The Nazis Beheaded Her for Practicing Free Speech
By: Mateja Klaric
Tags: Heroes, Life Lessons, History, Nazis, Resistance

To me, Sophie Scholl was a saint. And indeed, another member of White Rose, the group she belonged to, a Russian-German student Alexander Schmorell, was canonized as a saint by the Russian Orthodox Church in 2012. Given her life and death, Sophie should have been canonized too.

The White Rose was a group of students who resisted the Nazis. Their approach was peaceful and without as much as a trace of aggression. What these young German intellectuals wanted to achieve was to make people think, open their eyes, and recognize the horror of Nazism for what it was.

Sophie died under the guillotine in 1942 alongside two other crucial members of the White Rose, one of them her brother. She was only twenty-one and the Nazis beheaded her for the crime of spreading information and free thought in the form of leaflets. Free thought wasn’t allowed in Nazi Germany.

Another thing that wasn’t allowed was opposition. Those who opposed the regime were swiftly eliminated. But that’s not how the members of the White Rose started. In the beginning, they were, like most young people at the time, fervent members of the Hitler Youth and the German League of Girls.

Admit and learn from mistakes

For young people, it was easy to get carried away by the promises of greatness, comradeship, fun, and idealism that were at the core of the indoctrination machine known as the Hitler Youth. Sophie Scholl’s father opposed it but his children initially dismissed him as someone too old to understand.

Many members of the Hitler Youth later testified of how hard it was to resist the allure of the Hitler Youth and German League of Girls. It gave them a sense of belonging, erased class differences, and allowed everyone, including the poor, to engage in sports and fun activities that would have otherwise been out of reach.

The price of the smart uniforms, shiny daggers, and numerous benefits, however, was expectance of absolute loyalty to the Führer and the regime. Among other things, they had to learn Hitler’s speeches by heart, sing songs with lyrics such as “the Jews’ blood spurting from the knife makes us feel especially good,” and had no access to foreign media.

As a result of relentless indoctrination and propaganda, young people were much greater supporters of Hitler than the older generation. Rare were those who as much as even thought of resisting. Given this backdrop, the degree of integrity and heroism exhibited by the members of the White Rose in the face of such brainwashing is astounding.

This is even more true since students at the time were strongly encouraged to report their teachers, friends, neighbors, and even parents and other relatives for any statement and opinion critical of the state and Hitler. The schools were more like military training grounds run by the regime than normal schools.

Question authority and get educated

Forming the White Rose in a milieu that was full of mistrust, betrayal, and fear was not only heroic but also showed the ability to think with one’s own head at a time when most people succumbed to the mass insanity generated and promoted by the Nazi regime.

The members and founders of the White Rose were critical thinkers in the best sense of the word. Once they learned about the Nazi atrocities and mass killings of Jews, they started to question authority and decided that this was not something they wished to be a part of. It was not right, it was not moral.

One of the people who inspired the students and the White Rose movement was a professor of philosophy at the University of Munich, Kurt Huber. In his lectures, especially those on Immanuel Kant, professor Huber argued that the basis of morality lies in exercising one’s own independent reasoning and thought and not in blindly obeying authority.

After Sophie’s brother Hand Scholl and his friends experienced the abuse of Jews firsthand and learned about the mass killings while serving in the army, they realized they could no longer just stand by and do nothing. They decided their moral and ethical standards called for action.

Understand what’s at stake and take responsibility

The basis of their decision was understanding that each and every individual is personally responsible for what is happening in society. If we stand by and do nothing even though we know that what is going on is wrong, we share the guilt for the crimes.

It’s an ethical and moral duty of everyone to stand up and fight for what is right. If we fail to do that, the dark forces and evil will prevail, and that was not something the members of the White Rose were going to let happen. In other words, that wasn’t something they could bear having on their conscience.

The question is, why didn’t most people follow suit? Why wasn’t this how the majority reasoned and acted accordingly? And while asking this, it’s also important to understand that this is not just about Germans and Germany.

This same dynamic has been played out time and time again throughout the history of humankind. Even now, human society is still fraught with all sorts of abuses, racism, misogyny, slavery, genocides, human trafficking, supremacy, extremism, you name it, the evil is there and the victims and deaths go into millions.

Among the reasons for this are greed, selfishness, egotism, ignorance, immorality, but above all fear. And while members of the White Rose were certainly not immune to fear, they managed to overcome it.

Be brave

At first, Sophie Scholl wasn’t aware of what her brother and his friends were up to. They didn’t tell her about the White Rose and the anti-regime pamphlets they published and spread, for they wished to protect her. What they were doing was extremely dangerous and they were putting their lives at risk.

Once she found out about it, though, Sophie demanded to join them despite overwhelming fear. Sophie’s friend and one of the surviving members of the White Rose, Lilo Furst-Ramdohr, shared in an interview that Sophie was so terrified that she couldn’t bear sleeping alone and slept in her brother’s bed instead.

They all dreaded what might happen to them if caught but kept going nevertheless. As Lilo also remembered, they couldn’t understand how the Germans could have been so easily led into supporting the Nazi ideology.

By that time, 300,000 Jews have already been murdered and it was necessary to do something about it. The second pamphlet by the White Rose stated: “Germans encourage fascist criminals if no chord within them cries out at the sight of such deeds. An end in terror is preferable to terror without end.”

It was this last sentence that summarized where their courage came from. They were well-aware of what was at stake as well as of their personal role and responsibility in the grand scheme of things. They knew it was their duty to act and that if everyone acted as they did, no horrors would have passed.

And so they acted, and Sophie, her brother, and several other members of the group paid for it with their lives. But this was not the end of what they fought for. Their activism inspired discussion and disturbed authorities. Their last leaflet was smuggled to the United Kingdom and then distributed all over Germany by the Allied forces’ planes.

Today, members of the White Rose are celebrated as German heroes who acted on their conscience and placed it above everything else, even their lives. Sophie’s response to the judge when asked her whether she agreed that her deeds were a crime against the community, said it all: