What In The World Were You Waiting For?
The White Rose was a small, courageous
group of college students who dared to oppose
Hitler’s murderous regime.
Theirs was a story of absolute integrity and
uncompromised values.
This is the first in a series of histories, profiles and excerpts
from their case records.
We hope it will serve as a
challenge and source of hope and inspiration.
Father Roger Tobin and Father Skip Flynn
“Tear out our hearts and they will fatally burn you.”
Hans Scholl
We’re flummoxed trying to find a word to describe him as an adolescent. He sounds, at that age, like too many American politicians.
One biographer has written that, after joining the army at seventeen, he strutted "with his cape flying open to reveal his tight-fitting hose and boots; a sword and dagger at his waist.” Another reports, he was "a fancy dresser, an expert dancer, a womanizer, sensitive to insult, and a rough punkish swordsman who used his privileged status to escape prosecution for violent crimes committed with his priest brother at carnival time."
Sweet Angels and Saints! He really does sounds like many American politicians.
To the benefit of History, he was seriously wounded – his right leg shattered by a ricocheting canon ball in the 1521 Battle of Pamplona. A wound that ended his military career and left him with a lifelong limp.
At some point – probably during his extended recovery, he encountered one of History’s most troubling questions: “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his immortal soul?”
The question changed the life of Ignatius of Loyola.
“The history of man is the history of crimes, and history can repeat.
So information is a defense.
Through this we can build a defense against repetition.”
Simon Wiesenthal
Few Americans have heard of The White Rose.
And that’s profoundly tragic!
Perhaps as penance for their kowtowing, the history of Hans and Sophie Scholl, Christoph Probst, Wilhelm Graf and others should be required reading for American politicians.
Children’s and adolescents’ minds absorb.
And absorb quickly in a fashion that may, in the best of circumstances, make them courageous, indeed heroic.
Munich 1945
Inge Aicher-Scholl recalls the family conversation.
In those days we heard a story about a young teacher who had unaccountably disappeared. He had been ordered to stand before an SA [“Storm Detachment,” the Nazi Party’s original paramilitary wing] squad, and each man was ordered to pass by the teacher and to spit in his face. After that incident no one saw him again. He had disappeared into a concentration camp. “What did he do?” we asked his mother in bewilderment.
“Nothing. Nothing,” she cried in despair. “He just wasn’t a Nazi. It was impossible for him to belong. That was his crime.”
Oh God, at that the doubts which had arisen soon turned to deep sadness and then burst into a flame of rebellion. Within us the world of purity and faith was crumbling, bit by bit. What was really happening to our fatherland? No freedom, no flourishing life, no prosperity or happiness for anyone who lived in it. Gradually one bond after another was clamped around Germany, until finally all were imprisoned in a great dungeon.
“Father what is a concentration camp?”
He told us what he knew and suspected and added: “That is war. War in the midst of peace and within our own people. War against the defenseless individual. War against human happiness and the freedom of its children. It is a frightful crime.”
…There awoke in us a feeling of living in a house once beautiful and clean but in whose cellars behind locked doors frightful, evil, and fearsome things were happening… now there grew within us a horror and a fear, the first germ of unbounded uncertainty.
“But how is it possible that in our country a thing like this could take over the government?”
“In a time of great troubles,” explained Father, “all sorts come to the surface. Just recall the bad times we had to live through: first the war, then the difficult postwar years, inflation, and great poverty. Then came unemployment. If a man’s bare existence is undermined and his future is nothing but a gray, impenetrable wall, he will listen to promises and temptations and not ask who offers them…
“But surely we are not like cattle, satisfied if we have fodder for our bellies. Material security alone will never be enough to make us happy. After all, we’re human beings, with free opinions and our own beliefs. A regime which would tamper with these things has lost every spark of respect for man. Yet that is the first thing which we must demand from it…
“What I want most of all is that you live in uprightness and freedom of spirit, no matter how difficult that proves to be,” he added.
Inge recounts, once
“…in the early morning, the doorbell had rung and three men from the Gestapo had come to speak with Father… they took Father with them. On that day we realized fully, in our very bones, that we were horribly helpless. What did a single individual matter in this state? He was a speck of dust, to be flicked away with a finger….”
At some point, adolescence – youth – came to a sudden end for Hans Fritz Scholl and many of his closest friends.
Berliners watch the arrival of the British 7th Armored Division.
