THE SUMMER POSTING to the Russian Front had hardened Hans Scholl’s resolve to increase the activities of the White Rose.
The troop train had paused in Warsaw, allowing them to sip on vodka in a bar before walking through streets “surrounded by misery.”1 Scholl later told Traute Lafrenz that they had seen the Warsaw ghetto, where perhaps half a million Jews were starving in run-down houses, cut off from the outside world. Traveling on, they had eventually reached the Soviet Union and the ruins of Vyazma, a town that had been destroyed by German aircraft ten months earlier.2 From there it had been a short march to Gzhatsk, eighty miles due west of Moscow, right at the front of the German advance. At night Scholl would watch the muzzle flashes of the Russian artillery and then wait for the shells to hit the town around him. Willi Graf said the ruins of its tall houses rose “spookily in the moonlight.” For Alexander Schmorell, who had been born in Russia and spoke the language fluently, the pain of seeing the country destroyed was heartfelt.
Schmorell and Scholl spoke to local people and to patients in the field hospital and began to hear firsthand about the atrocities committed under the guise of Hitler’s war on Bolshevism. Schmorell shared folk tales and folk songs from his youth to win over suspicious peasant farmers and argued with fellow soldiers who dismissed them as Slavs and “Asiatic inferiors.” He risked a court-martial when he saw a German guard beating a Russian prisoner and pushed the soldier away.
Schmorell vowed that when he left Russia, he would never wipe the Russian mud off his boots, and that he would return one day.
Hans Scholl read Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy by candlelight in his bunker, and scoffed at the Nazi idea that these giants of literature must come from the ignorant hordes of Asiatic Russia. The friendly moments he shared with local Russians only made him sink further into a kind of depression. War, he thought, was “the most unimaginative of all human activities.”3 Those quiet moments of reflection, though, were few and far between. The hospital was busy, the wards lined with the maimed and dying. “I have no music in me anymore,” Scholl wrote after one long shift. “Now all I hear are groans and screams of people in torment.”4
However, among the death and misery, Hans did find a sense of hope. Many of the soldiers at the front were showing signs of dissent. Much of it was just the usual grumblings of the Landser, the German infantryman, of the kind one might hear in any army, but it revealed to him that he and his friends were not alone in their complete disillusionment with the Nazi hierarchy. One favorite joke among the men was imagining that Hitler had decided to visit the front in Russia to raise their morale. On visiting a group of men huddled in a bunker, the Führer asked, “And, you, soldier, what would be your final wish if a Russian shell landed right near you?” “Only,” replied the soldier, “that my Führer was standing beside me.”5
Soldiers along the front knew, of course, that such “defeatism” was likely to end in front of a firing squad. While he was in Gzhatsk, Scholl heard the story of a company commander who had been heard to brand the Nazi leaders as “criminals.” The young man’s Iron Cross, awarded for bravery in battle, did nothing to prevent him from being put against a post and shot.6
Despite this, Scholl took risks, too, when his natural humanity simply overcame any fear he might have. Once, while walking to the rear of the front line, he spotted a group of Russian women being made to carry and break rocks to help repair a road. Among them was a sickly young Jewish girl, with a Star of David stitched into her ragged clothing. As he watched, he realized she could barely swing the heavy pick she was gripping in her calloused hands. Reaching into his pocket, he brought out his iron ration, a mixture of chocolate, dried fruit, and nuts, and handed it to her. She saw only the uniform and not the kindness in his face, and threw the gift down at his feet. Unperturbed, he picked it up and dusted it down. How could he show her that he meant only kindness? He walked to the edge of the road and plucked a small flower, which he then laid with the food at the girl’s feet. “I only wanted to give you some pleasure,” he said and quickly walked away, realizing she might overcome her pride and fear if he did not watch her. When he was at a distance, he turned quickly and his heart swelled. The ration had been picked up and shoved into her pocket and the flower was in her hair. This moment of human connection stayed with him until word came that the medical company was being returned to Germany.
