SYMHC Classics: The White Rose and Nazi Germany

This week, we're revisiting an episode from previous hosts! During World War II, the Nazi party did not tolerate dissent, but some Germans did attempt to resist Hitler's government including the White Rose, a secret resistance group.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Today's Saturday Classic is a special audience request. Lots of
listeners have written in over the past few years to
ask us to do an episode about the student movement
known as the White Rose or on Sophie Shoal, who
was one of its most well known members. This was
an organization at the University of Munich that was part
of the resistance in Nazi Germany. And this is one

(00:23):
of those cases where the episode that we're getting all
those requests for actually already exists. It's episode by past
hosts Katie and Sarah and its original title was did
any Germans Resist Hitler? Which makes it a little bit
of a tricky episode defined in our archive you kind
of have to know the name to go looking for it. Uh.
Listener Damon and a couple of other folks specifically asked

(00:45):
us to please rerelease this as a Saturday Classic as well,
So that is what we're gonna do today. Welcome to
stuff Few, Mr History class dot Com. Hello, and welcome

(01:15):
to the podcast. I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy.
A few months ago, we talked about Hanna Snish, a
Hungarian who opposed the Nazis by parachuting into Yugoslavia and
an attempt to save fellow Jews. She was arrested, tortured,
and executed. And this heroic story left many of you

(01:36):
wanting to hear more about resistance to the Nazis during
World War Two. These stories are usually tragic, you know,
how could they end well, but they're also pretty inspirational.
One of the most surprising of these heroic stories comes
out of Germany, of all places, where the Gestapo in
the ss that kept such a close eye on the population.

(01:57):
Listening in to a broadcast of Radio London could be
enough to get you executed. And it's in Germany, in Munich, actually,
that this group of students decided to protest the atrocities
of their government and stir up their apathetic countrymen at
a great risk to their own lives, and they call
themselves the White Rose. But before we get into the

(02:20):
student movement in Munich, we need to give some background
on what life was like for someone who was trying
to resist the Nazi government. And some sources that Sarah
was reading kept saying that you can't understand unless you've
lived under a totalitarian regime. But we hope this will
help a little bit. So this is what you're up against.

(02:41):
Nazi indoctrinations started in preschool. Children were encouraged to denounce
their parents for making derogatory comments about Hitler or about
the Reich, and at age ten, boys would register to
join the German Young People after being investigated for racial purity.
At thirteen they could join the Hitler you and at
eighteen they'd be a member of the Nazi Party. Uh.

(03:03):
It was mandatory to serve either in the armed forces
or in labor details until age girls did the same thing,
participating in leagues that taught comradeship and motherhood. So that's
what you're up against in terms of this early indoctrination.
But in addition to the Gestapo, every block also has
a spy who would note down conversations going on, keep

(03:25):
track of who was saying what. So maybe you make
a joke to your wife about Hitler, and your neighbor
overhears it. Uh, next thing you know, you've got police
knocking on your door. So dangerous times. Consequently, it's pretty
difficult for all but the smallest groups to actually protest
the government because organized resistance usually involves a lot of people.

(03:48):
Socialists communists and trade unionists published underground literature, and even
though the Catholic Church is officially silent on what's happening,
some clergymen do work to protect Jews, and the church
denounces quote unquote euthanasia of the handicapped. We also have
the occasional assassination attempt. After the defeat at Stalingrad, German

(04:09):
officers attempt to blow up Hitler with a bomb. He
was injured and they were immediately executed. But really the
military is about the only group that could be so bold,
because most people who protest against the government have to
do it passively, just small measures of non compliance with
Nazi rules. So it's pretty easy to imagine that at

(04:31):
least a few teenagers were ticked off by the idea
of having to enroll with the Nazi youth in work
to fight against that without getting themselves into terrible trouble.
The student heroes of our story grew up in the
world of the Reich. They were raised in the thirties,
so they're fully indoctrinated. Some were even leaders of Hitler

(04:51):
youth groups. So how did they turn against the regime,
and more importantly, why did they decide to risk their
lives to denounce it. A lot of the eventual members
of the White Rose meet in the winter of nine
thirty nine when they're all finishing up their compulsory two
years of army service as part of this medic program. Basically,

(05:12):
if you had intended to go to medical school eventually,
you could finish up your army service training as a
medic to get a little hands on work before you
start your studies. So most of these kids end up
enrolling at the University of Munich the following spring. And
we know that students are the most protesting group of
the population and well and it's no different at Munich too.

