The White Rose

Transcript

Greetings, everyone. This is Michael Nagler, and I'm here with your next episode of the Nonviolent Moment.

Given the inexplicable and distressing rise of authoritarianism happening around the world today, including conspicuously here in these United States, I thought it would be a good idea to look at some of the movements of resistance that took place against the rise of the iconic authoritarian movement of our era, which was, of course, the rise of the Nazis.

There were a number of resistance movements, which of course, we did not know much about during the war, and whose history is only being slowly recovered today. There was a Catholic priest by the name of Arkenau, who hid and smuggled out of Germany a number of Jewish refugees, a number of downed United States Air Force people. So, he had a little bit of a network going for him within the Catholic Church, which otherwise was not particularly resistant.

There is a famous movement that took place in the south of France called Le Chambon, where several thousand refugees were rescued by a family by the name of Andre and Magda Trocme, the Trocme family. They were members of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. And that itself has an interesting bit of a background. In 1914, a German and an Englishmen were traveling into Cologne. And when they reached the station, they heard the news that war had been declared between their two countries. They were struck. They were smitten. They got off the train, they shook hands, and they swore this war will not divide us. And that was on what's called Bahnsteig Sieben, Platform Seven, at the Cologne railway station, where I have actually stood and paid homage to these two men and to the organization that followed, the Fellowship of Reconciliation – which led, among many other things, to the rescue of so many thousands in the south of France at Le Chambon-sur-Lignon.

The other well-known event is the Rosenstrasse prison demonstration. The Rosenstrasse, or Rose Street, right in Berlin, had been, before the rise of Hitler, had been the Jewish Community Center. And the event that we're talking about unfolds in February of 1943, where there were some three or so thousand Jewish men living in Berlin who had not yet been arrested for the simple reason that they had non-Jewish wives. They had Aryan wives.

So they were, Mischlinge, as the Germans called them. They were a mixed race. And Hitler didn't know what to do with them. But then when Stalingrad happened, and almost the entire Sixth Army of the German Wehrmacht was defeated and decimated and driven back out of Russia, and everyone knew the war was over, these men were, in fact, rounded up, taken to the detention center, and they were going to be brought out to the concentration camps.

But something happened which no one had predicted. And that was the wives and daughters and sisters of these men thronged the Rosenstrasse Detention Center, where the men were being held, and said, “We want our men back.”

Now, this is very interesting. Hitler was, of course, immediately apprized of the situation and said, “What shall we do?” He became incapable of making a decision. And somehow, I find that psychologically very interesting. The same thing happened to Stalin when Hitler invaded Russia in defiance of their non-aggression pact. Stalin was paralyzed for a week, and a lot of people died because of that.

And there's a film about this event called “Rosenstrasse,” which I was a little bit disappointed in because it doesn't really emphasize the non-violent – I'll tell you in a minute why I say that “non-dash-violent” resistance of those women – which eventually resulted in, after only one weekend, resulted in the release of all those men.

It's really good to know about this, because if you start talking about nonviolence in this world, what do you think people are going to say? The first thing they're going to say is, “It never would have worked against Hitler. And so therefore we have to maintain a good, strong, violent response.” Well, guess what? It worked brilliantly against Hitler when it was tried.

Now the White Rose, Die Weisse Rose, that I want to talk about did not have a happy ending. This was a group of students at the University of Munich, several of whom had actually seen military service in Russia. They had seen what was happening in Poland. They had seen what was happening to their Jewish neighbors. And these idealistic young people decided that this was not okay and that they had to resist.

So, what we will be talking about is what I call a non-violent, temperamentally nonviolent, student group that was martyred. ‘Non-violent’ in my little vocabulary means an episode in which violence was not used for whatever reason. But I differentiate this, which is sometimes called strategic nonviolence from nonviolence without a hyphen, which I call principled nonviolence, which everybody calls principled nonviolence, where people adopt nonviolence because they feel that it's the right thing to do, regardless of the consequences.

Now, the nucleus of this small group consisted of two pairs of siblings, a young woman who has become kind of the icon for the movement, and there's a movie named after her, and a book named after her. Her name is Sophie Scholl. She was drawn into the movement because her brother Hans had actually seen what was going on in Russia and come back to finish his medical studies. A lot of these people were medical students.

So, you had Hans and Sophie Scholl, a fellow named Willi Graf and his sister Anneliese, a young med student named Alexander Schmorell, who was important to the movement because he was born in Russia. His mother was Russian. He knew Russian perfectly and was able to open lines of communication that way. And I'm happy to say, as a recovering professor myself, that they had a faculty sponsor. His name is Professor Karl Huber. His first wife had died, and his second wife was Jewish, which made him very much a target of the Gestapo. So, he was eager to help these kids.

Now, there were a number of other people who gradually got involved in the White Rose. And we're not sure – the name was given by Hans Scholl, but we're not sure why. There was a very romantic Spanish novel called “La Rosa Blanca,” going around at that time, and given the temperament of these kids, I think they might have named it after that.

