THE SUN WAS shining on the spring morning in 1942 when Sophie Scholl set out on what she saw as her new and exciting life as a student in Munich.
Leaving Ulm railway station, she watched the countryside pass by, and picked at the piece of cake that her mother had baked her. On this favorite railway journey, she loved to rest her head against the window and watch the peaks of the Bavaria hills come into view.
Not yet twenty-one, Sophie was bright and intelligent, and was fortunate in Nazi Germany to be making the eighty-kilometer journey to Munich’s Ludwig Maximilian University, where the quota for female students was set at just 10 percent.
As the place where Hitler had made his reputation as an agitator and public speaker in the years after the First World War and the city where he had launched his attempted 1923 putsch to take over the regional government of Bavaria, Munich had strong links with the Nazi Party. Hitler had attended anti-Bolshevik “instruction courses” at the university in 1919; he and Goebbels had planned the persecution of the Jews at his favorite restaurant, the Osteria Bavaria; and he kept an office in the Brown House, the Nazi headquarters in Brienner Strasse. The building also stored the Blutfahne, the blood flag, which had been carried at the head of the 1923 march when the police had opened fire and was still spattered with the blood of the wounded.
It had been a difficult few months at home. During an unguarded moment in his office, Robert Scholl had vented his anger and frustration in the company of a young secretary. “This Hitler is God’s scourge on mankind!” she had heard him say. “If war does not end soon, the Russians will be sitting in Berlin within two years.”1 The young woman had been given the job by Scholl, and she was grateful to him for the work. She was fond of him but such was the influence of the regime on her, she simply did not feel she could let the comments pass. She reported her boss to the Gestapo, who arrested him under the Treachery Act of 1934. Released to finish a project he was working on for the local council’s finance department, Scholl still had the threat of trial and imprisonment hanging over him, and it had cast them all down.
Sophie had found solace in religion and in her friendship with the Catholic scholar Professor Carl Muth, who had become an inspiration to both her and her brother. She would be lodging with Muth for the first month of her course.
At Munich station, Sophie was met on the platform by her brother Hans and his girlfriend, Traute Lafrenz. Although she wanted to get to Muth’s home, Hans was eager to take her somewhere first.
At his room in Schwabing, his friends Alexander Schmorell and Christoph Probst were waiting for them—and they were looking forward to meeting her.
HANS SCHOLL HAD known twenty-five-year-old Alexander Schmorell since the autumn of 1940, and their conversations about philosophy and theology had developed into angry tirades about the Nazis. Tall and lean, with tawny brown hair, Schmorell, who was known to all by his childhood nickname of Shurik, had been born in Russia but brought up in Munich by his German father after his mother had died. Conscripted into the army, he had been among the marching figures who had entered Austria and Czechoslovakia. When asked to swear allegiance to Hitler, Schmorell had refused and requested to be discharged from the army. That request was, of course, turned down, but his commanding officer chose not to report his defiance to the Gestapo. Schmorell, like Scholl, was now studying medicine. Tall, popular, and charming, he liked to present himself as a bohemian and artistic type—and had become Hans’s best friend.
It was through Schmorell that Scholl had met Christoph Probst, a dependable and self-deprecating young man whom everyone seemed to like. Probst had grown up hating the way Nazism sought to persecute people of faith. While only a teenager, he had been devastated by the death of his father, who had taken his own life during a bout of severe depression. He remained close to his stepmother, who was Jewish, and tried to support many Jewish friends. He had been at Ludwig Maximilian University since the outbreak of war, and was now having to combine his studies with serving in the Luftwaffe and looking after his family. Married to Herta Dohrn, who shared his repulsion of the Nazis, he had two children and knew anything he did to oppose the regime put them at risk. But for Probst, the Nazi euthanasia program and the persecution of the Jews had made it impossible for right-minded people to ignore the crimes of the Nazis.
Probst had introduced Scholl and Schmorell to Willi Graf, a devoted Catholic and opponent of the regime who had been arrested back in January 1938 for his membership in an anti-Nazi youth group.
It was Graf who provided the friends with further information about what was happening to Jews and other civilians in the East. He had worked as a medical orderly in field hospitals during the invasion of Poland and Yugoslavia, and had only recently returned from the Soviet Union. The others shivered when they heard his stories from Russia and “of things so terrible” he would not have thought them possible. As he had told his family in Saarbrücken in a letter home from the front: “I wish I had not seen what I have seen.”
THAT FIRST DAY with her brother’s friends was everything Sophie had hoped it would be. They chatted about their favorite subjects, and made plans to go to concerts, the cinema, and restaurants. Saying good-bye to Inge and her parents in Ulm that morning, she had felt like a child; here she was a grown-up.
