White Rose

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Monument to the "Weiße Rose" in front of the Ludwig-Maximilian-University, Munich

White Rose (German: die Weiße Rose) was a non-violent resistance group in Nazi Germany, consisting of five students from the University of Munich and their philosophy professor. The group became known for an anonymous leaflet campaign, lasting from June 1942 until February 1943, which called for active opposition to Adolf Hitler's regime. ^[1]

All six members of the group were arrested by the Gestapo, convicted and executed by beheading in 1943. The text of their sixth leaflet was smuggled out of Germany through Scandinavia to England, and in July 1943 copies of it were dropped over Germany by Allied planes, retitled "The Manifesto of the Students of Munich." ^[2]

[edit] The group

Members of the White Rose, Munich 1942. From left: Hans Scholl, his sister Sophie Scholl, and Christoph Probst. Courtesy of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The White Rose consisted of five students, — Sophie Scholl; her brother Hans Scholl; Alex Schmorell; Willi Graf; and Christoph Probst, all in their early twenties — and a professor of philosophy, Kurt Huber.

Between June 1942 and February 1943, they prepared and distributed six different leaflets, in which they called for an end to Nazi oppression and tyranny through active opposition of the German people. Huber drafted the final two leaflets. A rough- draft of a seventh leaflet was found in possession of Hans Scholl at the time of their arrest by the Gestapo, written by Christoph Probst. The leaflet was destroyed beyond recovery.

The men of the White Rose were war veterans, who had fought on the French and Russian fronts. They were influenced by the German Youth Movement, of which Hans Scholl and Christoph Probst were members. They had witnessed the atrocities of the war, both on the battlefield and against the civilian population in the East, and sensed that the reversal of fortune that the Wehrmacht suffered at Stalingrad would eventually lead to Germany's defeat. They rejected the fascism and militarism of Adolf Hitler's Germany and believed in a federated Europe that adhered to principles of tolerance and justice.

[edit] The name

Under Gestapo interrogation, Hans Scholl said that the name had been taken from a Spanish novel he had read. Annette Dumbach and Jud Newborn speculate that this may have been The White Rose, a novel about peasant exploitation in Mexico published in Berlin in 1931, written by B. Traven, the German author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Dumbach and Newborn say there is a chance that Hans Scholl and Alex Schmorell had read this. They write that the symbol of the white rose was intended to represent purity and innocence in the face of evil. ^[4]

[edit] The leaflets

Quoting extensively from the Bible, Lao Zi, Aristotle and Novalis, as well as Goethe and Schiller, they appealed to what they considered the German intelligentsia, believing that they would be intrinsically opposed to Nazism. At first, the leaflets were sent out in mailings from cities in Bavaria and Austria, since the members believed that southern Germany would be more receptive to their anti-militarist message. The group's members were also influenced and supported by their Christian beliefs; Sophie and Hans, for example, became more and more convinced by Roman Catholicism, and Alexander Schmorell, whose mother was Russian, was a devout Russian Orthodox.

At the end of July 1942, the male students in the group were deployed to the Eastern Front for military service during the academic break. In late fall the men returned and the White Rose resumed its resistance activities. In January 1943, using a hand-operated duplicating machine, the group is thought to have produced between 6,000 and 9,000 copies of their fifth leaflet, "Appeal to all Germans!", which was distributed via courier runs to many cities (where they were mailed). Copies appeared in Stuttgart, Cologne, Vienna, Freiburg, Chemnitz, Hamburg and Berlin. Composed by Hans Scholl with improvements by Huber, the leaflet warned that Hitler was leading Germany into the abyss; with the gathering might of the Allies, defeat was now certain. The reader was urged to "Support the resistance movement!" in the struggle for "Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and protection of the individual citizen from the arbitrary action of criminal dictator-states". These were the principles that would form "the foundations of the new Europe".

The leaflets caused a sensation, and the Gestapo initiated an intensive search for the publishers.

