Where are the Sophie Scholls
Today?
Exactly 70 years ago today, an innocent young woman was
executed. Sophie Scholl, a 21-year-old university student at the University of
Munich in Germany, had defied the Nazi regime and for her supposed crime had
her head severed from her body by a well-used guillotine.
During the height of the Nazi party’s power, Sophie and a few
co-conspirators produced and distributed a series of six leaflets condemning the
government and calling for an end to the war. These were branded under the name
“The White Rose,” the name of their
non-violent resistance group promoting peace in the shadow of Germany’s
tyrannical state.
Once they were caught and arrested, Sophie, her brother, and a
friend were given a “show trial” and within mere hours were beheaded. While
thousands of Germans were likewise charged with treason and sent to their
death, Sophie’s story is inspiringly unique.
As a youth, Sophie and her brother enthusiastically joined
Hitler Youth—the regime’s paramilitary organization in which the rising
generation was indoctrinated with the party’s ideology. (They would later
write: “‘Philosophical training’ is the name given to the despicable method by
which our budding intellectual development is muffled in a fog of empty
phrases.”) Their parents did not share their early love for Hitler, and over
time the children saw that they had been wrong to so blindingly support the
state. Despite their newfound political views, the Scholl children could not
easily do much. Open dissent was illegal once World War II broke out, and
Germans toed the line that is common to citizens everywhere: support the troops
by supporting the government.
Sophie and her White Rose associates could not comply. Others in
the group wrote the essays which Sophie helped distribute; being a girl, she
was not under as much suspicion as she moved around town. Internal dissent was
always dealt with rapidly by the Gestapo, so the persistent publication of
these leaflets inflamed the community quickly.
Of course, Sophie and her friends knew what would happen to them
if they were caught. Despite that possibility, they pressed on, penning barbed
words that defied an empire. In the first leaflet, they wrote:
If the German people are already so corrupted and spiritually
crushed that they do not raise a hand, frivolously trusting in a questionable
faith in lawful order of history; if they surrender man’s highest principle,
that which raises him above all other God’s creatures, his free will; if they
abandon the will to take decisive action and turn the wheel of history and thus
subject it to their own rational decision; if they are so devoid of all
individuality, have already gone so far along the road toward turning into a
spiritless and cowardly mass – then, yes, they deserve their downfall.
The White Rose’s invitation to resist Germany’s government was
not without its condemnation of the citizenry’s apathy. Rather than simply offering
an alternative solution to their present condition, the leaflet’s authors aimed
to point out the people’s sins while calling them to repentance. This acerbic
approach permeated their writings, and is particularly visible in a passage
from the second leaflet:
For through his apathetic behavior he gives these evil men the
opportunity to act as they do; he tolerates this “government” which has taken
upon itself such an infinitely great burden of guilt; indeed, he himself is to
blame for the fact that it came about at all! Each man wants to be exonerated
of a guilt of this kind, each one continues on his way with the most placid,
the calmest conscience. But he cannot be exonerated; he is guilty, guilty,
guilty!
While disseminating their sixth leaflet, Sophie and her brother
were arrested. Days later, they appeared in court to face their accusers: Nazi
loyalists quick to act as judge, jury, and executioner. One summary
of the trial provides a glimpse into the denial of due process to which
Sophie was subjected:
He conducted the trial as if the future of the Reich were indeed
at stake. He roared denunciations of the accused as if he were not the judge
but the prosecutor. He behaved alternately like an actor ranting through an
overwritten role in an implausible melodrama and a Grand Inquisitor calling
down eternal damnation on the heads of the three irredeemable heretics before
him…. No witnesses were called, since the defendants had admitted everything.
The proceedings consisted almost entirely of Roland Freisler’s denunciation and
abuse, punctuated from time to time by half-hearted offerings from the
court-appointed defense attorneys, one of whom summed up his case with the
observation, “I can only say fiat justitia . Let justice be done.” By which he
meant: Let the accused get what they deserve.
