Establish The Work Of Our Hands
Truth-tellers have never been popular with would-be tyrants – including more than a handful of American politicians - and their derriere-canoodlers.
Autocrats want the world to believe “I alone can fix this” because they are “so great looking and smart, a true Stable Genius!”
Quiet, unassuming, reflective Willi Graf would have none of such lies or the politician(s) who spewed them; strongly motivated by his religious faith, he opposed Nazi ideology from the beginning – and without fear.
In 1929, shortly after entering secondary school, the onetime altar boy joined New Germany and, when the Nazis banned it in 1936, he was one of a dozen out of the thousand students at his school who refused to join the Hitler Youth – despite the fact that membership was required of all boys ten years old and older and his refusal might threaten his university admission. “Don’t think this is easy for me,” he wrote in his diary, crossing out the names of friends who had joined the Nazi paramilitary organization.
From age fifteen on, his life was guided by the words “Be doers of the Word and not hearers only, deluding yourselves.” (The Letter of James 1.22)
At sixteen, he joined the Grey Order) an underground Catholic group for young men twelve to 25 years old. Meeting in secret to avoid detection, the Grey Order combined retreats and camping trips with reading theology and religious hymns that emphasized God’s grace and mercy.
Catholic organizations, including youth groups, were initially protected by the 1933 Concordat between Germany and the Vatican and Willi was able to attend the annual 1934 Easter pilgrimage to Rome, where Pope Pius XI told the pilgrims “always speak the truth, defend the truth, and thereby defend your rights, which are the rights of conscience.” The Pope’s message was posted on church doors across Germany and ripped down by Nazi authorities. When thousands of youthful pilgrims arrived at the German border, Nazi guards confiscated rosaries, prayer books, musical instruments and cameras.
Willi attended Mass regularly and developed an early penchant for theology and philosophy; he sang in a Bach choir and played the violin and viola; spoke and read French and was accomplished in ancient Greek and Latin; and was fond of all things Russian, learning to speak, write and read the language, including Dostoevsky.
On May 10, 1933 the German Student Union sponsored a nationwide burning of “un-German” books, a foretaste of years of uncompromising state censorship. Libraries were cleared of “subversive” literature, history was rewritten, 1200 intellectuals – mostly Jews and liberals, including Nobel laureates - were removed from faculties and, in many university towns, students marched in torch-lit parades to mark the occasion. Faculty members’ jobs no longer depended on truth but on conformity to the National Socialist ideology and young zealots from the Student Union monitored professors and students alike.
Three months after receiving his university-entrance diploma, Willi began his six-month paramilitary labor service duty before enrolling at the University of Bonn in November 1937. Despite his natural inclination to literature and philosophy, he avoided these Nazified curricula and began medical studies, believing this allowed him to give fuller expression to his commitment to be a “doer of the Word, not just a hearer.”
Two months later the Grey Order was banned and he had his first experience of the Gestapo and prison; he and seventeen others were arrested and held in custody for two weeks for their membership in the Order.
In January 1940, one year into the Second World War, Willi was drafted and saw action as a medic in field hospitals in southern France and Belgium; in 1941, he served in Serbia, Poland and Russia, returning home in April 1942.
His military files reported that his care of the wounded and sick was “exemplary” and he “showed himself as an intrepid medic who never thought about his own safety.”
At one point, he wrote his sister,
“…a lot of things have taken place, and I wish I hadn’t seen them. Yet one must not wish that, for in the end, everything we live through has its reason [i.e. meaning], which we must bear. I don’t want to go into details.”
It appears he saw firsthand the brutality of German soldiers as they attempted to encircle Russian forces in the early stages of the siege of Moscow – fueling his hatred of National Socialism. “Not: Something must be done, on the contrary: I must do something,” he wrote his sister in response to the German atrocities.
Wilhelm determined it was not possible to be a faithful Christian and loyal German without resisting National Socialism. He rejected what he considered the ambiguity and moral lapses of Catholic Church leaders who did not express full-throated and consistent opposition to the Nazis or were ambivalent about the suffering of their victims. He found his moral guidance in the New Testament, which he often read. Empathy, solidarity with the suffering, and love of neighbor were intrinsic to living his faith. This commitment found expression in his 1938 decision to join the Red Cross and remain a member until his final arrest in 1943.
For Willi Graf, Psalm 90 – one of the oldest of the Hebrew Psalms - served as a guiding principle:
Lord, You have been our dwelling place throughout the generations…
Let Your work appear to Your servants
and Your glory to their children.
And let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us,
and establish the work of our hands for us;
Yes establish the work of our hands.
He believed that individuals bear full responsibility for determining their own courses of action - whether to conform to the world or confront it. For Graf the question was not “Where is God in the Holocaust?” but “Why are there not more committed Christians acting on their faith and defending the oppressed?” On the Eastern Front and in the Warsaw Ghetto he witnessed “unimaginable” atrocities and his faith gave him the strength and civic courage to do something extraordinary with “the work” of his hands.
