Beloved members and supporters of Civil Liberties Defense Center – first, we thank you. As a grassroots organization, we are strengthened and heartened by your continued support not only for us, but also for movements seeking justice, wherever your passions stem from. We recognize that this is a time for soul-searching decisions of how to engage. How do we continue the good fight and keep ourselves well in the process? One of the ways our organization believes we can continue to be re-inspired, informed, and activated is by looking back while we look forward. May we learn from those brave souls who gave so much to resist the onslaught of authoritarianism many in history have faced. The full-scale assault on civil liberties, sanity, humanity, and the environment we face today is, sadly, not new. This week, we present the story of Sophie Scholl and The White Rose.

Although Sophie Scholl only remained on this planet for a scant 21 years, her courage, moral compass, and resistance to the horrors of the Nazi party still echo through the generations under the banner of The White Rose. Born in May of 1921 in Forchtenberg, Germany, Sophie and her elder brother, Hans, were two of six children of politically influential and ardent anti-Nazi parents, Robert and Magdalena. To their profound disappointment, the Scholl parents watched as their young and impressionable children were swept up into youth wings of the Nazi party, Sophie with the League of German Girls (Bund Deutscher Mädel) and Hans with the Hitler Youth.

After Sophie graduated from high school in 1940, she was trained as a kindergarten teacher but discovered and penned in her own words that her “soul was hungry.”  Sophie longed to continue her education in fields that better matched her desires for an autonomous life away from the fascistic regime that was Hitler’s Germany. However, as a young woman in Nazi Germany, Sophie could not enter college without first giving her time to the highly militarized RAD or National Labor Service (Reichsarbeitsdienst). This 6-month stint only further politicized her views and cemented her beliefs that the 3^rd Reich’s desire for “total war” was a death cult that would only lead to mass slaughter and national shame.

Her first awakening to the wholesale killing of innocent humans was her discovery that the Nazi party had begun to exterminate German Nationals who mentally or physically did not meet the Reich’s psychotic ideal of “Herrenmenschen” (Master Humans). By this time the Jewish population of Europe had already begun to be ripped from their homes and sent to concentration camps for “extermination.”

As the Nazis gained power and begin to exert their influence on all aspects of German society, Sophie and her brother each began to see through the madness of Nazi fanaticism and propaganda. Sophie joined Hans at the University of Munich in 1942, Sophie studying biology and philosophy, and Hans, medicine. During this period, their father, whom they both deeply respected, had begun serving a prison sentence for publicly criticizing Hitler. The siblings were both passionate about the arts, and spent much of their free time attending lectures, concerts, and supporting visual artists, many of which fell under the Nazi umbrella of “degenerate” art. Information about Nazi war crimes had begun to pour out of the Eastern Front from friends and allies of the Scholl children, and Sophie, despite the fact that she had yet to learn of her brother’s involvement, had discovered the existence of The White Rose (Weiße Rose) movement.

Following her arrival at the University of Munich, Hans introduced Sophie to his group of friends that included Alexander Schmorell, Willi Graf, Jurgen Wittenstein, and Christoph Probst, all members of a small cadre of students who had begun to write and distribute leaflets condemning the tenets of National Socialism (Nazism) and advocating for its overthrow. Hans and Alexander had just penned the first four leaflets in June of 1942 under the name “The White Rose.” When Sophie eventually learned of her brother’s involvement in the subversive organization, she demanded membership. The group wrote and produced their leaflets on a single typewriter and a single mimeograph machine (early copier), distributing the first 4 of 6 leaflets through mail alone. Just acquiring paper, envelopes, and stamps was a highly risky endeavor during a time of mass shortages and rationing, and The White Rose successfully punched above their weight by creating an intricate system of dissemination and distribution. This in turn tricked the Gestapo into believing there was a nationwide mass movement with thousands of active members.

Their leaflets focused on the moral responsibility of German citizens to resist fascism as well as engaging in sabotage of the Nazi war machine. They reminded citizens that they must find their own individual acts of resistance, stating “We cannot provide each man with the blueprint for his acts, we can only suggest them in general terms, and he alone will find the way of achieving this end.”

In speaking on the German state, The White Rose shared this warning that remains relevant 83 years later:

But our present “state” is the dictatorship of evil. “Oh, we’ve known that for a long time,” I hear you object, “and it isn’t necessary to bring that to our attention again.” But, I ask you, if you know that, 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?

By early 1943, the efforts of this handful of friends and siblings had begun to pay political dividends of resistance. The White Rose leaflets were being shared, copied, disseminated, and spoken about — with passion — by underground groups of Nazi resistors, and with angst by the armed enforcers of the 3^rd Reich. Early 1943 found Sophie and her group feeling hopeful for an end to the bloodshed. The defeat of the German Army at Stalingrad was a watershed moment in the war and in turn The White Rose upped their activity and risks, spending nights painting the walls around Munich with slogans such as “Freedom” and “Mass Murderer Hitler.”

On February 18, 1943, Sophie and Hans entered the halls of the University of Munich to covertly disseminate The White Rose’s 6^th leaflet in the empty corridors between classes. In an effort to either spread the writings further or in a split-second decision, Sophie shoved a stack of leaflets off a balcony into the hall below. She and Hans were spotted by a janitor who was in league with the Nazis. Because Hans was carrying the 7^th unpublished leaflet in Christoph Probst’s own handwriting, all three were immediately arrested by the Gestapo. Sophie, Hans, and Christoph were interrogated for three days, before being found guilty in a mock show trial. Sophie’s interrogator offered her an opportunity to spare her own life if she pointed the finger at her collaborators, but she refused, stating, “I believe that I have done the best I could do for my countrymen under the present circumstances. So I feel no remorse for my conduct and I am willing to accept the consequences arising from it.”

Receiving no actual defense from Nazi sympathetic attorneys, all three were sentenced to death. Sophie, Hans, and Christoph were led to the guillotine and murdered on February 22, 1943, just four days after their arrest.

According to Else Gebel, a member of the communist resistance to the Nazis who shared a cell with Sophie in the days after her arrest, Sophie’s last words to her before being taken to the guillotine were, “How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause….It is such a splendid sunny day, and I have to go. But how many have to die on the battlefield in these days, how many young, promising lives. What does my death matter if by our acts thousands are warned and alerted. Among the student body there will certainly be a revolt.”

We don’t have look very hard or stretch our imaginations to bear witness to the similarities between the fanatical fascist thought police of our grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ generations and authoritarianism as it exists in this country today. Just like in Hitler’s Germany or Mussolini’s Italy, vocal opposition to the regime is not met with a willingness to debate, but instead with mocking dismissal at best, or disappearance and inevitable deportation — especially if you’re brown-skinned. In a democracy, debate over the path forward is a welcome and robust exercise. Only a coward calls oppositional viewpoints of governance stupid. Only a despot revokes the visas of students who are here legally, humans who define our very country as a melting pot of identities and ideas.

Sophie Scholl and the other members of The White Rose are a poignant reminder that resistance can take on as many forms as we can dream up. They also remind us that bottomless resources are not required to nurture the spark that becomes the flame of resistance that draws others out of the shadows in activation. May their legacy remind us all that organizing against hate requires action and we never know which actions we engage in will be the ones to inspire others to have the courage to do the same.

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Since posting this blog, we’ve received additional resources from our wonderful constituents that they wanted to share. Please click the links below!

Center for White Rose Studies – White Rose Leaflets Translated in English

American Rose – folk song by Jim Page