It All Started With Lies And Lies And Lies And Intolerance
This is the second in a series of posts about
The White Rose, the only German resistance group
to actively campaign against Hitler’s attempt to
annihilate European Jews.
We believe, in today’s America, it an important story
and one unknown to most Americans.
Father Roger Tobin and Father Skip Flynn
Forty-five years after Germany’s defeat in World War II, Gustav’s son asked the Simon Wiesenthal Center to investigate his father’s past. Research showed that Gustav had indeed voluntarily enlisted as a member of the Sturmabteilungen, the infamous “storm troopers” or “brownshirts” that helped launch Kristallnach, the Night of the Broken Glass, when synagogues and Jewish homes were attacked across Germany and Austria and thousands of Jews were hauled off to concentration camps.
Years after the Wiesenthal Center report, a deep dive by the Los Angeles Times revealed that, although an Austrian, Gustav would have had to apply to join the SA, was made as master sergeant with the military police unit nicknamed “Chain Dogs,” served with German Army units that saw some of the most brutal bloodshed of World War II, left the army in 1943 and worked as a police officer until his death in 1972.
Days after the January 6, 2021 insurrectionist assault on the United States Capitol, Gustav’s younger son, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who became a citizen in 1983, addressed the American people:
I grew up in Austria. I am very aware of Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass. It was a night of rampage against the Jews carried out in 1938 by the Nazi equivalent of the Proud Boys. Wednesday was the Day of Broken Glass right here in the United States. The broken glass was in the windows of the United States Capitol. But the mob did not just shatter the windows of the Capitol. They shattered the ideas we took for granted. They did not just break down the doors of the building that housed the American democracy. They trampled the very principles on which our country was founded.
…I’ve never shared this so publicly because it is a painful memory. But my father would come home drunk once or twice a week, and he wound scream and hit us and scare my mother. I did not hold him totally responsible because our neighbor was doing the same thing to his family and so was the next neighbor over. I heard it with my own ears and saw it with my own eyes. They were in physical pain from the shrapnel in their bodies, and in emotional pain from what they saw or did.
It all started with lies, and lies, and lies, and intolerance… I know there is a fear in this country and all over the world that something like this could happen right here. Now, I do not believe it is, but I do believe that we must be aware of the dire consequences of selfishness and cynicism.
…My father and our neighbors were misled also with lies, and I know where such lies lead…
I grew up Catholic, I went to church, to Catholic school, I learned the Bible, and my catechisms, and all of this. And from those days I remember a phrase that is relevant today: “a servant’s heart.” It means serving something larger than yourself. See what we need right now from our elected representatives is a public servant’s heart. We need public servants that serve something larger than their own power, or their own party. We need public servants who will serve higher ideals, the ideals in which this country was founded, the ideals that other countries look up to.
Hans Scholl (right) with Alexander Schmorell
Hans Scholl grew up with “a servant’s heart,” determined to battle the same type of lies, Unlike Gustav, he was forced into a bifurcated life of military service as a medic and as a medical school student, sometimes in a barracks and sometimes at the university. According to his sister Inge, “…but the heavier and gloomier burden he had to bear was that he lived in a country where bondage, hatred and falsehood had become the mode of existence. The viselike rule of naked force was becoming tighter and even more unbearable.”
Pressed into frontline service in the war against France in 1940 and in the Eastern front in 1941, he learned about the atrocities committed by German forces and experienced an ever-growing disaffection from National Socialism. He and fellow student Alexander Schmorell with whom he served as a medic on the Eastern Front, felt compelled to act – to find some small way to resist. Thus, The White Rose.
Christoph Probst
Through Schmorell, Hans met Christph Probst, married with three children. While Hans and Alexander were the “spiritual fathers” of The White Rose, Christph was deliberately excluded from political acts which might put him in danger.
Willi Graf
Medical student Willi Graf, who had also been caught up in the 1938 wave of arrests in which Hans had been involved, brought a special sense of philosophy and theology to the small group. Hans’ sister Sophie described him: “When he says anything, in his very deliberate way, one has the impression that he would not speak unless he could commit himself with his whole being. That’s why everything about him gives the impression of being precise, genuine, and wholly reliable.”
Sophie Scholl joined her older brother at Munich’s Ludwig Maximillian University in Autumn 1942; while she was warmly welcomed into Hans’ social circle, by all appearances, she was not initially privy to The White Rose.