On the nights of the 3, 8 and 15 February 1943, the slogans "Freedom" and "Down with Hitler" appeared on the walls of the University and other buildings in Munich. Alexander Schmorell, Hans Scholl and Willi Graf had painted them with tar (similar graffiti that appeared in the surrounding area at this time may have been painted by imitators).

The shattering German defeat at Stalingrad at the beginning of February provided the occasion for the group's sixth leaflet, written by Huber. Addressed to "Fellow students!", it announced that the "day of reckoning" had come for "the most contemptible tyrant our people has ever endured". As the German people had looked to university students to help break Napoleon in 1813, it now looked to them to break the National Socialist terror. "The dead of Stalingrad adjure us!"

[edit] Capture and trial

On February 18, 1943, coincidentally the same day that Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels called on the German people to embrace total war in his Sportpalast speech, the Scholls brought a suitcase full of leaflets to the university. They hurriedly dropped stacks of copies in the empty corridors for students to find when they flooded out of lecture rooms. Leaving before the class break, the Scholls noticed that some copies remained in the suitcase and decided it would be a pity not to distribute them. They returned to the atrium, climbed the staircase to the top floor, and Sophie flung the last remaining leaflets into the air. This spontaneous action was observed by the custodian Jakob Schmied. The police were called and Hans and Sophie were taken into Gestapo custody. The other active members were soon arrested, and the group and everyone associated with them were brought in for interrogation.

The Scholls and Probst were the first to stand trial before the Volksgerichtshof — the so-called People's Court that tried political offenses against the Nazi German state — on February 22, 1943. They were found guilty of treason and Roland Freisler, head judge of the court, sentenced them to death. The three were executed by guillotine the same day. All three were noted for the courage with which they faced their deaths, particularly Sophie, who remained firm despite intense interrogation (however, reports that she arrived at the trial with a broken leg from torture are false), and said to Freisler during the trial, "You know as well as we do that the war is lost. Why are you so cowardly that you won't admit it?" (Hanser, A Noble Treason)

Alexander Schmorell and Kurt Huber were beheaded on July 13, 1943, and Willi Graf on October 12, 1943. Friends and colleagues of the White Rose, who helped in the preparation and distribution of leaflets and in collecting money for the widow and young children of Probst, were sentenced to prison terms ranging from six months to ten years.

[edit] The legacy of the White Rose

Actress Julia Jentsch as Sophie Scholl on trial in Sophie Scholl: The Final Days

With the fall of Nazi Germany, the White Rose came to represent opposition to tyranny in the German psyche and was lauded for acting without interest in personal power or self-aggrandizement. Their story became so well-known that the composer Carl Orff claimed (thought by some accounts [1], falsely) to his Allied interrogators that he was a founding member of the White Rose and was released. While he was personally acquainted with Huber, there is a lack of other evidence (other than Orff's word) that Orff was involved in the movement, and he may well have made his claim to escape imprisonment.

The square where the central hall of Munich University is located has been named "Geschwister-Scholl-Platz" after Hans and Sophie Scholl, the square next to it "Professor-Huber-Platz". Many schools, streets and places all over Germany are named in memory of the members of the White Rose. The subject of the White Rose has also received many artistic treatments, included an acclaimed opera by composer Udo Zimmermann.

In an extended German national TV competition held in the autumn of 2003 to choose "the ten greatest Germans of all time" (ZDF TV), Germans under the age of 40 catapulted Hans and Sophie Scholl of the White Rose to fourth place, selecting them over Bach, Goethe, Gutenberg, Willy Brandt, Bismarck, and Albert Einstein. Not long before, young women readers of the mass-circulation magazine "Brigitte" had voted Sophie Scholl to be "the greatest woman of the twentieth century".