The young men marched back to Vyazma, where they were deloused and assembled at the station. Graf managed to buy a samovar before the journey, and the cattle car that took them out of Russia was filled with the smell of hot tea. Through the ragged holes in the wooden sides of the train, they watched the countryside roll by, and occasionally caught sight of a peasant with a cart trundling along a rough road. Graf spoke for them all when he said he was worried about what would happen to the Russians they had met.
When they stretched their legs during a stop at the Polish border, these sentiments were fresh in their minds. Close to the station a group of Russian prisoners was being roughly herded into a barbed-wire enclosure. The men dragged their feet through exhaustion and starvation; their tattered clothes hung off them. Scholl, Schmorell, and Graf wandered over, holding out cigarettes for them to take. Schmorell exchanged a few words with them, but the soldiers on guard turned on the medics. There was an angry argument, which threatened to spill over into violence, but then the train whistle blew and there were shouts from the station. The medics ran back, still exchanging insults with their fellow soldiers.
The soldier medics did not take a walk in Warsaw on the way back; they stayed on the train. They had seen enough. Jürgen Wittenstein, who was returning on the train, too, said Russia had left them feeling a mix of “shock, horror, and rage.”7
TWO DAYS AFTER Hans and Sophie met up again in Munich in November 1942, the Allies landed tens of thousands of troops in Morocco and Algeria, areas of French North Africa controlled by the Hitler-supporting Vichy regime. The invasion—code-named Operation Torch—took pressure off the British soldiers fighting Rommel in Egypt and allowed the Allies to take naval control of the southwest Mediterranean. The invasion would also make possible an assault on southern Europe. For Roosevelt, Torch was a turning point in the war.
The Scholls had opposed the war throughout—even during the German successes of 1939 and 1940—and now the tide looked to be turning in North Africa and Russia. As they listened to the German radio broadcasts, which tried to disguise or downplay any downturn in the Wehrmacht’s fortunes, they remained as resolute as ever in their beliefs that the German people had to fight against the Nazis and strike them “the most telling blows.”8 Hans told his sister that no matter how much Goebbels’s radio broadcasts exalted the spirit and morale of the German soldiers in Russia, he had seen for himself that many of them were exhausted and worn down by the horrors of the war in the East.
On the surface the Scholls returned to “normal” student life. The rather privileged way in which the trainee doctors were treated meant that Hans and his friends returned from the front to enjoy all the benefits of university life again. They attended lectures, as if they had only been at home for the holidays, and he, Schmorell, and Graf resumed their membership of the Bach Choral Society. Hans and Sophie now each had a room at Franz-Joseph-Strasse 13, in the fashionable suburb of Schwabing, where the landlady was largely absent, having taken to the country to avoid the by now regular terror of the air raids. Hans, who had split from Traute Lafrenz, started a relationship with an art student, Gisela Schertling, who became friendly with the group but was a devoted National Socialist and so was never told anything about their real political feelings or their work. Lafrenz continued to work with the White Rose, who now met most nights at the Scholls’ lodgings to discuss how next to proceed.
They all heard and discussed the foreign radio reports about the arrests of the “spies and traitors” of the Rote Kapelle. They had been shocked to hear that there were senior people in the civil service and in the Luftwaffe—right in the heart of Hitler’s Berlin—who were resisting the regime. It meant that they were not alone, and that there was resistance high up in the government itself. All now agreed with Hans Scholl that the way forward was to find out if there were other groups, and to create a network of resistance across the major cities of Germany. Such moves would put them in greater danger: the more people they tried to contact, the greater the risk of exposure through denunciation or contact with somebody already on a Gestapo watch list. But this consideration was put to one side, and the discussion turned to how they would find people away from their immediate circle in Munich.
The breakthrough came quickly, through Lilo Ramdohr, an artist friend of Schmorell’s. Ramdohr had met Falk Harnack through his work as a director with the National Theater in Weimar, and they were now in a relationship and planned to get engaged to be married.9 Falk, she told them, had been a student in Munich in 1933 and had clashed with supporters of the brownshirts on the streets. He had even distributed anti-Hitler leaflets, she said, and had been among a group of students calling for a university strike in 1938. She could set up a meeting.
