someone said The sun and moon will be extinguished tomorrow. They clutched the arms of their chairs.

  “Who?”

  Falk Harnack smiled, pleased at the effect he had created, as though they were onstage and a line of dialogue had sent a thrill through the audience.

  “Why should I say anything more?” he asked.

  They produced a copy of an old leaflet from inside a book on a shelf. (“What a rotten hiding place,” Falk said, “and why would you endanger your absent friend this way?” They blushed.) With trembling fingers they spread the yellowing sheets on the table like sacred parchments.

  Falk bent over the table and read

  Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized nation as allowing itself to be “governed” without opposition by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct. It is certain that today every honest German is ashamed of his government. traced the margins with his finger while trying not to laugh because he pitied the young people for their naiveté

  If the German people are already so corrupted and spiritually crushed that they do not raise a hand; if they surrender man’s highest principle, that which raises him above all other God’s creatures, his free will; if they are so devoid of all individuality, have already gone so far along the road toward turning into a spiritless and cowardly mass—then, yes, they deserve their downfall. straightened, eyes at the door.

  “What have you done with these leaflets?”

  They had bought envelopes and stamps in many small batches, mailed the leaflets to people who owned bookstores, people who were artists and intellectuals and professors and pastors. People in the telephone book. Left batches of leaflets in phone booths and toilets and empty classrooms at the university.

  The leaflet called for an uprising of the German people.

  “Any response?” Falk asked.

  Their faces, eager as they explained their work, changed. “No response,” said Shurik.

  “People are so uncertain,” Willi Graf said. “They need an example.”

  “No response,” said Hans Scholl. “Yet.”

  They were interrupted by a pounding at the door.

  “Jesus Christ!” they cried, shuffling leaflets into hiding places frantically until they heard a woman’s voice on the other side of the door.

  “Hans? Shurik?”

  They opened the door to Hans Scholl’s sister Sophie, a first-year philosophy student, who rushed in clutching a cloth bag to her chest.

  “My God, Sophie!” Hans cried. “What are you doing here?”

  “I followed you.” She set the bag down with a thump and took out cheese and a bottle of wine.

  “Something’s going on,” she said. “Something’s going on and I won’t leave until you tell me. If I were a man, you wouldn’t leave me out of this. Would you? Would you?”

  “It’s not something women should be involved in,” Shurik said.

  She glared at him, her short hair sticking o
ut at odd angles beneath her kerchief.

  “I won’t go away,” she said.

  Before Falk Harnack left to catch his train, he wrote the address of his aunt in the Wangenheimstraße and gave it to Shurik, who handed it on to Hans Scholl. “If it’s an emergency you can write to this address. Otherwise wait until I contact you.”

  “Remember,” Scholl said, “we want a meeting. We don’t want to be left out. If there’s an uprising, German students must be involved. There can’t be a revolution without students.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” Falk said, and slipped out into the night.

  Falk decided to try once more to draw on his old connections to the Bonhoeffers. Not so much for Shurik and the other students but for himself. With Arvid and Mildred dead, he was left isolated and despairing. He was frightened as well, but driven more than ever to act, to do—something. Arvid had wanted him in the Rote Kapelle, but despite his earlier predilections, Falk no longer felt comfortable working with the Communists. Stalin’s pact with Hitler had shaken him, as had the stories of the persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union that had filtered into Poland, stories that led him to condemn the Russians and Ukrainians and Lithuanians and Poles as bitterly as he did his fellow Germans. Falk now considered himself to be a democratic socialist and a citizen of the world. Nothing else. In Poland he drifted into the orbit of the few Wehrmacht officers who had defied the expectations of their class to harbor socialist sympathies of their own. It wasn’t so hard to find them. A few veiled references to the Weimar trade unions and one could very quickly size up the lay of the land.

  Through these same officers he learned enough of the resistance to consider himself a part of it. He guessed there was a cell in the Abwehr working toward a coup. He’d never been given names, but he could guess. Still he didn’t dare show his face at the War Ministry in the Tirpitz-Ufer. The sudden appearance of the brother of an executed spy would have sent them all running for cover. The same would happen, he believed, if he went to either the Dohnanyi or Bonhoeffer homes.