(05:36):
Even though these students really have to watch their backs,
they have a lot more pressure than most student protesters
would have. Still though, when, for instance, one of their
Nazis student leaders tell them that they'll have to spend
their first summer break harvesting the crops in Bavaria, they
are very upset. Stink bombs go off in the chemistry building,
so you can imagine just these acts of protests, still

(05:58):
very dangerous in these times, but trying to to make
their opinions heard. Later in nineteen thirty nine, when most
of the male med students are drafted into the army,
they would steal as much freedom as they could skipping
out on roll call or on drill, according to White
Rose survivor George Fittenstein, and by early nineteen forty two

(06:19):
to med students Alex Schmorell and Hans Shoal have started
writing leaflets, copying them on a typewriter and distributing them.
And Sarah's got the first line from the first leaflet.
Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized nation as allowing
itself to be governed without opposition by an irresponsible clique
that has yielded to base instinct. It is certain that

(06:41):
today every honest German is ashamed of his government. So
of the first one hundred of these flyers that they
distribute in mail, thirty five are returned to the Gestapo.
So this means two things. Spies and people who get
this very incriminating flyer in the mail get very nervous
and send it right back to the Gestapo. And writing

(07:03):
leaflets and copying them might not sound like a big deal,
it is paper is in very short supply, so buying
huge packs of it is very suspicious, and so is
buying lots of postage, and think about how dangerous it
is to carry such a pamphlet around with you, because
if you're stopped and searched, you're done for. But the

(07:24):
students that Munich are amazed to see these pamphlets. Who's
doing this? They're wondering what's going on. The Gestapo are
not pleased, and so the White Rose membership starts to grow.
And it's interesting that the discipline and order that some
of the members might have picked up in the Hitler
youth serves to make them pretty disciplined and ordered when

(07:46):
they're fighting the German government. They would graffiti the streets
of Munich with slogans like down with Hitler, Hitler the
mass murderer, or freedom Freedom, and the initial Munich group
expands to students in Hamburg, Freiburg, Berlin and Vienna. They
would mail each other these mimiographed leaflets, and sometimes they
would even carry them on trains, which was a task

(08:09):
usually left up to the girls. They were less likely
to be searched, but they could leave these suitcases full
of these pamphlets in different cars. Well, they'd carry them
in another compartment. Because you didn't want to be found.
You wanted to be separate from the suitcase for as
much of the journey as possible. But of course we
also have to talk about what the White Rose movement
was even all about, and was it really true that

(08:32):
Germans didn't know what was going on, what atrocities were
being committed. As you so often here, that's usually the
excuse for such enormous inaction that happened. Well, these kids
know what's going on, and when a lot of the
male population of the White Rose movement goes to serve
on the Eastern Front as medical aids in the summer
of ninety two, they actually see some of the atrocities firsthand.

(08:56):
Hans Shoal sees Jewish labors being beat bound for death camps, mistreated.
He hears about how the polls are being deported into
concentration camps, and others like Hans's sister Sophie, here's about
some of the other policies at church in sermons. So
these kids know what's going on, we can assume that
a lot of other people knew. Must have to exactly,

(09:26):
Sophie against permission to reprint a sermon against these murders
and distributes it to the students she joins the White
Rose after enrolling at Munich and begging her brother to
let her in, And many of these members also had
Jewish friends who had since been deported. We have to
make it clear they thought that what was happening was

(09:47):
very wrong. This wasn't just a political protest. This was
a very personal thing, definitely. And so by November ninety two,
the students who were on the Eastern Front serving as
medical aids are back, and the White Rose members are
more dedicated than ever to their cause, and they bring
in one of their professors, Kurt Hoober, who helps them

(10:10):
edit the drafts, rejecting one is to communists. I can
sort of imagine this mentor relationship between these students who
are probably writing radical things like students do, and this
older fellow sort of toning it down, making it more powerful,
making it a better way to speak to their audience.
And they're not naive enough to think that their pamphlets

(10:32):
will help topple the government. That's not what they're trying
to do. They understand that it's only military action that
will end the regime. Although they do specifically distance themselves
as independent thinkers fighting for Germany, they they're very patriotic,
and they want to make it clear that they're not
puppets under Allied control. But while they do advocate sabotage

(10:53):
of the armaments industry, their goal is to improve resistance
morale and stir these apathetic Germans into standing up for
what is right, letting them know that there are other
people who think that way. Yeah, giving people encouragement, and
ultimately they publish six leaflets between nineteen two and three
with that little break while a lot of the guys