THIS LINK THROUGH Lilo Ramdohr to Falk Harnack seemed a stroke of luck, but when she told them that Harnack was stationed with an infantry company in Chemnitz, they grew anxious. The train journey to the city close to the Czech border would be subject to checks and controls. Two soldiers traveling so close to the border and reluctant—because of association with Arvid Harnack, who was under arrest in Berlin—to give the name of the man they were meeting could be charged with desertion. They also wanted to carry copies of the first four White Rose leaflets so they could show Harnack the kind of work they had been doing.
The risks were great, but the dream of expanding their resistance was too powerful. Hans and Schmorell headed to Chemnitz and found Harnack in a quiet inn named Sächsischer Hof.10 Harnack, in his late twenties and so a little bit older than the others, led the conversation. They talked all day, first in the downstairs tavern and later in a private room upstairs. With the door locked, Falk Harnack spread out the four White Rose leaflets on a small table and studied them. They were typed out, single-spaced, on cheap duplicating paper. Falk read the rage that came out of them and shivered at the dangers the members of the group faced for writing and mailing out these leaflets.
But he had criticisms of the young group’s writing: It was too academic, he said. Too intellectual. The words and phrasing were from the worlds of literature and philosophy, not the simple messages that would speak to the masses. Hans Scholl and his friend took the criticism well: They knew it made sense. After all, they were all middle-class, intellectual, and from comfortable backgrounds. Schmorell’s father was wealthy and lived in a large villa in the Munich suburb of Harlaching. Christoph Probst came from a rich merchant family, and he lived as a private scholar who was not only learning medicine but also funding his own research into Eastern religions. Graf’s father was a wine wholesaler and the owner of a large banqueting hall.
Falk shared his own beliefs with them: that despite the arrests of his brother and sister-in-law, the resistance had to develop a broad antifascist consensus in every city across Germany. People who had been enemies during the days of the Weimar Republic—from the Communists on the left to the conservatives and army on the right, with the Social Democrats and the liberals in the middle—must all come together as one to bring down Hitler.
And then he told them something that shocked and inspired them: a secret cabal of generals had built up a resistance network that planned the seemingly impossible—the assassination of Adolf Hitler and the complete overthrow of his regime.
INSPIRED BY THEIR meeting with Falk Harnack, the White Rose sought to expand its membership and activities.
Scholl and Schmorell made another journey, this time to Stuttgart, to see Eugen Grimminger, the friend who had taken over Robert Scholl’s business when he had been jailed. Hans Scholl knew he could trust the fifty-year-old accountant. Married to a Jewish woman named Jenny, Grimminger had helped a number of Jews escape Germany in 1938 and 1939. He had lost his prewar job in the civil service because of his marriage to a Volljüdin, and the Nazis considered him “politically unreliable,” but for the moment they left him alone.
Grimminger was anxious about what the two students might want to talk about and suggested they walk where they might not be overheard. In the end they stopped and sat on a loading bay of a bus and tram company. The younger men lit pipes as they talked, and from behind the smoke Hans Scholl took a deep breath and told Grimminger about the White Rose, the leaflets written so far, and those that could be yet to come. We are looking to unite resistance across Germany, Scholl told him, and yes, it does exist. He asked Grimminger about his friends in the industrial community around Stuttgart, and the accountant told him there were murmurs of dissent among some. Scholl seemed to suggest that a coup could take place and oust Hitler from the chancellery. The suggestion at once terrified and excited Grimminger. But what do you need from me? Grimminger asked.
