{"id":157260,"date":"2025-05-09T08:00:42","date_gmt":"2025-05-09T12:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=157260"},"modified":"2025-05-09T12:42:52","modified_gmt":"2025-05-09T16:42:52","slug":"its-sophie-scholls-birthday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=157260","title":{"rendered":"“As long as politics is this confused and evil, turning away from it would be cowardly.\u201d — 20th century hero Sophie Scholl"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n“I am, now as before, of the opinion that I did the best that I could do for my nation. I therefore do not regret my conduct and will bear the consequences that result from my conduct.\u201d — Sophie Scholl<\/big><\/p>\n

She was born on this day.<\/p>\n

In an atmosphere of almost phantasmagorical mind control and propaganda, how does one keep one’s bearings? One only needs to read George Orwell’s 1984<\/i> to understand the mental issues, the difficulty of not just resisting, but to even have a CONCEPT of resistance, when the society around you is so totalitarian – as in the State is so total – that no aspect of life remains untouched. There is no way out, not just for the citizens, or the State’s victims, but no way out for the MIND. The mind cannot be free in a totalitarian system. <\/p>\n

In general, this is true. But Sophie Scholl is a reminder that it doesn’t have to be that way. Sophie Scholl, a German college student, beheaded by the Nazis in 1943 when she was just 21 years old, saw what was happening and resisted it, calling for other Germans to resist it too. <\/p>\n

“It is possibly the most spectacular moment of resistance that I can think of in the twentieth century … The fact that five little kids, in the mouth of the wolf, where it really counted, had the tremendous courage to do what they did, is spectacular to me. I know that the world is better for them having been there, but I do not know why.” — Playwright Lillian Garrett-Groag<\/big><\/p>\n

As a member of the Wei\u00dfe Rose (White Rose), a resistance group made up mostly of students at the University of Munich, Scholl devoted herself to passing out leaflets, covering walls with anti-fascist graffiti, warning other Germans about the Nazis, calling for a larger and more widespread resistance. The White Rose protested the war, and accused the Nazis of committing war crimes. They called on Germans to join their extremely small numbers. <\/p>\n

One of the White Rose pamphlets reads: <\/p>\n

\u201cOur current \u2018state\u2019 is the dictatorship of evil. We know that already, I hear you object, and we don\u2019t need you to reproach us for it yet again. But, I ask you, if you know that, then why don\u2019t you act? Why do you tolerate these rulers gradually robbing you, in public and in private, of one right after another, until one day nothing, absolutely nothing, remains but the machinery of the state, under the command of criminals and drunkards?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Another pamphlet reads: <\/p>\n

\u201cAnd now every convinced opponent of National Socialism must ask himself how he can fight against the present \u2018state\u2019 in the most effective way\u2026.We cannot provide each man with the blueprint for his acts, we can only suggest them in general terms, and he alone will find the way of achieving this end: Sabotage in armament plants and war industries, sabotage at all gatherings, rallies, public ceremonies, and organizations of the National Socialist Party. Obstruction of the smooth functioning of the war machine\u2026.Try to convince all your acquaintances\u2026of the senselessness of continuing, of the hopelessness of this war; of our spiritual and economic enslavement at the hands of the National Socialists; of the destruction of all moral and religious values; and urge them to passive resistance!\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Leaflet #2 read: <\/p>\n

Since the conquest of Poland, 300,000 Jews have been murdered in this country in the most bestial way … The German people slumber on in dull, stupid sleep and encourage the fascist criminals. Each wants to be exonerated of guilt, each one continues on his way with the most placid, calm conscience. But he cannot be exonerated; he is guilty, guilty, guilty!\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Leaflet # 4 read: <\/p>\n

“We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace!”<\/big><\/p>\n

Sophie Scholl was one of THE heroes of the 20th century. Because of Sophie Scholl, no one can comfortably say: “Well, we didn’t know what was happening …” “How could we have known what was really going on?” or: “I knew things were bad, but what could I do? There was no way to fight back.” Well, Sophie Scholl knew. Sophie Scholl fought back. Do not erase Sophie Scholl, her brother Hans Scholl, and their friends. She risked her life. She lost her life. She knew what the consequences would be for what she did. She did it anyway. And, perhaps most importantly: she herself was not at risk. She was a German citizen. She was not Jewish. She was not in any threatened minority group. She and her siblings, like every other child in Germany, had been involved in the Youth Movement, eventually known as the Hitler Youth (one of the many examples of how normal German institutions were morphed into the State propaganda, how the State tentacled itself into every aspect of German life, co-opting everything). She had enjoyed the Youth Movement activities, the camping, the hiking, the community. When she saw the light, through her activist brother, as well as her activist father (who had been imprisoned for his anti-Nazi views), she broke with the tide. Not because she herself was at risk, but because others<\/em> were at risk. What the Nazis were doing to OTHERS was wrong. <\/p>\n