Quite quickly, the group also began talking about the Nazis and what could be done to show their opposition. The students told Sophie that the student union at the university was dominated by Nazi Party members, but that the wider student body could be open to discussion and might even be a fertile ground for growing opposition.
Hans also had something to confess to Sophie, though he did not know that he should: The next step that they took could put them all in danger of their lives. He and Schmorell had been agonizing over how to turn their anger into an active resistance campaign. Lafrenz and Probst had been drawn into their discussions, which went on long into the night. What form should protest take? Could they make bombs—should they make bombs? No, they were nonviolent, Christian; they could not take human life. In the end they had decided that—like the anonymous figures who had spread the word of Bishop von Galen—they should put their views into leaflets and send them out through the post. It seemed like a mild form of resistance, but in Nazi Germany it was a capital crime. Even as they agreed on the action to take, they knew—though only in their early twenties—that they could well be signing their own death warrants. “I always understood that I could lose my life in the event of an investigation,” Schmorell said. “I ignored this all because my deep urge to combat National Socialism was strong.”2 The leaflets would be anonymous, of course, but they decided early on that they should feature the name of an organization: It would make the Nazis believe they could be dealing with a large number of dissenters. Hans Scholl chose the name randomly, the White Rose, based on a poetic ballad that he had been reading, but also as it “would sound good and would give the impression that there was an agenda.”3
Schmorell borrowed a portable Remington typewriter from a neighbor and gave it to Hans, who began to write: “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 instincts.” He stated that “every honest German is ashamed of his government,” but who could imagine the “dimensions of shame” when the “most horrible of crimes . . . reach the light of day?” Stating that the Nazi system had put “every man into a spiritual prison,” he called for “passive resistance . . . before it is too late.” He quoted Schiller and then Goethe, and again inspired by the Galen leaflet, he called on the recipient to “make as many copies of this leaflet as you can and distribute them.”
During the period the leaflet was being written, Hans introduced Sophie to Josef Furtmeier, a friend of the architect Manfred Eickemeyer. Furtmeier, a former civil servant who had lost his job after refusing to join the Nazi Party, was—according to Traute Lafrenz—a “walking encyclopedia.”4 The Scholls nicknamed the seventy-two-year-old “the Philosopher” as they were held spellbound by his conversation late into the night. Furtmeier said the German population had to be roused into action by protest that could counter the propaganda being put out by the state.
The Scholls would leave his home filled with thoughts of making a Christian, peaceful protest against Germany’s “criminal war makers,” and would chat about a new international community of states that could rise up after the war and stop such horror from happening again.
At some point, in the excitement, Hans told Sophie about the White Rose leaflet he was writing. Immediately, she wished to be involved. It must have caused Hans terrible pain to draw Sophie into the conspiracy, but knowing her as he did, he knew that she was yearning to stand up to the regime. With her devotion to God and humanity, her desperation to do what was right, she could be the emotional heart of the group.
First, she tried to obtain a duplicating machine from her boyfriend, Fritz Hartnagel—although without explaining why—but he could not help.
In the end Hans spent 32 marks on a duplicating machine, made a hundred copies of this first leaflet, and sent them out to addresses he found in the Munich telephone directory. Most of the addresses were randomly picked, but Hans also chose innkeepers because he believed they might gossip with customers.5
Sitting in clouds of pipe smoke, Hans Scholl and Schmorell worked together on a second leaflet, drawing on their love of philosophical discussion and on what Graf had recently told them about the war in the East: “Since the conquest of Poland three hundred thousand Jews have been murdered . . . in the most bestial way.” It was a “most frightful crime against human dignity, a crime that is unparalleled in the whole of history,” and it “must be the sole and first duty, the holiest duty of every German to destroy these beasts.”6 Ending with a quotation from the antiwar philosopher Lao Tzu, the White Rose again urged people to copy and distribute the leaflet.
It was early July when this leaflet arrived at the randomly chosen addresses to which it was sent. By then Hans Scholl, Alexander Schmorell, and Willi Graf had received some devastating news: They were being sent to the Soviet Union at the end of the semester. The war against the Soviet Union had being going on for a year, and the Wehrmacht had launched a major offensive to once again try to break the Red Army. It was a posting that made the blood run cold.
With weeks to go, and with Sophie’s help, they went back to their work with added vigor, determined to make a difference while they still had the chance. Another student medical orderly, Jürgen Wittenstein—whose father, a First World War test pilot, had been killed before his son was born—was recruited to help with the third and fourth leaflets. These described Germany’s “dictatorship of evil” and tried to stir people from their torpor.