In April 1942, he resumed his medical studies – as a member of the 2nd Munich Student Company at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where his frontline experience and abhorrence of National Socialism drew him to the company of Hans Scholl, Christoph Probst and Alexander Schmorell – the core members of The White Rose.
To all appearances, Graf was a typical medical school student: attending clinics but little-concerned about attending classes; long-distance running, smoking cigars, drinking wine and schnapps with friends, reading more than forty books and secretly helping with the difficult, time-consuming, labor-intensive and dangerous work of composing and distributing mass quantities of Leaflets calling for passive resistance and removal of the Nazi regime. His White Rose focus was on expanding the circle of the student resisters, recruiting friends from his former youth groups, and, during the late Spring and early Summer, facilitating the distribution of the group’s first four Leaflets
From July through the end of October 1942, Willi, Hans, and Alex served in a medical field internship on the Eastern Front – interrupting Leaflet production and confirming their commitment to resistance against the Nazis.
Two more Leaflets – the Fifth, “LEAFLET OF THE RESISTANCE. A Call to All Germans” and the Sixth, “Fellow Fighters in the Resistance!” – were published in the months after the student-medics return to Munich.
On February 3, 1943 – the first of two days of official mourning to mark the German defeat at Stalingrad, considered the turning point of the war, the soldier-medic-students of The White Rose mounted a late night foray to paint anti-Hitler and anti-Nazi graffiti – “Down With Hitler,” “Hitler the mass murderer,” “Freedom” and crossed out swastikas.
The letters were three feet high and painted in black tar-based paint, making them difficult to remove. Alex held the stencils, Will painted and Hans, armed with a pistol, stood watch in the nighttime drizzle; Hans and Willi occasionally swapped roles as twenty-nine graffiti were painted across Munich. A similar operation occurred on the night of February 8 and resulted in an intense and constant Nazi surveillance of the University.
The Gestapo had been informed that the leaflets were causing dismay at the highest levels of the Nazi Party – Hitler and his cabinet – at they expected and demanded swift arrests to quash any further rebellion and prevent a “chain reaction.”
Despite an overriding sense that the Gestapo were quickly closing in, Hans announced his plan to distribute the seventh Leaflet inside the University. Willi and Alex demurred – it was too dangerous – and Sophie agreed to accompany her brother, placing over one thousand Leaflets outside lecture halls on Thursday, February 18. Caught by a janitor, they were quickly arrested and transferred to Stadelheim Prison.
Willi Graf was leaving a lecture early when – minutes before their arrest – he spied Hans and Sophie with their suitcase full of leaflets. He spent the day at the clinic to which he was headed when he left the lecture; he and his sister Anneliese then went to visit relatives and were arrested around midnight, when they returned to their apartment – the Gestapo were waiting for them.
The Gestapo rounded up his family – holding Anneliese in prison for four months and his parents for four weeks, creating an overwhelming fear for Willi that his family would be sent to a concentration camp. He was charged with undermining the spirit of German troops and furthering the cause of the enemy.
Hans, Sophie and Christoph Probst, who was arrested on February 20, were executed on Monday afternoon – on Hitler’s orders.
Willi Graf, Alex Schmorell and Professor Kurt Huber (and eleven of their friends and associates who received a wide range of prison terms) went on trial on April 19, 1943. They were charged with “promulgat[ing] leaflets calling for sabotage of the war effort and for the overthrow of the National Socialist way of life… [propogating] defeatist ideas, and [having] most vulgarly defamed the Fuhrer, thereby giving aid to the enemy of the Reich and weakening the armed security of the nation.”
Professor Huber and Alex were executed on July 13; Willi was promised a changed verdict in exchange for information and, when he refused, threats were made against his family. The Nazis believed they could extract important information from him regarding other members of The White Rose and his “contacts.” Knowing that Hans had already been executed, Willi never abandoned his principles; he continued to place blame on Hans to protect his surviving friends. Despite months of torture, his strategy worked. Not one of his contacts was arrested or killed.
From prison, Willi wrote his parents:
"What hurts me most of all is that I am causing such pain to those of you who go on living. But strength and comfort you'll find with God and that is what I am praying for till the last moment. I know that it will be harder for you than for me. I ask you, Father and Mother, from the bottom of my heart, to forgive me for the anguish and the disappointment I've brought you… Forgive me and always pray for me! Hold on to the good memories.... I could never say to you while alive how much I loved you, but now in the last hours I want to tell you, unfortunately only on this dry paper, that I love all of you deeply and that I have respected you. For everything that you gave me and everything you made possible for me with your care and love. Hold each other and stand together with love and trust.... God's blessing on us, in Him we are and we live."
In the hours before his execution, he wrote Anneliese, assuring her that death was not the end, but the beginning of true life. He reminded her of the concert of Handel’s Messiah they had attended in December with other White Rose members and told her he found strength in the aria “I know that my Redeemer liveth.”
Willi Graf was executed by guillotine on October 12, 1943. His execution took one minute and eleven seconds from the time he was escorted from his prison cell to the moment the blade fell. His family learned of his death when one of their letters was f
returned labeled “deceased.”
God’s blessing on us, in Him we are and we live.”