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\nIt’s easy to fight for yourself. Self-preservation kicks in. Fighting for others<\/em>, caring about others<\/em>, recognizing that YOU may be safe but OTHERS are not and you have a RESPONSIBILITY to fight for those who are not safe, like, literally anyone who isn’t the dominant group (and even the dominant group isn’t safe). Basically: care about other people enough to take risks for them. That’s the REAL heroism. <\/p>\n

In Cultural Amnesia<\/i>, Clive James wrote of Sophie Scholl:<\/p>\n

The world would undoubtedly be a better place if Sophie Scholl were a household name like Anne Frank, another miraculous young woman from the same period. In addition to an image of how life can be affirmed bya helpless victim, we would have an image of how life can be affirmed by someone who didn’t have to be a victim at all, but chose to be one because others were.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Sophie Scholl was born in 1921 in Forchtenberg, the fourth of what would eventually be six children. Her parents raised their children in an atmosphere of political debate, open discussion, and, most importantly, the blinding light of rational critical thinking. Mr. Scholl included the children in discussions of moral and ethical issues, debating things at the dinner table, talking about the issues that faced Germany. Her brother Hans, three years older than Sophie, had become completely disillusioned with “Hitler Youth” and, by extension, the Nazi party. He was outspoken about it and was arrested for his dissident views in 1937. Meanwhile, Sophie Scholl found school increasingly difficult because the curriculum was now totally about indoctrination into Nazi ideology. (Was she able to have this awareness because of the open environment at home? Because of her father’s views? We don’t really know, and ultimately it doesn’t really matter.)<\/p>\n

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\nHans and Sophie Scholl, left, and Christoph Probst, right, in Munich in 1942<\/i><\/p>\n

Scholl and her brother Hans both attended the University of Munich. Their circle of friends were artists, philosophers, all politically aware. They talked about the dictatorship in which they lived. They knew it WAS a dictatorship, which, again, is something many people claim they hadn’t realized at the time, swept away in the brainwashing fervor of all the propaganda. This was where their White Rose activities began. Getting paper during wartime for the leaflets was terribly difficult. So was finding a printer. Every single thing they were doing – using a printing press for their own anti-government purposes – was incredibly dangerous. They knew it. Distributing the pamphlets was treacherous for them. They knew it. <\/p>\n

In a postscript to his 1996 article about Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners<\/i>, Clive James writes: <\/p>\n

Hans Scholl, the master spirit of the White Rose resistance group in Munich, had already turned against his Hitler Youth upbringing, but his trajectory towards outright subversion was accelerated after one of [Stefan] Zweig’s books was taken away from him by a Nazi official. Scholl thought that if the Nazis were against that<\/i>, they were against the Germany he cared about. (Goldhagen’s failure to so much as mention the White Rose, incidentally, is the kind of omission that makes a mockery of his scientific vocabulary. In science, the fact that doesn’t fit the theory eliminates the theory, not the other way about. Hans and Sophie Scholl were gentiles born into a household formed by liberal German culture, were well aware that Jews had helped to form that culture, and were ready to die for it rather than betray it. If Goldhagen wants to go on asking why the German population did not rise up, he might consider the manner in which those two brave young people perished. The guillotine is a big price to pay for a conviction.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There are a series of letters Sophie wrote to her long-time boyfriend Fritz Hartnagel, which gives us a window into this young woman’s life, who she was, the fullness of her, her thoughtfulness, humor, insights, her exhaustion with how “political” life was, that in Germany everything was infiltrated by politics, there was no space free of it (one of the main aims of totalitarianism). <\/p>\n