The third leaflet claimed to hear the reader say they know about the dictatorship, so “why bring that to our attention again”? If you know, said the resisters, “why do you not bestir yourselves, why do you allow these men who are in power to rob you step by step, openly and in secret, of one domain of your rights after another, until one day nothing, nothing at all, will be left but a mechanized state system presided over by criminals and drunks?” The essay stated that “everyone is in a position to contribute to the overthrow of this system” by using “passive resistance.”
“At all points we must oppose National Socialism, wherever it is open to attack . . . The military victory over Bolshevism dare not become the primary concern of the Germans. The defeat of the Nazis must unconditionally be the first order of business . . .”
For the first time more detailed suggestions on how to rebel were also made, and they went beyond passive resistance. In a section most probably written by Schmorell, sabotage was mentioned as a way to fight back—a highly provocative proposal at the height of war. Of armament plants and war industries, Nazi gatherings and rallies. At universities and laboratories. It urged people not to give to collections for the war effort, and ended with a quote from Aristotle: “The tyrant is inclined constantly to foment wars.”
Written by Hans Scholl, the fourth leaflet warned against celebrating Hitler’s recent successes in North Africa and Russia, as the offensive in Egypt has “ground to a halt” and the “apparent success has been purchased at the most horrible expense of human life.” It painted a picture of a state in which the leaders do not “count the dead,” as mourning “takes up her abode in the country cottages, and there is no one to dry the tears of the mothers.” Every word that comes out of Hitler’s mouth “is a lie.”
Scholl depicted a Christian battle between Good and the “servants of the Antichrist”: “Has God not given you the strength, the will to fight? We must attack evil where it is strongest, and it is strongest in the power of Hitler.”
Suspecting that many would believe the leaflets were British propaganda, Scholl knew that it was important to stress that they were produced by Germans daring to speak out. He wanted to show that there was an alternative to “traditional German apathy.” He declared that the “White Rose is not in the pay of any foreign power” and that it was “trying to achieve a renewal from within of the severely wounded German spirit.” Nazism would only be broken by “military means,” and the country’s rebirth “must be preceded . . . by the clear recognition of all the guilt with which the German people have burdened themselves.”
Hans Scholl signed off: “We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace!”7
These leaflets were copied and sent out, with probably not more than a hundred copies being made of each.8 Wittenstein, who had edited the third and fourth leaflets of the group, bravely traveled to Berlin with some in a suitcase and left them at various points for people to pick up and read.
The group was supported now by another Ulm student, Hans Hirzel, the son of the local Lutheran minister, who made an astonishing confession to the Scholls: It had been he who had been secretly duplicating the sermons of Galen in their area.9 He had pushed them through the mailbox at the Scholls’ home as part of his campaign to mail them anonymously to people he thought would approve of them. This action had inspired Scholl. It had seemed a good, peaceful, and possible way to fight back.
But there was a doubt that ran through every member of the group: Was anybody reading what they were saying? Or was every recipient too scared of or too enthralled by Nazism to take any of it in? Were all the leaflets they sent being put in the trash unread or passed to the Gestapo, which must by now be investigating?
Hans Scholl’s doubts over the effectiveness of the campaign were particularly strong. As he packed for the mobilization to Russia, he began to think that he would not bother with the campaign anymore.10 Anxious and a little demoralized, he pinned his hopes on Kurt Huber, a forty-nine-year-old professor of philosophy and psychology at the university, who he felt might lift their spirits and provide the group with mature guidance.
Small, pale, and with a heavy limp left over from a childhood illness, Huber seemed an unlikely inspirational figure—but he was capable of holding more than two hundred students spellbound during his lectures on German philosophers. Brought up in Stuttgart by middle-class, conservative parents, he viewed the Nazis as a movement of violent and uncouth revolutionaries who were causing the unnecessary deaths of thousands of valiant German soldiers. Loathing the compliance of his colleagues who fell in with Hitler’s movement for personal gain, during lectures he occasionally let fly a risky comment that did not fit into the regime’s way of seeing the world. Once, on mentioning the Dutch philosopher Spinoza, he had joked: “Careful, he’s a Jew! Don’t let yourselves be contaminated.”11 The students had laughed nervously or pretended not to hear, and he escaped repercussions.
Sophie attended his lectures and noted that he appeared to be anti-Nazi. Perhaps he could add gravitas to their campaign.
The students invited him to one of their meetings at Schmorell’s home and asked him whether he had received one of the White Rose leaflets—knowing that they had sent one to him. He said he had, but looking around the room at the Scholls, Traute Lafrenz, Probst, and Schmorell, he suddenly seemed guarded and nervous. When they tried to talk politics, he said “active resistance” to the regime was “impossible,” and left soon afterwards.
