History of the History of the White Rose: 1996-1997

Ruprecht Poensgen (Salem), Wittenstein (Memories/History Place and Shoah Foundation interview), and Hildegard Hamm-Brücher: Two very good, two... well, read on.

Schule Schloβ Salem, September 22, 1933. Postcard photo. Public domain.

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1996:

The first publication in this post corrected misinformation that had been perpetuated for decades by George J. (“Jürgen”) Wittenstein. If you’ve bought into Wittenstein’s tales about life at Schule Schloβ Salem, the essay written by Ruprecht Poensgen [no umlaut is correct] and published by Institut für Zeitgeschichte is a must-read. Entitled Die Schule Schloβ Salem im Dritten Reich, Poensgen obliterates the sacred cow of Wittenstein’s stories.

Poensgen’s essay is not about Wittenstein. It focuses solely on the school he attended. Contrary to Wittenstein’s assertions that Salem remained democratic and philo-Semitic after Hitler came to power, antisemitism on campus flared around the person of Kurt Hahn. Poensgen records NSDAP actions not only to terminate Kurt Hahn, but other Jewish teachers and those who sympathized with them – in May and June 1933, not years later.

If you have not understood why I, together with Johannes Tuchel (Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand) and Dr. Armin Ziegler, have called Wittenstein’s stories into question, especially as re-told by Detlef Bald, read Poensgen’s essay. It will become clear in a flash. I only wish Poensgen had turned this essay into a full-length book and had not stopped at June 1933.

1997:

Jürgen Wittenstein was busy in 1997.

First, he granted an “interview” to Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archives. Carol Stulberg interviewed him for four hours. Interview with Dr. George J. Wittenstein and Christel Bejenke, March 22, 1997 is a master class in subterfuge and deceit. I’ll give Stulberg credit. She tried to bring him back to the questions she asked. Repeatedly. Poor Carol Stulberg. It was a losing proposition.

If Wittenstein did not want to answer one of her softballs, he would ramble on and on about topics unrelated to her query. ‘Was there antisemitism at Salem after Hahn was fired?’ Wittenstein launched into a disjointed response about Gordonstoun and how he (Wittenstein) knew Prince Philip from Salem, and about the Atlantic School and William Randolph Hearst's castle (really!) and UNESCO and the International Baccalaureate and the British Coast Guard and World Colleges and ...

Then Stulberg finally interrupted his meandering avoidance of her question about Salem. She asked, “After Hitler came to power, I'd like to know if you witnessed any antisemitism while you were there [Salem].”

After more meandering, Wittenstein bent over, almost out of view of the camera, and continued talking... about the Atlantic School and Kurt Hahn. Finally after a long pause, he said, “There was no overt antisemitism in the school because first of all, there had been many Jewish students.” Followed immediately by this strange statement:

I remember very distinctly that one day one of the teachers who obviously was a Nazi called me for private interview and said, I have to apologize to you. I always thought you were Jewish and I just found out you’re not. (Laughs) Which I thought, is a very odd apology. And that was that.

As would be expected, Wittenstein also made up his new mythology about his ‘involvement’ with White Rose resistance on the fly. His 1947/48 essay and his 1993 Siena College speech took on new life in front of Shoah Foundation cameras.

That expanded narrative was cemented in his four-part document “Memories of the White Rose,” written for The History Place, edited by Philip Gavin. Wittenstein’s practice run for the History Place document included not only Stulberg’s interview, but a 1996 speech for the “Jewish-American Federation” (sic). That speech was excerpted on the Web site of the California Medical Association with his express consent. Since the History Place essay is slightly longer, I’m including only it and not the speech given in 1996.

My review of Wittenstein’s History Place essay is more detailed than most. I listed all forty-two points where he got things wrong. Some are simple, such as repeating his previous error about the university converting to trimesters in the summer of 1942, when that had been in place for three years.

Other false statements are more critical. Wittenstein completely omitted older adults like Wilhelm Geyer and Manfred Eickemeyer, to name but two. He stated that all the White Rose friends came from families that were opposed to Hitler; this statement is not only false, but it misrepresents the milieu that affected the students, because their resistance efforts opposed not only the NSDAP regime, but their parents’ authority and belief systems as well. Yet most of the young adults seemed to genuinely love their families, even when they were on opposite sides of a dark, yawning divide.

This four-part essay appeared about midway through Wittenstein’s second career as speaker and writer on German resistance. It marked a turning point, where he fleshed out anecdotes he had barely known before (if ever), and yet he had not gained the level of knowledge he would have after reading my histories and the works of Armin Ziegler, Christiane Moll, and Johannes Tuchel. Later in life, as documented in Evolution of Memory, Wittenstein’s “memory” greatly improved. For example, he eventually stopped calling them leaves and adopted the actual language, leaflets; and, he ultimately stated that Kurt Huber and Alexander Schmorell were executed in 1943 and not 1944. (That date was not a typo, as he wrote that they had to wait “a long time” for execution.)

Note to teachers and professors: If you read a draft of any student’s work that includes Wittenstein’s History Place essay in the bibliography, please show that student this review. Use Wittenstein’s essay on the History Place site to explain how critical the historical process is. It’s never too early to learn that fundamental concept.

Rounding out this post about White Rose publications in 1996-1997: A little book by Hildegard Hamm-Brücher, “Zerreisst den Mantel der Gleichgültigkeit.” Die “Weiβe Rose” und unsere Zeit. In it, she briefly tells her life story, and what she knew about White Rose leaflets and secret conversations. To her credit, Hildegard Hamm-Brücher never claimed to have been part of the resistance work around Leipelt. The entire review will be included in this post, because Hamm-Brücher was a remarkable woman.