Sophie’s parents attempted to enter the courtroom during their
children’s trial, but were denied access. “But I’m the mother of two of the
accused!” her mother told one of the guards. His response: “You should have
brought them up better.” Robert, the father, was forcibly escorted outside. His
prophetic words largely fell on deaf ears that day: “One day there will be
another kind of justice! One day they will go down in history!”
Indeed. A prominent area within the University of Munich is
named after Hans and Sophie Scholl, along with streets, squares, and schools
around Germany. Books and movies portraying their story are popular and widely
available.
Their dissent is their legacy.
Like Fred
Korematsu, the members of the White Rose are recognized and remembered
for defying injustice and daring to go against overwhelming peer pressure. We
honor their bravery, and applaud their activism. We cannot imagine ourselves
being in a similar situation.
But we are in a
similar situation! The stinging rebukes penned by Sophie’s associates have
plenty of application to Americans in our generation who largely tolerate (if
not explicitly support) injustice. Are we that different from the Germans who
embraced an evil empire? As Milton Mayer, author of They
Thought They Were Free, wrote about them:
What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people,
little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions
deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that
the government had to act on information which the people could not understand,
or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be
released because of national security.
Hitler’s tyranny was not rolled out in one stump speech, for (we
can assume) the Germans would have responded in horror. Instead, they were
incrementally convinced that the programs and actions instituted by the state
were necessary. “Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last,” writes
Mayer, “but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait
for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes,
will join with you in resisting somehow.”
Save a few quickly-extinguished flames of resistance, no such
reaction was produced among the German people. In hindsight, they learned their
lesson and now praise the very people that were previously demonized as
traitors and killed. Should we not learn from their mistakes, we risk
experiencing the same:
Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are,
what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was
all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those
early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood,
others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. You remember everything
now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.
The government taxes people to line the pockets of a few
well-connected corporations. It explicitly sanctions the termination of the
lives of countless unborn children. It sends thousands of innocent people to
their death, writing off their fate as “collateral damage.” It destroys
families by sending its military officers to fight in unjust wars, leading to
suicide, divorce, and rampant immorality. It erodes Americans’ savings by
manipulating the currency and violating the free market. It incarcerates
individuals whose sole “crime” is to have ingested a naturally-occurring plant.
It confiscates a significant portion of each person’s income, redistributing it
to others who grow dependent upon the pilfered proceeds. It violates their
privacy, listens in on their conversations, and archives their every digital
fingerprint. It molests them and calls it security. It robs them and calls it
their civic duty. It purports to spread freedom internationally while violating
it domestically.
“Through his apathetic behavior [a person] gives these evil men
the opportunity to act as they do,” wrote White Rose. No, the various
governments in this nation are not sending people to their deaths en masse. No,
they are not enforcing genocide against large quantities of innocent
individuals. No, alarming atrocities are not apparent to the average citizen.
But that’s the point of
the lesson to be learned from Sophie’s advocacy and Mayer’s observations—if we
“do not raise a hand” when small violations occur, then how in the world would
we object to the large ones? If we don’t resist limited violations
of liberty, do we expect that we would defy the extreme ones?
Facing her accusers in court, Sophie stated that “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.”
More poignant are her last words before the blade fell. “How can
we expect righteousness to prevail,” she rhetorically asked, “when there is
hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause?
Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if
through us thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?”
Sophie stood up against a despotic regime and didn’t flinch. We
have the opportunity, even an obligation, to defy injustice while in its
(relatively) early stages. We do not currently face the same threats for
punishment against civil disobedience, and the internet facilitates the
dissemination of alternative voices to “awaken” and “stir to action” those who
currently slumber. Our chance of success is higher and our risk of punishment
is lower.
What, then, are we waiting for?
As
He died to make men holy,
let us live to make men FREE!
let us live to make men FREE!
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