On July 22, the group met Huber again, this time behind the heavy black-out curtains at the architect Eickemeyer’s studio, where they raised a brandy glass to the students who were due to leave for the Soviet Union the following morning. The partygoers included many students who knew nothing of their friends’ secret activities, and some even gossiped about the White Rose leaflets being obviously the work of Communists.
Fiercely anti-Communist, Huber—the only older, gray-haired guest—did not like the youngsters’ excited talk about Communism. And when he heard Schmorell say that German soldiers, on witnessing the kinds of atrocities perpetrated by the Einsatzgruppen in Poland, should engage in passive resistance, too, he became angry and snapped that soldiers had to follow orders. The brief row brought him out of his shell, and when someone asked him about passive resistance, he hesitated before stating that the only way to get rid of Hitler was to assassinate him. He then talked at length about the bombings of Cologne and Hamburg, where he feared the architectural treasures of Germany—its cathedrals and museums—were being destroyed. Some of the young guests listened in awe as he described how the nation was losing its most visible emblems of German spirit.
But looking around him at the bohemian group, slouching on stools and cushions and picking at cake, he said: “We are not factory workers. We cannot take to the streets.”12
The Scholls again did not feel they could invite him into their group, although—seeing the way he had galvanized those present with his impromptu speech—they still believed he could help them.
The following morning Sophie insisted on going along to the freight yard at the Ostbahnhof railway station to see off her brother, Schmorell, Graf, and Wittenstein, who had also been posted to Russia. Probst was leaving Munich, too, but only going as far as Innsbruck, to serve with a Luftwaffe medic unit.13 It was a sad farewell. The train was due to take them a long way from home, through Poland to Russia. It would be three months before they came home, if they came back at all.
Sophie stayed, watched them chat. She wondered how her mother must feel back in Ulm: Not only was Hans on his way to the Russian Front, but Werner, her youngest, barely twenty years old, was there, too.
Hans looked up at his sister. Her dark hair—now a little longer than usual—was at her shoulders; her satchel-like briefcase, bursting with books, was hooked by its handle over a spike in the fence separating her from them. Seeing that he was looking at her, she gave a big smile and he smiled back. When he looked away again, her look changed. She was engrossed in thought.
The first phase of the White Rose was over. Their minds now were filled with thoughts of where to take it next.
AT THE END of the semester Sophie Scholl returned to Ulm and the family home in the shadow of the cathedral. Coming through its door, she had a torrent of thoughts she would have liked to share but she could not: how she and Hans were at last doing something about the plague that had taken over their land.
At home, though, she felt much younger than she did at the university. There she was an independent woman, a free-thinking scholar; here, with her mother and father, she was their child again. And they desperately needed her support.
The trial of Robert Scholl for his outspoken words against Hitler had been set for the beginning of August. He appeared in the Special Court in Stuttgart—where Hans had appeared in 1938—and was sentenced to four months in prison, a sentence that was considered lenient. Scholl also lost the legal license he needed to work in financial services, and although a friend—Eugen Grimminger, who hated the Nazis—took over his business and offered Inge a job, the imprisonment left the family struggling for money.
These were lonely times for Sophie. Her father was in prison; her brothers, Hans and Werner, were in Russia; and then Fritz Hartnagel, whom she had not seen since the spring, was sent there, too. The family also received news that Ernst Reden, who had remained friends with Inge, had been killed. The news and the effect it had on her sister made Sophie step up her resistance to the war. “It’s got to stop,” she told her family.14
Soon after, a letter arrived ordering Sophie to fill in her summer with two months’ labor service at a local arms factory. The work was grim, consisting of long hours among the deafening machinery. Sophie described it as “very like slavery,” and indeed most of the others working the machines were captured Russian women who had been forced to work in this most dangerous of home-front industries. Sophie saved some of the money she received and went to see Hans Hirzel, the young student from Ulm who had copied the Galen sermons. She gave him money to buy a duplicating machine.
With every week that passed, there seemed to be bad news. She feared for Hartnagel, who was now at Stalingrad, and wept for Carl Muth when his home was damaged by one of the first bombing raids on Munich. Her father was eventually freed early and in good health, but she could not get over the injustice of his being humiliated and jailed in the first place. She told him she could not forgive the Nazis “who had made it happen.”15
Hans was due back for the winter semester, which was to start at the beginning of November. She longed to see him again but worried over the “uncertainty” that “casts a shadow over all the days to come.”16 In her diary she wrote: “I ought to be overjoyed at being with him again, but there is something troubling my joy.”17
She wondered how Russia had affected her brother, and she feared, too, the inevitable outcome of his return: that together they would renew the campaign of the White Rose.