(11:14):
are away on the Eastern Front. Four published as the
White Rose and two are published under the name Leaflets
of the Resistance. And it's that sixth pamphlet that really
destroys some of the major members of the movement. It's
just after the defeat at Stalingrad when the White Rose
publishes its sixth leaflet, and here's an excerpt, Shaken and

(11:37):
broken are people behold the loss of the men of Stalingrad.
Three hundred and thirty thousand German men have been senselessly
and irresponsibly driven to death and destruction by the inspired
strategy of our World War one private first class Feurer,
we thank you, and another repeated through the leaflet for us.
There is but one slogan fight against the party. It

(11:59):
says that over an for a goad, something to try
to get get it stuck in the reader's head. And
the Shoals go to this campus building at their university
and they leave stacks of these leaflets outside of the
doors of the classroom. They're carrying the whole, the whole
shipang in this suitcase. When they realize that there's still
a lot of the leaflets left in their bad Sophie

(12:19):
takes them up to the third floor and throws them
down a light. Well, so imagine just all these pamphlets
shower showering down. Well, it catches the attention of a
janitor and he turns them into the Gestapo. They're arrested,
and the barely involved Kristoph Propst is actually implicated because
Hans has something mentioning him in his pocket, a draft

(12:42):
for a later pamphlet. So the three of them are
taken into custody. They delivered that last batch of pamphlets
on February nine, and just days later they're put on trial.
The judge is horrified that three nice German kids could
have turned to this, and is especially disgusted that Hans

(13:03):
is a soldier well, and that the state is paid
for his education. It just seems doubly wrong to this judge.
Propst has a wife and three babies, and he claims
psychotic depression after the loss at Stalingrad and because of
his wife's difficult child birth. He's trying to save his life.
Sophie explains herself really boldly, though. She says somebody, after all,

(13:24):
had to make a start. What we wrote and said
is also believed by many others. They just don't dare
to express themselves as we did. And later she actually
tells the judge, you know the war is lost, why
don't you have the courage to face it? So she's
being incredibly brave and bold in the face of uh.
I mean, she'll definitely be charged by this judge. There's

(13:45):
no other way out. The Shoal's parents tried to burst
into the courtroom in the middle of the trial, and
their mother is told she should have brought them up better.
Their father forces his way in and is forcibly escorted out,
and as he's escorted out, he shouts, one day there
will be another kind of justice. One day they will
go down in history. Poor propist family, on the other hand,

(14:16):
doesn't even know that he's been arrested. His wife is
still in the hospital from childbirth, and he's not visited
by anyone before his execution. Unsurprisingly, the judge rules guilty.
The court finds quote that the accused have, in the
time of war, by means of leaflets, called for the
sabotage of the war effort in armaments and for the

(14:37):
overthrow of the national socialist way of life of our people,
have propagated defeatist ideas and have most vulgarly defamed the fur,
thereby giving aid to the enemy of the Reich and
weakening the armed security of the nation. On this account,
they are to be punished by death. They're executed by
guillotine almost immediately. The siblings meet with their parents one

(15:00):
last time, and the guards allow the three to meet
one last time. Sophie has killed first, then Props, then Hans,
who cries out, long live freedom, but it's not over yet,
and the Gestapo arrest three other members later in the year,
Alexander Schmorrel, who is twenty five. We should I don't
think we've mentioned their ages yet. They're all in their

(15:21):
very early twenties. Uh. They also arrest Willie Graff who's
twenty five, and the professor who is helping Kurt Hooper,
who is forty nine, and some of them aren't executed
until n so the second batch of trials doesn't go
as quickly as as the first with the Shoals and
Props does. Today, they're heroes in Germany for daring to

(15:43):
stand up during the country's darkest years. There's a square
at the University of Munich named after the Shoals, and
things all over the city that are named after other
members and will close with another quote from their leaflets, quote,
we seek the revival of the deeply owned to German spirit.
For the sake of future generations. An example must be

(16:04):
set after the war, so that no one will ever
have the slightest desire to try anything like this ever again.
Do not forget the minor scoundrels of this system. Note
their names, so that no one may escape. We shall
not be silent. We are your bad conscience. The White
Rose will not leave you in peace. It's especially interesting

(16:24):
that call to not forget even the most minor scoundrels,
to know their names so that no one will escape
that's still so pertinent even today. We have an article
on that it's called are their Nazi War criminals still
at large? And there are, and people are still actively
looking for them and looking to bring them to justice.
People have not forgotten. Thank you so much for joining

(16:52):
us for this Saturday classic. Since this is out of
the archive, if you heard an email address or a
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(17:12):
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