August 6 - August 7, 1942.
Summary:
Hans Scholl’s younger brother Werner appears at HVP Plankenhorn. He is assigned to the TVP near Ržev, which is very close to the worst of the fighting.
Werner takes Hans out for a late-night stroll. He introduces him to Russian farmers. They drink vodka and sing Russian songs “as if we were in the middle of peacetime.”
The Russian military breaks through German defenses in two places near the TVP where Werner is assigned and HVP Plankenhorn. Hans Scholl is frustrated that the Russians cannot exploit their advantage. It is almost as if he is cheering them on.
Alois Mauer, Willi’s old friend from Gray Order days in Saarbrücken, shows up out of the blue. Ali and Willi sit up late talking. Ali tells Willi about conditions on the front line, while Willi fills Ali in about life in Munich. As Ali leaves, Willi realizes that goodbye is no longer auf Wiedersehen, till we meet again. Now goodbye has the potential of permanence.
Why this matters:
Those we deem as “enemy” can change. Hans Scholl and others of his generation had been raised to believe that Russians were the enemy, that Germany’s survival depended on defeating the Bolshevist threat.
As he and his friends understood more and more about atrocities committed in the name of the German nation, they ceased seeing Russians as the enemy. Rather, fascists in their own country had to be defeated if Germany were to survive.
It’s particularly difficult when things are gray, when the lines are less clearly drawn.
Talk about it! This is a public post, and comment section is open.
White Rose History, Volume II, pages 154-155.
Notes and references
Willi Graf’s tales of seeing Ali were preserved in letters to Günther Schmich, a so-called “half-Jewish” Catholic priest whom Willi regarded with utmost respect.
Remember the Mauer family name. The Mauer brothers were critical to Willi’s considerations regarding resistance. They were his most trusted sounding boards. You will see them over and over in the chapters to come.
The Smolensk-Moscow highway through Vyaz’ma still exists. It is now the E30. Smolensk is the gateway to Russia, just inside the border from Belarus. The E30 starts at Frankfurt a.d. Oder in former East Germany on the Polish border. From there it goes to Poznań (then Posen), also in Poland. It cuts between Łódź and Warsaw - to the north of Łódź and to the south of Warsaw. From there, it goes to Brest in Belarus, on the border with Poland. It then angles sharply north-northeast to Minsk, Belarus; from Minsk to Smolensk, just inside the then-Soviet Union, now Russia, and from there to Vyaz’ma, Gzhatsk, and on to Moscow.
On the western side of the highway, the E30 becomes the 2, running just south of Berlin to Magdeburg, Hannover, Dortmund, Essen, Düsseldorf, where it ends as the 2. From Düsseldorf, it’s a short drive to The Hague and Rotterdam.
In other words, whoever controlled the E30 controlled a major supply route.
When Germany invaded the USSR, German pilots bombed Smolensk-Vyaz’ma-Gzhatsk and the highway that connected them. When Soviet pilots tried to re-take the route, they also bombed the same highway and cities. The people who lived there didn’t stand a chance.
As usual, Inge Scholl limited access to what we see and know about events on the front lines between Hans and Werner Scholl. None of Werner’s letters have been published or made public, at least that I know of.
Jens, Inge (Ed.). At the Heart of the White Rose: Letters and Diaries of Hans and Sophie Scholl. Translation by J. Maxwell Brownjohn. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., 1987.
Knoop-Graf, Anneliese and Jens, Inge (Eds.). Willi Graf: Briefe und Aufzeichnungen. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH, 1994.
Podcast © 2024 Denise Elaine Heap. White Rose History, Volume II, Chapter 12, © 2002 Denise Elaine Heap and Exclamation! Publishers. Please contact us for permission to quote.
This podcast is a project of WHY THIS MATTERS, a newsletter of Center for White Rose Studies, that explores the reasons that voices silenced more than eighty years ago still speak to us today.
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