Letter to Fritz, February 26, 1938<\/strong><\/p>\n

Dear Fritz! I’m actually lying in bed and have just woken up from a dream. In the dream I was at a camp. In my dreams I am normally traveling. Next to the camp there was a big lake. In the evening I went to see a woman who owned a boat. We sailed out across the lake and by then it was nighttime. The sky was completely overcast and in front of a wall of clouds hung the moon, a great pale disk that illuminated the whole lake. Illuminate isn’t quite the right word. The whole lake was a sort of pale grey. That’s nothing unusual but some distance away from the moon there was a little red dot glowing behind the clouds. “That’s the sun,” the woman explained to me. “We live in the only place on earth where you can see the sun and the moon at the same time.” I don’t know what happened after that. They say that dreams come from the noises you hear when you are asleep. That could well be true. Anyway. I like dreaming. I live in a strange world in my dreams where I am never quite happy. But still. Please don’t think I’m being silly or sentimental. I’d hate that. I’m actually quite the materialist. Good night. Sophie.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Letter to Fritz, April 9, 1940 <\/strong><\/p>\n

My dear Fritz. I’ve got a feeling that a letter from you will come tomorrow. I hope I’m not fooling myself. Sometimes I dread the war and I’m on the brink of losing all hope. I don’t even want to think about it but soon there won’t be anything but politics, and as long as politics is this confused and evil turning away from it would be cowardly. You’re probably smiling right now and thinking “She’s such a girl” but I think I’d be far happier if I weren’t constantly under all this pressure. I could spend time doing other things with a much clearer conscience. But everything else comes second now. It’s just that we’ve been brought up to be political. Now you’ll be laughing again. I just want to be with you and see and feel nothing but the fabric of your suit. Is this a bad letter? It’s not a breath of fresh air in your musty room. In fact, it’s probably making it even mustier. Don’t hold it against me. Sophie.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On the 18th of February, 1943, Hans and Sophie Scholl took stacks of what would be the final White Rose pamphlet to a building on the campus of University of Munich and scattered the pamphlets around the building’s atrium. A janitor spotted them and reported it. Hans and Sophie were arrested that day. <\/p>\n

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\nThe arrest of siblings Sophie and Hans Scholl<\/i><\/p>\n

\nThe two were put on trial on February 21st. Look at that date. To call it a “trial” is to make a mockery of the word.<\/p>\n

On the back of her indictment, Scholl wrote one word: Freiheit<\/em>. (Freedom.)<\/p>\n

In the People’s Court on February 21, before the sadistic Judge Roland Freisler, Scholl declared bravely: “Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just don’t dare express themselves as we did.” She also challenged the court: “You know as well as we do that the war is lost. Why are you so cowardly that you won’t admit it?” <\/p>\n

21 year old girl.<\/p>\n

The two were sentenced to death and guillotined just hours later.<\/p>\n

Clive James, in Cultural Amnesia<\/i>, wrote: <\/p>\n

She didn’t stand a chance anyway. The mere fact that the reliably fanatical Roland Freisler had been sent to preside over the court sealed her doom. But once again in her young life she was bearing witness, and to such effect that even the clinically insane Freisler was momentarily rendered speechless. When he got his breath back, he used it to remind her of his mission, which was to render her speechless permanently. Sophie Scholl was guillotined by the Nazis at Stadelheim prison in Munich on February 22, 1943, at five o’clock in the afternoon. She was twenty-one years old. In life she had been reserved with strangers but full of fun with those she loved….She radiated a moral beauty that left even her Gestapo interrogators self-consciously shuffling their papers, for once in their benighted lives hoping that the job of killing someone might pass to someone else. If there can be any such thing as a perfect person beyond Jesus Christ and his immediate family, Sophie Scholl was it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hans Scholl’s last words before his execution: <\/p>\n

Es lebe die Freiheit! (Let Freedom live!)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sophie Scholl’s last recorded words were:<\/p>\n

“Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go… What does my death matter, if through us, thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?” <\/big><\/p>\n

Their White Rose friends, Christoph Probst, Willi Graf, Hans Konrad Leipelt, and many others were also rounded up in the following weeks and months, and many of them were tried and executed too. It wasn’t a big group. It had no “reach.” But they were RIGHT. And their RIGHT-ness should shame anyone who declares “we had no idea what was going on and even if we had what could we have done?”<\/p>\n

