The White Rose: Munich, 1942–1943

Introduction: The Legacy of the White Rose

Introduction to the Second Edition: The Legacy of the White Rose IX I recall an overcast early spring afternoon when I climbed over the stone wall that separated our garden from our neighbors. I recall my playmate's anxiousness to tell me the news about some university students in Munich who had thrown hundreds of paper sheets from the balcony into the vast entrance hall of the university's main building. (I guess we did not yet know the word "leaflet".) The students were arrested, because the superintendent had seen them do it and promptly notified the police. I was struck by my friend Jiirgen's words, as I detested the superintendent of my all girls high school, knowing all too well what kind of power he had. I asked Jiirgen what was written on the papers. "Something against the Fuhrer," was his reply. We did not talk about what would happen to these young students,just eight or ten years older than we. Children in Germany in 1943, even if they were as young as we were, knew what would happen. Maybe we fleetingly muttered, "K£," meaning concentration camp, or "gleich tot" meaning killed instantly . I do not remember. At night my parents would listen to the radio broadcasts from Switzerland and the BBC in London. It might have been then that I first heard the name "White Rose." But it would take two more years of killing and "defending" and gassing before we were freed from Hitler, and many more years before we would start to claim our history and discover that at least some Germans, however few, had resisted the Nazis. I saw Sophie ScholPs photograph for the first time dur- ing one of these seizures of despair most of us are visited by in our youthful years. I remember telling myself that Sophie was the one friend I needed, and would never meet. Why was I still around? How could anyone in my generation, anyone born in 1929, wish to grow up, after all that had happened in our country? Was it not much more natural to stop growing, as Oscar Drummer, in Giinter Grass's novel, insisted on doing? We had so few people we could trust in as we entered a world of old Nazis and opportunists. Quite a few former refugees returned to Germany, but we felt as isolated in postwar Germany as Sophie and Hans Scholl and their friends once did. We heard the White Rose portrayed, after the war, as a group of highly idealistic people with little sense of the realities of power and politics. For many years I believed that this was true. Where was their strategy?Whom did they want to reach? What could they hope for? Was it not clear from the very beginning that they were destined to be caught and to die for a besmirched "fatherland"? Hnlderlin—one of the great poets of the idealistic epoch—had said, "For thee, o Fatherland, no one has fallen in vain." Did they not fall in vain? How could one successfully resist Hitler and the military industrial complex of the Alfred Krupps and the I. G. Farbens, armed only with Western political philosophy from Aristotle to Fichte, the words of such classical German writers as Goethe and Schiller, and the wisdom of Lao-tse and the Bible? Sometimes I felt that it was just for us, the next generation, that they had died, preferring death to living under Hitler. I wondered if they died so that we would know there had been at least a few people in Germany, a few students among hundreds of thousands, with a conscience. I have changed my mind about the so-called youthful "idealism" of the White Rose, and I would like to explain to the North American reader why it is that now in 1983, forty years after these events, I think differently. When I x read their material again, I was surprised to find a clear political analysis in the writings of the White Rose. Their leaflets repeatedly underscored the issue which was to be decisive in delaying the downfall of Hitler's Reich—Nazi antiCommunism . Along with anti-Semitism, to which it was linked in many ways, anti-Communism was the most virulent force in the Nazi ideology. Millions of "good" Germans did not like the Nazis, yet thought that they were the lesser evil compared with...