White Rose

White Rose (German: die Weiße Rose) was a World War II resistance group in Germany that called for nonviolent resistance against the Nazi regime.

The White Rose consisted of five students, all in their early twenties, at Munich University. Hans Scholl and his sister Sophie led the rest of the group, including Christoph Probst, Alexander Schmorell and Willi Graf. They were joined by a professor, Kurt Huber, who drafted the final two leaflets. All six members of this group were arrested, tried, convicted, and executed by beheading.

The group of Munich students prepared and distributed six leaflets between June 1942 to February 1943. A seventh leaflet was found in possession of the students at the time of their arrest by the Gestapo.

The men of the White Rose were war veterans, who had fought on the French and Russian fronts. They were influenced by the German Youth Movement, of which Hans Scholl and Christoph Probst were members. They had witnessed the German atrocities, both on the battlefield and against the civilian population in the East, and sensed that the reversal of fortune that the Wehrmacht suffered at Stalingrad would eventually lead to Germany's defeat. They rejected the fascism and militarism of Adolf Hitler's Germany and believed in a federated Europe that adhered to Christian principles of tolerance and justice. Quoting extensively from the Bible, Lao Zi, Aristotle and Novalis, as well as Goethe and Schiller, they appealed to what they considered the German intelligentsia, believing that they would be intrinsically opposed to Nazism. At first, the leaflets were sent out in mailings from cities in Bavaria and Austria, since the members believed that southern Germany would be more receptive to their anti-militarist message.

At the end of July 1942, the male students in the group were deployed to the Eastern Front for military service in the between-terms academic break. In late fall the men returned and the White Rose resumed its resistance activities. In January 1943, using a hand-operated duplicating machine, the group is thought to have produced between 6000 and 9000 copies of their fifth leaflet, "Appeal to all Germans!", which was distributed via courier runs to many cities (where they were mailed). Copies appeared in Stuttgart, Cologne, Vienna, Freiburg, Chemnitz, Hamburg and Berlin. Composed by Hans Scholl with improvements by Huber, the leaflet warned that Hitler was leading Germany into the abyss; with the gathering might of the Allies, defeat was now certain. The reader was urged to "Support the resistance movement!" in the struggle for "Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, protection of the individual citizen from the arbitrary action of criminal dictator-states". These were the principles that would form "the foundations of the new Europe."

The leaflets caused a sensation, and the Gestapo initiated an intensive search for the publishers.

On the nights of the 3rd, 8th and 15th of February 1943, the slogans "Freedom" and "Down with Hitler" appeared on the walls of the University and other buildings in Munich. Alexander Schmorell, Hans Scholl and Willi Graf had painted them with tar (similar graffiti that appeared in the surrounding area at this time may have been painted by emboldened imitators).

The shattering German defeat at Stalingrad at the beginning of February provided the occasion for the group's sixth leaflet, written by Huber. Addressed to "Fellow students!," it announced that the "day of reckoning" had come for "the most contemptible tyrant our people has ever endured". As the German people had looked to university students to help break Napoleon in 1813, it now looked to them to break the National Socialist terror. "The dead of Stalingrad adjure us!"

On February 18, 1943, coincidentally the same day that Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels called on the German people embrace total war in his Sportpalast speech, the Scholls brought a suitcase full of leaflets to the university. They hurriedly dropped stacks of copies in the empty corridors for students to find when they flooded out of lecture rooms. Leaving before the class break, the Scholls noticed that some copies remained in the suitcase and decided it would be a pity not to distribute them. They returned to the atrium, climbed the staircase to the top floor, and Sophie flung the last remaining leaflets into the air. This spontaneous action was observed by the custodian Jakob Schmied. The police were called and Hans and Sophie were taken into Gestapo custody. The other active members were soon arrested, and the group and everyone associated with them were brought in for interrogation.

The Scholls and Probst were the first to stand trial before the Volksgerichtshof — the so-called People's Court that tried political offenses against the Nazi German state — on February 22, 1943. They were found guilty of treason and Roland Freisler, head judge of the court, sentenced them to death. The three were executed by guillotine the same day. The other key members of the group were also beheaded later that summer. Friends and colleagues of the White Rose, who helped in the preparation and distribution of leaflets and in collecting money for the widow and young children of Probst, were sentenced to prison terms ranging from six months to ten years.

With the fall of Nazi Germany, the White Rose came to represent opposition to tyranny in the German psyche, seen to have been without interest in personal power or self-aggrandizement. Their story became so well-known that the composer Carl Orff claimed (by some accounts falsely) to his Allied interrogators that he was a founding member of the White Rose and was released. While he was personally acquainted with Huber, there is a lack of other evidence (other than Orff's word) that Orff was involved in the movement, and he may well have made his claim to escape imprisonment.

The square where the central hall of Munich University is located has been named "Geschwister-Scholl-Platz" after Hans and Sophie Scholl, the square next to it "Professor-Huber-Platz." Many schools, streets and places all over Germany were named in memory of the members of the White Rose.

The group's activities were the subject of two German films: Die weiße Rose from 1982, directed by Michael Verhoeven and released in the United States (subtitled) as "The White Rose"; and Sophie Scholl – Die letzten Tage from 2005, directed by Marc Rothemund.


Quotes

* Last words of Sophie Scholl: "...your heads will fall as well."

* Alles wirklich Wertvolle kommt nicht aus dem Ehrgeiz, und dem Pflichtgefühl, sondern aus der Liebe und Devotion gegenüber Menschen oder objektiven Dingen. (Nothing truly valuable arises from ambition or from a mere sense of duty, it stems rather from love and devotion toward men and toward objective things.)

Albert Einstein, 1947