In February 2005, a movie about Sophie Scholl's last days, Sophie Scholl – Die letzten Tage (Sophie Scholl: The Final Days), featuring actress Julia Jentsch as Sophie, was released. Drawing on interviews with survivors and transcripts that had remained hidden in East German archives until 1990, it was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in January 2006.

Prior to the Oscar-nominated film, there had been two earlier film accounts of the White Rose resistance. In 1982, Percy Adlon's Fünf letzte Tage ((The) Last Five Days) presented Lena Stolze as Sophie in her last days from the point of view of her cellmate Else Gebel. In the same year, Stolze repeated the role in Michael Verhoeven's Die Weiße Rose (The White Rose).

Simultaneous to the U.S. release of the Oscar-nominated film in February, 2006, the book Sophie Scholl and the White Rose was published in English, a definitive non-fiction account by Annette Dumbach and Dr. Jud Newborn, a University of Chicago-educated writer and lecturer who served as co-creator and Founding Historian of New York's Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust.

Definitive Account of the White Rose by Jud Newborn and Annette Dumbach, published in 2006, telling the full story behind the film, Sophie Scholl: The Final Days

Earlier, Newborn, working with the Project Director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on the Mall in Washington, D.C., had successfully advocated inclusion of the White Rose in that museum's permanent exhibition.

Newborn's co-authored book, an extensively expanded and updated version of the original 1986 English edition, tells the full story behind the film, treating the White Rose in its entirety while setting the group's resistance in the broader context of German culture, politics and other forms of resistance during the Nazi era. Former German president Richard von Weizsäcker had contributed a special introduction to the book's earlier German-language edition, which remains in print as of 2006. Studs Terkel contributed a brief but moving foreword to the new English version, which also contains historic photographs, a chart of where White Rose leaflets were distributed, a picture of the original duplicating machine used by the White Rose, and an introduction which discusses how contradictory attitudes about the White Rose evolved in Germany from 1945 to the present. Much of this material had never been published before in book form. Among the book's appendices are all of the White Rose leaflets, including the pieced-together text of the planned seventh leaflet, drafted by Christoph Probst and discovered among the trove of previously lost Gestapo interrogation transcripts.

The book's front matter also contains historic excerpts of statements made by Nobel Laureate Thomas Mann and other famous contemporaries describing their emotions when learning about the resistance of the White Rose, who represented the best of what Germans in exile had termed, gratefully, "the other Germany."

In Fatherland, an alternate history novel by Robert Harris, there is passing reference to the White Rose still remaining active in Nazi-ruled Germany in 1964.

The English band White Rose Movement take their name from the group.

[edit] Quotes

• Last words of Sophie Scholl: "…your heads will fall as well". There is, however, some dispute over whether Sophie or Hans actually said this; other sources claim that Sophie's final words were "God, you are my refuge into eternity."

• Last words of Hans Scholl: "Es lebe die Freiheit!" (Long live freedom!)

• "We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace!" (Leaflet 4's concluding phrase, which became the motto of the White Rose resistance)
• "We will not be silent" has been put on t-shirts in many languages (Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Spanish and French) in support of Raed Jarrar. [2] has background information.

[edit] The leaflets

[edit] Notes

[edit] Further reading

• DeVita, James "The Silenced" HarperCollins, 2006. YA novel inspired by Sophie Scholl and The White Rose.

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

White Rose

• Dumbach, Annette & Newborn, Jud. Sophie Scholl & The White Rose. First published as Shattering the German Night, 1986; this edition Oneworld Publications, 2006.
• Hornberger, Jacob G. "The White Rose: A Lesson in Dissent", Jewish Virtual Library.
• "The White Rose", a website about the group.
• The leaflets of the White Rose
• Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
• The White Rose: Information, links, discussion, etc.
• The legacy of the White Rose
• Memories of the White Rose
• "The White Rose", The Holocaust History Project.
• "The White Rose", The Shoah Education Project.
• Sophie Scholl - The Final Days film website (in English)
• Sophie Scholl - Die letzten Tage film website (in German)