The answer was money. To expand operations, buy new supplies, and travel, the little group of the White Rose needed more funds. Grimminger sighed and walked back and forth. He admired these young people and clearly saw the spirit of his friend Robert in his son Hans. Germany needed young people like this, now more than ever. But to fund their operation would be taking a leap that simply petrified him, not for his own sake but for his family’s. Any money he handed over would be an act of treason. He could not take that risk. It would be a death warrant for his Jewish wife and her family, and probably for him, too. The conversation became heated, with Grimminger angry about being asked to involve himself so deeply—although his temper was more likely a disguise for the frustration he felt for not appearing to help. He apologized to Scholl, they shook hands, and the two students left empty-handed.
But all the way home Grimminger’s conscience played on him. If people like him did not help the young people, who would? They had taken a tremendous risk in contacting him, and were going to continue putting their lives on the line. Their goal was to make a better life for everyone, especially Germany’s Jews. He slowly changed his mind, wrote a check for 500 marks, and sent it to Hans Scholl. He did not ask for repayment: It was a gift. A gift to do good. It was an act of generosity that would cost Grimminger far more than money.
Back in Munich, the architect Manfred Eickemeyer pledged money, too, handing over 200 marks in cash, and Willi Graf had saved up 50 marks, which he put into a kitty overseen by the group’s treasurer, Sophie.
Deciding that the group’s first outlay should be on a bigger and faster duplicating machine, Traute Lafrenz took the train to Vienna, where her uncle owned an office-supply company. He told her the war had made it difficult to source supplies for individuals, but he promised to try to get her something by the spring—which seemed a long time to wait for the impatient twenty-three-year-old. Not to be disappointed, she went to see her aunt Mimi, who had connections with the University of Vienna, and asked her to deliver some leaflets to trusted members of the student body.
After returning to Germany, Lafrenz headed north to her native Hamburg, where she had many left-wing friends, having studied in a liberal arts school and later at the university. Nazism had never really dominated in Hamburg, a busy port with a large international influence. A movement of working-class teenage rebellion, known as the Edelweiss Pirates, had been active in the city, and the Gestapo reported on a strong “swing movement” among upper-middle-class kids. The regime sought to clamp down on these American-influenced musical gatherings as it believed the will to shun Nazi-approved music of the völkisch in favor of Benny Goodman and Louis Armstrong led to rebellion of other sorts.11
In Hamburg, through former classmates Heinz Kucharski and Greta Rothe, Lafrenz found a loosely connected group of students and intellectuals who were eager to learn about the work of the White Rose in Munich.12 They numbered about fifty—many more than the White Rose—but lacked cohesion. They met in bookstores and carefully selected coffeehouses and debated what to do. The chemistry students among them discussed stealing nitroglycerin, which could be used to blow up a railway bridge used regularly by German troop trains or even Gestapo headquarters. Their ambitions had been great, but only now were they congregating around a leader: a former soldier named Hans Leipelt, who had served with distinction in Poland and won a bravery medal for the destruction of a tank. Despite his courage, Leipelt had been dishonorably dismissed from the army when it was discovered that his mother was half-Jewish.13 Leipelt—who wore round steel-rimmed glasses and had a shock of unruly dark hair—was inspired by the copy of the White Rose’s third leaflet that Traute Lafrenz had brought with her. He resolved to make his group the northern branch of the White Rose.
Willi Graf also traveled extensively in the period around Christmas 1942, having volunteered to use the winter holiday to gain support from his own contacts. Packing a bag full of leaflets and a duplicating machine, he went to visit friends at the University of Bonn—where he had previously studied—and later people he knew from school in Saarbrücken. Showing astonishing bravery, he then traveled on to Cologne, Ulm, and Freiburg, where he discovered a small core of resisters on the faculty led by Heinz Bollinger in the philosophy department and his brother Willi, a medic at the local military hospital. Graf gave them the duplicating machine and a pile of White Rose leaflets, and in return Willi Bollinger said he knew how to copy military passes and army train tickets if they required any. He also showed Graf the cache of guns he had been quietly storing away.14 At each stop Graf sought out people he felt might help the resistance movement. Almost everywhere he met fear and suspicion. Old friends just could not believe what he was asking of them, while others felt it was more honorable to help their nation win the war first and then change the leadership. Many, though, were filled with respect for his courage and resolve: “He was one of those young people who have always found it impossible to remain indifferent in the face of injustice,” one friend said later.