But there was another woman who eventually became part of the network, whose name was Traute Lafrenz. And what's remarkable about Traute, whose picture, incidentally, is above my desk at home, is that she died last year at the age of 103, in North Carolina. So, with knowing, I suppose, that she had outlived Hitler by 79 years.

So, there is now a book by Inge Scholl, who is a sister of Sophie and Hans. The book is called “Sophie Scholl.”

And I have a little story to share. I had a colleague named Fritz Tubach, who was born in Germany. And of course, was roped into – or, because he was an idealistic young guy – this is the tragedy. Because of his idealism, he became a member of the Hitler Youth. After the war, the allies rounded up people like Fritz, Fredric Tubach was his actual name, and forced them to watch films which the Germans themselves had made, depicting the horrors of the concentration camp. And Fritz had a nervous breakdown and was still a little bit jumpy. It’s just, as far as I know, to this day, a little bit nervous and jumpy because of that traumatic upbringing and a traumatic episode. Realizing what he had done, all unbeknownst to himself.

And Fritz told me that a woman came to him and told him the following story. She was a chemistry student. She was not one of the nuclear seven, but she was involved with the White Rose. And sure enough, they were eventually betrayed to the Gestapo. One day, the Gestapo came to the university to arrest her. By a strange coincidence, if you believe in them, she was sick. She was home sick that day. So they went to her professor, the Gestapo did, and asked about this woman. And he said, [German] “Her? She's not involved.” Knowing full well that he was lying, and he was risking his life in doing so. But that is the relationship that professors often do have with students, I think still maybe to this day in Europe.

Okay, so now let's get to our story. A lot of these people, they were all, the central group, were all students at the University of Munich. Three of them were medical students. And, like all German youth, they had been sent to the East for several tours of duty that interrupted their studies. But after their experiences at the Eastern Front, having learned about the mass murders in Poland and the Soviet Union, Hans Scholl and Alexander Schmorell felt compelled to do something.

So, from late June until mid-July of 1942, they wrote the first four of six leaflets, which were distributed clandestinely by members of the White Rose. These were, you know, very, if you know anything about German intellectual culture at that time, these were very well-read students. The leaflets quoted extensively from the Bible, from Aristotle, from the romantic German poet, Novalis, as well as Goethe and Schiller, who are the iconic poets of German literature.

And they appealed, this is interesting for us – they appealed to what they considered the German intelligentsia, believing that these people would be easily convinced by the same arguments that had convinced them.

Now, this is something that we see very often. I want to say two things about it, I guess. This appeal to the intellect goes only so far. And Gandhi said, “If you want things to be done, if you want the people to be moved, it is not enough to appeal to the head, you have to appeal to the heart also.”

And how do you do that? Well, if you have waited too long, on Michael Nagler’s escalation curve, you have to suffer – you have to undertake self-suffering, at least in the form of risk to open other people's hearts.

And now this brings me to the second thing I wanted to say about these young people. They were all guillotined. Why didn't their suffering awaken the hearts of Germans? To some extent it did, of course. To some extent, it's doing it to us. But why didn't it lead to that massive awakening of the heart that would have led to a nonviolent uprising against Hitler? I think here we have to distinguish between what Martin Luther King called unearned suffering and suffering willingly endured, and suffering that one would have, one would have avoided if one possibly could.

I mean, these kids were human, okay? They didn't want to die. I didn't want them to die. They were captured. They were mistreated, and they were summarily executed over the appeals of their own parents. So, therefore, I'm saying, their suffering didn't quite have the same effect as a Gandhian fast, for example. Where no one tells him to do it, he just does it on his own to awaken conscience. Okay?

So, they appealed in their leaflets to people to renounce what they called “national socialist subhumanism.” Then to renounce imperialism and Prussian militarism for all time. You have to realize how radical this was in German consciousness at the time.

You remember why, for example, Albert Einstein had to leave Germany. Because they circulated a petition they wanted all the intellectuals and professors to sign. And that petition was a declaration that German culture equals German militarism. After the stinging defeat of WWI, Germany's self-respect was keyed to their military prowess. Now, this is a terribly unfortunate thing.

So anyway, here are these leaflets asking them to renounce Prussian militarism, which is really radical, to support the resistance movement in the struggle for, “freedom of speech, freedom of religion and protection of the individual citizen from the arbitrary action of criminal dictator states.” And I'm not going to say it, but I think this is beginning to sound kind of familiar.

And so, these kids said freedom of speech, etc., protection of the individual citizen from the action of criminal dictator states, these would be the principles that would form, “The Foundations of a new Europe.”

The woman I mentioned, Traute Lafrenz, was actually the last surviving member of this group. On May 3rd, 2019, she turned 100, and she was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany for her work as part of the White Rose. She protested that she didn't really have that much to do with the White Rose. She just carried some leaflets from one place to another. She didn't author them. But the fact is that what she did was very dangerous. In fact, that is how the White Rose students were caught.

What they were doing was they somehow managed to secure mimeograph equipment and copy off large numbers of these fliers. And they were leaving them outside of classrooms in the University of Munich.