Friedrich Reck, a conservative establishment German – who had been disgusted by the Weimar Republic – I mean, the man was basically a reactionary – nevertheless was horrified by the rise of the Nazis, horrified by the brutality and cruelty and corruption, kept a secret journal between 1936 and 1944, where he howled out his RAGE at what was happening in his country. He actually knew many of the main players, so you get personal impressions of Himmler, etc. Reck considered the document so dangerous he would hide it in different places, burying it in the woods, etc. He was eventually arrested by the Nazis and sent to Dachau, where he died. Amazingly, his journal survived, and it has been published with the title Diary of a Man in Despair<\/i>, and it is essential reading. In March, 1943 he writes:<\/p>\n

At just this moment, I learn for the first time of the martyrdom of the Scholls.<\/p>\n

I never saw these two young people. In my rural isolation, I got only bits and pieces of the whole story of what they were doing, but the significance of what I heard was such I could hardly believe it. The Scholls are the first in Germany to have had the courage to witness for the truth. The movement they left at their deaths will go on, and as is always the case with martyrdom, they have sown seeds which will raise important fruit in time to come. This young brother and sister went boldly about their work, almost as though they were defying death. Their betrayal came through a miserable university proctor, who was then so afraid of being beaten or otherwise punished, that he had to be taken into protective custody.<\/p>\n

They were sentenced to death by a second example of the Rossdorfer-type. They died in all the radiance of their courage and readiness for sacrifice, and thereby attained the pinnacle in lives well lived.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He then goes on to describe their background, which he learned from some of the people who knew the Scholls. Clearly he was making his own inquiry into this astonishing act of resistance. He continues: <\/p>\n

Their bearing before the tribunal — that of the girl, especially — was inspiring. They flung their contempt of the court, the Party, and the insane, would-be great man, Hitler, into the faces of their judges, and at the end, did something which carries the icy breath of the Eternal about it for us who survive. For, with their last words, they repeated the warning once given by the condemned Knights of the Temple to their judges, that those who were persecuting them and those who stood behind them would ‘within a year be called to judgement before the throne of God.’ The curse pronounced by the Templars were realised to the extent that before a year was past both Pope Clemens V and King Philip IV of France were dead. It remains to be seen what will happen here in the course of the next year … <\/p>\n

But the Scholls departed from this life quietly, and gravely and with wonderful dignity gave their young blood. On their gravestones let these words be carved, and let this entire people, which has lived in deepest degradation these last ten years, blush when it reads them: ‘Cogi non potest quisquis mori scit<\/i>‘ — He who knows how to die can never be enslaved.<\/p>\n

We will all of us, someday, have to make a pilgrimage to their graves, and stand before them, ashamed.<\/p>\n

This is the story of these two children of our race: the latest, and God willing, the first<\/em> Germans of a great rebirth of the spirit.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In one of her last letters to Fritz, dated November 7, 1942, Scholl wrote: <\/p>\n

When will the time finally come when we won’t have to focus all our strength and all our attention on things that aren’t worth lifting a finger for? Every word is scrutinized before it’s even spoken in case there’s even a hint of ambiguity about it. Our trust in other people has to give way to mistrust and caution. Oh, how tiring and sometimes disheartening it is. But no. I won’t let anything take away my courage. These trivial things will not get the better of me when I know there are other joys that surpass them. When I think of this, my strength returns and I want to cry out a word of encouragement to everyone else who is oppressed. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Clive James wrote: <\/p>\n

You would have thought to be as good as Hans Scholl was as good as you could get. He did what he did through no compulsion except an inner imperative, in the full knowledge that he would perish horribly if he were caught. Yet if moral integrity can be conceived of as a competition, Sophie left even Hans behind. Hans tried to keep her ignorant of what he was up to but when she found out she insisted on joining in. Throughout her interrogation, the Gestapo offered her a chance that they did not extend to her brother. They told her that if she recanted she would be allowed to live. She turned them down, and walked without a tremor to the blade. The chief executioner later testified that he had never seen anyone die so bravely as Sophie Scholl. Not a whimper of fear, not a sigh of regret for the beautiful life she might have had. She just glanced up at the steel, put her head down, and she was gone. Is that you? No, and it isn’t me either.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

No. But we can learn – we MUST learn – from her example. <\/p>\n

Freiheit!<\/p>\n

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\n“We will all of us, someday, have to make a pilgrimage to their graves, and stand before them, ashamed.” — Friedrich Reck<\/big><\/p>\n

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\nThank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account<\/a>. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0<\/a>, if you’d like to subscribe.<\/em> <\/small><\/p>\n