It was lonely work, but the quiet and stoic Graf carried it out with care and without drawing attention to himself. In the end he recruited only four people: the Bollingers, Helmut Bauer, and Rudi Alt.
In Ulm, Sophie worked with Hans Hirzel—the son of the minister at the Martin Luther Church—and two of his friends, Franz Josef Müller and Heinrich Guter, to mail out more leaflets. They found a hiding place behind the organ of Hirzel’s father’s church in which to sit and talk as they wrote the addresses on the envelopes.15
IN MUNICH, HANS and Sophie Scholl found solace from the stresses of their underground activities in a bookshop hidden in the shadows of the twin domes of the Frauenkirche. Josef Söhngen’s bookshop was as peaceful and eccentric as its owner, and the Scholls loved them both. Söhngen did little to hide his feelings about the Nazis and the concentration camps from his loyal customers, and he listened with horror to Hans’s stories from Russia. He saw the young man as tense but determined, and in his apartment above the shop they would talk about politics in more detail. One night, Hans Scholl came in, sat down, and said he needed to “recover his balance.” He explained about his little network and his hopes to expand it.
Söhngen said he had a friend named Giovanni Stepanov, an art historian, who had links with the Italian antifascist movement. The bookshop owner often arranged talks for the Italian in Munich, and he could introduce Scholl to him. It seemed like an opportunity to expand, but unfortunately the next time Stepanov came to the city Hans was visiting Ulm.
Scholl did, however, finally succeed in recruiting the group’s oldest member, Kurt Huber, the professor with the ability to inspire during his lectures. Huber had remained friends with Scholl despite his concerns about the effectiveness of passive resistance. He cared deeply for the university students, seeing them as the future of a better Germany, and Hans was one of a small group that he invited home for coffee and cake. They would sit with Huber’s wife nearby and his young children, Birgit and Wolf, playing in another room.
In silence Huber listened to Scholl’s descriptions of atrocities in Russia, and one day when Scholl brought Willi Graf along, the two men admitted to being involved with the White Rose leaflets. Huber was alarmed but said he doubted whether the leaflets would have any effect at all on the Nazis. Scholl admitted he had his doubts, too, but repeated the sentiments expressed in the fourth leaflet, that bringing down Nazism had to take priority over everything, including opposing Communism. He also told Huber about the resistance groups in the army. The professor was shocked but heartened: He respected the army a great deal and believed they were the only section of society that could offer truly meaningful resistance.
Scholl said he wanted to write more leaflets, with better appeals to the people, and he asked for Huber’s help in preparing them.
Despite his reservations, Huber agreed to become involved. “In a state where the free expression of public opinion is throttled,” he said, “a dissident must necessarily turn to illegal methods.”16
AS 1943 BEGAN, Hans Scholl was excited about the circle of people he had brought together. “All the energy one expends comes flowing back,” he told his friend Otl Aicher.17
Hans and Schmorell now wrote separate drafts for the group’s fifth leaflet. They were working against the backdrop of bad news from the front. German soldiers were encircled by the Red Army at Stalingrad, and the Russians were calling on them to surrender; Panzer armies were in retreat; the Allies were threatening to take Tripoli. The students tried to incorporate all this into their new “Call to All Germans.”
When the writing was done, the group came together in Hans’s room, with Kurt Huber invited to decide between the two versions. Scholl and Schmorell read Huber their work, while Graf and Sophie looked on: two students reading theses to a professor, but these were not term papers; they were tracts that could get them killed.