Two factors brought an idyllic youth to a dramatic halt. Having joined the Hitler Youth at thirteen, barely days before his fifteenth birthday, he was named a standard-bearer for the September 1935 Nuremberg “Reich Party Rally for Freedom.” There he began to recognize the fanaticism of the Hitler Youth and its unconditional subordination to the Nazi power structure. More importantly, for the first time he recognized the implications of Germany’s homophobic “Paragraph 175” law.
Hans and many of his closest friends left Hitler Youth and became members of the bundische movement – a youth camping/outdoors program that may have had some homoerotic tendencies. When the National Socialists ordered the dissolution of the bundische and its publications and books reduced to pulp and ashes, Scholl’s local group continued informally and, in 1937, shortly after he turned 19, he and others were criminally charged with illegally travelling to Sweden; he was also charged with “immoral behavior” with one of the members of the group - violating Paragraph 175.
From 1935 to 1936, Hans had a deeply affectionate and apparently sexual relationship with one of the members of the group, whom he first met in 1934. Hans always claimed that he was unaware until late in this intense relationship that it was illegal to have sex with someone of the same gender. Throughout his interrogations and trial, he refused to identify his partner, telling his interrogators he could only explain the charges in terms of the great love he felt for him.
In a letter he wrote to his parents on April 25, 1938, he wrote, “I received the indictment today. The boys were released under the amnesty, thank God… I’m not afraid of going on trial. Even if I can’t justify myself in open court, I can justify myself to myself.” Hans was detained for seventeen days and, six months later, the case against him was declared a “youthful aberration” and dropped.
Nonetheless, Robert Zoske in his book Flamme sein! Hans Scholl und die Weiße Rose [in German only] argues “For Hans Scholl the humiliation of being a ‘175’ marked Scholl’s break with the National Socialist ideology.”
In many ways, Hans Fritz Scholl was just like every other kid his age. Upon his release, he determined to dedicate himself to his medical studies, all the while pursuing a “right path,” to use his sister Ingre’s words in her account The White Rose: 1942-1943. Drafted into a company of medics, his became a half-life: part student, part soldier. “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 normal mode of existence. The vicelike rule of naked force was becoming tighter and ever more unbearable.”
In Spring 1942, German Cardinal and Bishop of Munster Cemens August Graf von Galen – “the Lion of Munster” - published a pastoral letter excoriating Nazi policies and practices from the confiscation/destruction of Catholic religious institutions and communities, including hospitals, to the destruction of “life which [according to the Nazis] does not deserve to live… [the] unemployables, invalids, cripples, incurables, and the seniles and those who suffer from incurable disease!” The letter was read from every Catholic pulpit in Germany
“Finally, a man has had the courage to speak out. We really ought to have a duplicating machine,” responded Hans.
In May 1942, after her six months in the National Labor Service, Sophie Scholl joined her brother in Munich, where she enrolled at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, studying Biology and Philosophy. Both were inspired by professor Karl Huber, who, according to Inge, provoked his students to ask “For how does one trace out the work of God in a world where killing and suffering are raging?”
During a late-night talk session typical of students worldwide, someone questioned, “Isn’t it preposterous that we sit in our rooms and study how to heal mankind when outside the state every day sends countless young people to their death? What in the world are we waiting for? Until one day the war is over and all nations point to us and say that we accepted this government without resisting?”
That same night, Sophie heard her brother repeat words that would change their lives forever: “We must get hold of a duplicating machine.”
German civilians in Munich look at a poster displaying pictures of atrocities at Nazi death camps under the heading 'Whose guilt?'.
In the summer of 1942, something small, yet magnificently profound, occurred in Germany. A two-page leaflet – produced on a duplicating machine – appeared anonymously in mailboxes in Munich and were delivered by trusted couriers to cities across Germany, where they were passed surreptitiously, hand-to-hand or mailed anonymously to hundreds. Under the heading of the first of the “The Leaflets of the White Rose” appeared the words
“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!”
“Every people deserves the government it is willing to endure…”
Ignatius of Loyola’s life and History were changed by the simple question of an itinerant rabbi 2000 years ago: “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his immortal soul?”
Perhaps… No! It is time for America’s political and “religious” leaders to ask the same question of themselves.
Or the time will come when their children or grandchildren will turn to them, and like the heroes of The White Rose, will ask “What in the world were you waiting for. Until the day when we must point to you and accuse you of accepting the government of a would-be tyrant without resisting.”