Hans and Sophie Scholl and Christoph Probst
The first four leaflets of The White Rose – written by Hans and Schmorell - made their appearances between late June and mid-July 1942 - left in the telephone books of public phone booths; mailed to people whose names appeared in phonebooks, to professors and students at the Universities of Munich and Hamburg; sent anonymously to the mailboxes of doctors, scholars and pub owners throughout German and distributed by couriers to the city of Ulm.
The young authors of the first leaflet – of four -made their position clear: Resist
“Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized people as allowing itself to be ‘governed’ without opposition by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct. If everyone waits until the other man makes a start, the messengers of avenging Nemesis will come steadily closer; then even the last victim will have been cast senselessly into the maw of the insatiable demon… Therefore, every individual conscious of his responsibility as a member of Christian and Western civilization must defend himself as best he can at this late hour, he must work against the scourge of mankind, against fascism and any similar system of totalitarianism. Offer passive resistance — resistance — wherever you may be, forestall the spread of this atheistic war machine before it is too late, before the last cities, like Cologne, have been reduced to rubble, and before the nation’s last young man has given his blood on some battlefield for the hubris of this subhuman. Do not forget that every people deserves the government it is willing to endure!”
While Sophie almost immediately - and instinctively - made the association between the authors and her brother, Hans cautioned her “These days it’s best not to know certain things, so as not to endanger the lives of others.”
Like a crime spree in a television mystery, leafleting inexplicably stopped between July 23 and October 30, 1942 - Scholl and Schmorell, the “spiritual fathers” of the group, and Graf were sent as medics on the Soviet front.
On the Russian front, Hans learned of the indictment and four-month incarceration of his father; the emotions provoked by this news were offset by the briefest of reunions with his brother Werner and, throughout his Eastern front experience, he was confronted by the unmistakable expressions of the Holocaust.
The friends returned to Germany with a new understanding of the regime’s bloodthirst, determined to continue their resistance, and a profoundly aware of their new dangers and the loss of friends who would not understand – or might oppose – their efforts.
Leaflet Five – “LEAFLET OF THE RESISTENCE – A Call to All Germans” began with the bold declaration:
The war is approaching its destined end… Mobilization in the United States has not yet reached its climax, but already it exceeds anything that the world has ever seen. It has become a mathematical certainty that Hitler is leading the German people into the abyss. Hitler cannot win the war; he can only prolong it. The guilt of Hitler and his minions goes beyond all measure. Retribution comes closer and closer… Germans! Do you and your children want to suffer the same fate that befell the Jews? Do you want to be judged by the same standards as your traducers?... Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the protection of individual citizens from the arbitrary will of criminal regimes of violence – these will be the bases of the New Europe. Support the resistance. Distribute the leaflets.
Ultimately Sophie was incorporated into the inner circle and became a member of the cohort that distributed the leaflets through couriers to different campuses and cities and by mail to anonymous recipients across Germany.
The final leaflet began with an in-your-face to Hitler and his henchmen:
Fellow Fighters in the Resistance! Shaken and broken, our people behold the loss of the men of Stalingrad. Three hundred and thirty thousand German men have been senselessly and irresponsibly driven to death and destruction by the inspired strategy of our World War I Private First Class. Führer, we thank you!... The day of reckoning has come — the reckoning of German youth with the most abominable tyrant our people have ever been forced to endure. In the name of German youth we demand restitution by Adolf Hitler’s state of our personal freedom, the most precious treasure that we have, out of which he has swindled us in the most miserable way… The name of Germany is dishonored for all time if German youth does not finally rise, take revenge, and atone, smash its tormentors, and set up a new Europe of the spirit. Students! The German people look to us… Beresina and Stalingrad are burning in the East. The dead of Stalingrad implore us to take action. “Up, up, my people, let smoke and flame be our sign!”
On Thursday, February 18, 1943 Sophie and Hans deposited leaflets at the atrium of the main Munich’s main University building. Whether from what her Gestapo interrogation described as the result of “high spirits” or “foolishness,” she pushed piles of the leaflets over the balustrade, cascading them into the empty hall below - drawing the attention of a University caretaker.
The two were arrested and tried two days later. Christoph Probst was taken into custody the following day.
“I knew what I took upon myself and I was prepared to lose my life by doing so,” Hans told his interrogators.
The three were tried, found guilty, sentenced, and beheaded by guillotine the next day.