Huber did not like Schmorell’s: It had a “Communist ring” to it and was too pro-Soviet. Scholl’s, he said, was more tightly critical of Hitler’s regime. At this point Huber felt deeply that “since the Führer assumed the high command and dismissed our most competent generals, the striking power of the German army has been catastrophically weakened.”18 Huber also objected to the plan to publish the fifth leaflet not under the banner of the White Rose but as “Leaflets of the Resistance Movement in Germany.” Huber said it felt heavy and clunky, while “White Rose” had implied purity and courage; the students disagreed. They believed the new name fit in with their new knowledge of a wider resistance network and would give the impression that this German phase of resistance was part of a Europe-wide movement.
This time the appeal to Germans was shorter, punchier, without the lengthy Biblical and philosophical quotations of the previous four. Hans had taken the advice given by Falk Harnack to talk more directly to “the masses.” “The war is approaching its destined end,” it began, “. . . in the East the armies are constantly in retreat and invasion is imminent in the West. Mobilization in the United States has not yet reached its climax, but already exceeds anything that the world has ever seen. It has become a mathematical certainty that Hitler is leading the German people into the abyss.” The phrase “mathematical certainty” was a clever play on a phrase often used by the Führer.
The reader was told emphatically, “Hitler cannot win the war; he can only prolong it,” and was again urged to turn away from Nazism and to think about how history would view the German people: “Are we forever to be a nation which is hated and rejected by all mankind? No.”
A significant element of Schmorell’s text appears to have survived Huber’s intervention, with the text being adapted after he left.19 “Do not believe the National Socialist propaganda which has driven the fear of Bolshevism into your bones. Do not believe that Germany’s welfare is linked to the victory of National Socialism for good or ill . . . The workers must be liberated from their condition of downtrodden slavery under National Socialism.”
Hans Scholl ended with a statement of wishes that drew on the conversations he and Sophie had had with Josef Furtmeier, “the Philosopher,” about an international community of states protecting the world from war. “Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, protection of the individual citizen against the arbitrary actions of authoritarian states—these are the foundations of the New Europe.”20
WHILE THE FIFTH leaflet was in production an event took place in Munich that was unprecedented in the history of Nazi Germany: a spontaneous student revolt that saw fistfights and a march through the streets. The White Rose felt they had helped create an atmosphere in which the protest took place, although it was ultimately sparked by a clumsy speech from the highest-ranking local Nazi official.
The protest would mark a key moment in the chain of events that would bring the wrath of the regime down upon the young students.
The SS leader Heinrich Himmler himself had created the concept of Lebensborn—the Spring of Life—and a chain of nursing homes where “racially pure” babies could be born. German women were told it was their duty and an honor to provide babies for the Reich and were encouraged to become pregnant by SS officers whether or not they were married to each other. Himmler was said to have been delighted by the sons of the Reich whom Nazi mothers had called Heinrich after him.21
A keen proponent of the idea that women should be providing babies for the Third Reich as a priority over all other aspects of their lives was Paul Giesler, the forty-seven-year-old Gauleiter of Munich and Upper Bavaria.
With his high forehead and middle-aged paunch, out of uniform Giesler looked like a middle manager in a provincial bank. In it he struck fear into those under him. An enthusiastic Nazi who had been an SA leader since 1924, he looked forward to delivering a key speech to mark the 470th anniversary of the founding of the university. The location for the event was the main auditorium of the Deutsches Museum, a science and technology center on an island in the Isar River, in the center of Munich. The students were ordered to attend, although the Scholls and Schmorell ignored this, having pledged never to attend a Nazi-sponsored event. The main hall was reserved for SS officers and male members of the staff, while female students were made to stand on a balcony. Traute Lafrenz and Gisela Schertling, who had very different views on Nazi ideology, were among those who heard Giesler speak. He had chosen to be provocative, viewing students as draft dodgers, “twisted intellectuals,” and “falsely clever minds,” who knew nothing about “real life.” There were murmurings of discontent and a stony silence when he roared: “Real life is transmitted to us only by Adolf Hitler, with his light, joyful and life-affirming teachings!”22
With a disdainful eye he then turned his attention to the female students, who, he said, instead of reading books should be using their “healthy bodies” to provide the Reich with a baby a year. “And for those women students not pretty enough to catch a man,” he leered, “I’d be happy to lend them one of my adjutants. And I promise you that would be a glorious experience!”