But one day, on their way out, Sophie realized that she still had a lot of leaflets in her briefcase. She made a fatal mistake. She went back in, took these leaflets and threw them over the balcony onto the atrium of the University, where she was seen by a custodian whose name I will pass over here. And he betrayed them to the Gestapo. And they were killed under the guillotine shortly thereafter.

But what I'd like to do now is read you a little bit of what they said in these stirring leaflets. So, here's a quote from the first leaflet of the White Rose.

“Isn't it true that every honest German is ashamed of his government these days? Who among us has any conception of the dimensions of shame that will befall us and our children when one day the veil has fallen from our eyes and the most horrible of crimes – crimes that outdistance every human measure – reach the light of day?”

I just want to add in this connection that during the Nuremberg trials, one of the top-ranking Nazi’s made a statement [German]. “This disgrace of Germany will last for a thousand years.” And that, of course, was a veiled reference to Hitler's claim that he had established a thousand-year regime, the thousand-year Reich.

Well, I'm happy to say, incidentally, having said all this, that I studied in Germany for a year. It wasn't too long after the war, early ‘60s actually. And the young people in that country had completely turned their back on this kind of past. So, they were not heavily burdened by guilt like their parents sometimes were, but they absolutely had learned the lesson would never be caught in this kind of thing again.

Second leaflet of the White Rose quote, “Since the conquest of Poland, 300,000 Jews have been murdered in this country.” Skipping some graphic language here, “the German people slumber on in dull, stupid sleep and encourage the fascist criminals. Each one 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.”

Now, incidentally, not long after this episode, we have Karl Marx writing poetry in Germany. Yeah, that was a surprise for me too, that the founder of communism was writing poetry. But I guess almost all students in Germany were writing poetry at that time. And one line of one poem of his that stands out for me is “In seinem Sessel, behaglich dumm, Sitzt schweigend das deutsche Publikum.”. Not the greatest of poetry, okay? But it says, “In its armchair, comfortable and silent, sits dumbfounded the German public.”

So, this idea of passive witnesses to criminality, in which one steps back and says, “I didn't do this. I’m not guilty, myself.” It doesn't work and it doesn't help. And I'm reminded of a statement by an American Air Force officer – all this whole thing is going to come back to me in a little while – who did an act of bravery. They told him you didn't have to do that. You weren't responsible. And he said, “I was responsible because I could do it, not because I had caused it.”

All right. Third leaflet of the White Rose, quote, “Why do you allow these men who are in power to rob you step by step, openly and in secret, of one domain after another of your rights, until one day nothing, nothing at all will be left but a mechanized state system presided over by criminals and drunks? Is your spirit already so crushed by abuse that you forget it is your right or rather, your moral duty to eliminate this system?”

Now, one of the things that we know today is this kind of accusation is tricky. There's a fine line that has to be drawn here. And I'm of course, not blaming these poor kids for not knowing about that. The fact is, they probably had heard the name Mahatma Gandhi, but knew absolutely nothing of what was going on in India. They had not heard of the term nonviolence, although what they were doing, they called “passiver Widerstand.” Passive resistance which Gandhi had explicitly repudiated even when he was still in South Africa. 

And Martin Luther King also said that passive resistance, which is the term that was floating around for what they were doing at that time, was misleading because it was anything but passive. They were taking the lead. They were being proactive. And it wasn't only resistant, its biggest strength actually lay in building, of what we call today, constructive program.

So, I think what we have here, is a testimony to the human spirit, incredible courage by these young people. We have to venerate them for their heroism, for their martyrdom. And we obviously have to learn from their experiences.

I think one of the models that we've subsequently developed at the Metta Center is called the Escalation Curve, where we say that conflicts escalate. If left to their own devices, they get worse and worse. The dehumanization gets steeper and steeper. And what we need to know as people who want to resist, as nonviolent folks, what we need to know is that we should be correlating, calibrating, if you will, our resistance to match the level of dehumanization.

And that’s a very important little set of criteria to go by. In the first phase, you could say people are having a disagreement, but it's not really quite yet a dispute. You can call them to the table. You can talk with them. And if you do that with respect, and you practice the art of listening, and you hear and understand exactly what their complaint is, if you have the faith, as we must, that everybody has a point of view, everybody has some position, some need which may or may not be legitimate, but can be addressed. And often conflict can be headed off at that stage.

But in the next stage, folks aren’t listening to you. So, the time is over for conversations. And here's where you must be ready to practice civil disobedience. You have to take a risk. You have to be willing to suffer. You have to break what you consider unjust laws, but not in the spirit of being. You know, not being against the law, but being in a spirit of reforming and purifying the law.

And sometimes even that is not going to work because you’ve waited too long. “The evil, the criminals, and drunks”, have gotten too far. You still have one other option, and that is to risk your life. You’ll say, “This is a terrible thing. I don't want to do that.” But look at the number of people who risk their life in war and lose it, versus a very small number of people who've been injured and killed in nonviolence.

Well, I hope to come back next time with an even happier episode, but I think it's important for us to honor and learn from the White Rose. Thank you very much for listening.