Thomas Mann was impressed by the White Rose’s resistance to the Nazi regime. “Brave, wonderful young people! You shouldn’t die in vain, you shouldn’t be forgotten,” said the Nobel Prize winner for literature on June 27, 1943 on the British radio station BBC. Around four months earlier, on February 22, the students Hans and Sophie Scholl and Christoph Probst had been executed in Munich. The day following tomorrow, February 22nd, will mark the 80th anniversary of her death.
Her death was just the beginning. Four more members of the group were murdered by 1945, and many others from the area were imprisoned. The White Rose emerged from a circle of friends. Hans Scholl and Alexander Schmorell knew each other from medical school and shared their rejection of the Nazi regime. Like-minded people like Willi Graf, Christoph Probst, Sophie Scholl and the musicologist and professor Kurt Huber also joined.
In the summer of 1942, the first leaflets were published denouncing the outrages of those in power. “Who of us can imagine the extent of the shame that will come upon us and our children when the veil has fallen from our eyes and the most horrible and outrageous crimes come to light?” it said.
The German people are sleeping
A total of six leaflets were published, which also called for the overthrow of the National Socialists. The war mania, the oppression or the murder of the Jews were also denounced in the writings. “Why is the German people behaving so apathetically in the face of all these most hideous, inhumane crimes,” the second leaflet from 1942 said.
The fact is accepted as such. “And once more the German people sleep on in their dull, stupid sleep and give these fascist criminals courage and opportunity to continue to rage – and they do it.”
February 18, 1943 was a fateful day. At around 11 a.m., the Scholl siblings put out the sixth leaflet at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU) in Munich, which called for the day of reckoning: “In the name of all German youth, we demand personal freedom from the state of Adolf Hitler, that most precious asset of the Germans, of which he cheated us in the most pathetic way.” But a caretaker observed the siblings and sounded the alarm – a little later both were arrested, two days later Christoph Probst too.
Just four days later, on February 22, the President of the People’s Court, Roland Freisler, passed his verdict, which the executioner Johann Reichhart also carried out shortly followingwards. “Long live freedom,” shouted Hans Scholl before laying his head under the guillotine in Stadelheim prison. His sister Sophie and Probst died the same way.
Willi Graf, Alexander Schmorell and Kurt Huber were also later murdered, as was Hans Leipelt. After the death of Probst and the Scholl siblings, he and a friend had typed out the fateful sixth leaflet several times, adding the note: “And her spirit lives on anyway!”
The German Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier paid tribute to the White Rose in his memorial lecture at the beginning of February at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, where a memorial explains the work of the White Rose. “Peace, freedom, the dignity of every human being and the responsibility of every individual – these values guided the White Rose,” said Steinmeier. “Today they are the foundation of our liberal democracy.”