As he spoke these words, twenty women tried to leave the balcony in protest but were arrested by brown-shirted students. Male students rushed to their aid, and fights broke out. Giesler spoke on, but his words were drowned out by shouts, people stamping their feet, and chairs screeching on the floor as students and SS men struggled and fought at the back of the auditorium and in the lobby.
Some female students ran out and were arrested. Angry male students got into fights with university brownshirts and members of the SS. The female students who had been arrested were released in the confusion and called people together in groups. They burst out of the doors, crossed the bridge off the little island, and headed north along the bank of the Isar. As they marched, they linked arms and sang. For the people outside the art museum with its permanent Nazi exhibition of “Great German Art,” the sight of the young marchers was a complete shock. No one had seen voices raised in protest—an angry group of people marching in dissent—for almost ten years.
And although the police broke up the march as it walked between the historic buildings of Ludwigstrasse, the protest had already become a major topic of conversation across the city. Sophie told her friends there was a direct link between their leaflets and the unrest. Their message was getting through!
The march gave the White Rose fresh hope, and they threw themselves into work to disseminate the fifth leaflet in much greater quantities. This time they went a lot further than before, producing between eight thousand and ten thousand copies, all printed in the artist’s studio belonging to Manfred Eickemeyer, who was away but had left Hans the key. They worked through the night, continuing during air raids, only stopping the duplicating machine when someone passed close by outside on Leopoldstrasse. It was hard work as the machine had to be cranked by hand, the copies appearing one by one. Sophie and Traute Lafrenz traveled across the city, buying special mimeograph paper, stamps, and envelopes in various locations, aware that a bulk buy would attract attention. They disguised their missions as fun shopping trips, sometimes grabbing a bite to eat in a favorite restaurant, the Deutscher Kaiser on Wilhelmstrasse or an Italian restaurant, the Bodega, in Schwabing. The tension of one trip was broken when Sophie saw a dray horse and rushed to pat its neck. “There, there, old boy,” she said, “everything’ll be all right.” The moment made Lafrenz smile.23
The work to get this huge batch of leaflets out to the public was dangerous and exhausting. Every member of the gang was involved. In Munich they left them in telephone kiosks, the entrances and stairways of apartment blocks, and beer halls, and mailed some from dozens of mailboxes. They also wanted to get away from the city and took huge risks by carrying suitcases filled with leaflets on the train. Each member always traveled alone and placed the case in the overhead rack of a different compartment, to distance himself or herself from the “criminal” material. Graf’s contact Willi Bollinger helped with counterfeit travel passes.
Scholl followed this routine on a journey to Salzburg, where he left the station and found mailboxes in quiet streets and posted 150 leaflets. Schmorell carried a case filled with 1,400 leaflets to Linz and Vienna. To confuse the authorities, he mailed 400 from Vienna to Frankfurt, 200 from Linz, and the rest from Salzburg. Graf traveled in uniform but without a pass—thus putting himself at risk of arrest for desertion—to Cologne and Bonn.
Sophie’s journeys took her to Augsburg, Ulm, and Stuttgart, and in all she mailed close to a thousand leaflets.24 In Ulm she was helped again by Hirzel, Müller, and Guter, and also could not resist showing her father one of the leaflets.
He looked at it admiringly but then suddenly said, “Sophie, I hope you two haven’t anything to do with this?”
Sophie looked indignant and lied. “How can you even suspect that?” she said.
With the group feeling exhilarated at this period of intense activity, Christoph Probst, whose wife was expecting their third child, had a terrible sense of foreboding. He warned his friends that they were still in the jaws of a ruthless state: With their success, the danger was increasing. The young idealists of the White Rose had demanded attention for their message: They were now getting it.
In the oppressive corridors of the Munich Gestapo a special squad was being formed with one mission: to hunt them down.