One of Hildegard Hamm nee Brücher’s grandmothers was Jewish and had converted to Protestantism. Hildegard Brücher was raised Lutheran – first in Berlin, then in Dresden with that ‘not-Jewish’ grandmother, Else Pick.

In 1937, she was enrolled in Schule Schloβ Salem – yes, the same boarding school where Jürgen Wittenstein was educated. She was expelled a year later when they learned she had a Jewish grandmother. The NSDAP looked at “ethnicity” only, not religion, when determining whether someone were Jewish. Unless the person had converted to Judaism. They were Jewish then as well.

After Hildegard Brücher passed the Abitur (1939), she fulfilled her Reich Labor Service (through December 1939), after which she enrolled in Munich’s chemistry department (January 1940). Heinrich Wieland, department chair, used a loophole to permit so-called “half-Jewish” students to study. She therefore became well-acquainted with the circle around Hans Leipelt.

Hildegard Brücher’s friendships with “half-Jewish” chemistry students also put her in contact with anti-Nazis on campus, including the medical students of the Second Student Company. She intuited who was not Nazi, but when she received one of the White Rose leaflets, she did not ask around about authorship. She read it while sitting on the toilet and then cut it up into little pieces.

For her, 1942 was a difficult year. In January 1942, the grandmother in Dresden had been advised that since she was Jewish, she would be transported to Theresienstadt. Else Pick chose suicide over death in the camps. Hildegard knew that her life and the lives of her four siblings were now in danger. Oh, and she had pneumonia for months on end that year.

In 1943, the leaflets returned. Hildegard recalled one in particular that spoke to her, said the things she had been thinking. Stalingrad! Yes. She would not have known that the very popular Professor Kurt Huber penned it. But that leaflet! Idealistic, maybe, but political clarity. It would be fifty years before she could read them all together, first through sixth. She never could forget the one about Stalingrad.

The real value of Hamm-Brücher’s book lies in her description of life after the war. She mercilessly told of the unwillingness of her fellow countrymen to face up to the reality of their misdeeds. The Allies gave Germany opportunity for a new beginning. “Can a new beginning succeed without taking personal responsibility for one’s guilt, [without] catharsis?”

She depicted the “DP” or displaced persons, mostly Jewish survivors of the camps, skeletons who had been marched westward from the extermination camps in the East, with large groups deposited in Starnberg, south of Munich. Hamm-Brücher condemned her fellow Germans – instead of compassion or pity, they (relatively well off, she noted) shunned the DPs and wanted nothing to do with them.

“German guilt was great, but the shame regarding [that guilt] was only experienced by a few. Almost no one wanted to hear about collective responsibility much less about collective guilt. When an American officer asked me if I had known about the KZs [concentration camps], I truthfully answered yes. Why were so few truthful?”

Hildegard Hamm-Brücher said that the scope of the atrocities was so great, she could not then, nor could she in 1997 as she wrote this book, imagine how great the atrocities had been. Her words were heavy, deliberate. She let no one off the hook.

Although she acknowledged the Lutheran church’s postwar “confession” led by Martin Niemöller, Helmut Gollwitzer, and Gustav Heinemann in Stuttgart, she declared that that confession – the closest thing to an apology issued after the war to millions of Jewish neighbors and people who had been murdered – that that confession was not nearly enough. “We brought sorrow to many people and countries…,” the Lutherans said. To Hildegard Hamm-Brücher, scientist and politician, the enormity of the sin demanded more than a vague we’re sorry. Jews, the disabled, crimes against humanity committed by German soldiers in the name of the German people – Hildegard believed the “apology” needed far more specificity than “sorrow to many people and countries.”

That the greater Lutheran church in German rejected even that weak apology as “fouling one’s own nest”? Hamm-Brücher found the unwillingness to accept responsibility for grievous murders something so reprehensible…

Which brought her back to the fourth Leaflet of the White Rose, where Hans Scholl called for a “revival of the deeply wounded German spirit from within.” Hamm-Brücher saw the words of the White Rose as applicable to her Germany after the war, to the stubborn refusal to deal with their national crimes.

She used as example a 1947 article quashed by the Vicariate General of Freiburg. The Catholic youth magazine Fährmann [Ferryman] planned a piece which would have spoken positively about White Rose resistance, especially praising Christoph Probst’s actions. The Vicariate censored it, stating, “Even revolution against an unjust regime is not allowed.” She noted that Willi Graf’s friend Heinrich Bollinger remarked that resistance to the Nazi dictatorship still was deemed a “grave sin” by the official Catholic church [Amtskirche] well into postwar years. Resistance to the Nazi dictatorship!

Back to the DP camps: Hamm-Brücher was angered that fifty years after the war ended, when some citizens of Starnberg and surrounding towns wanted to memorialize the DP camps and the suffering of the displaced persons, they had to fight the conservative citizenry. One mayor argued that it was wrong to honor the DPs, because there had been criminals among them (he said).

In one of the bitter ironies of an otherwise magnificent little book, Hamm-Brücher held up Inge Scholl as example of someone who tried to live democratic ideals after the war. In the same chapter, Hamm-Brücher wrote of Persilscheine that allowed Nazis to reinvent themselves, and guilty parties who had been ardent Nazis who suddenly pretended to have known nothing about National Socialism. Inge Scholl did a great job of covering her tracks.

Hamm completed her PhD in chemistry in 1945 – Heinrich Wieland was her Doktorvater. In 1949, she benefited from the educational exchanges set up with the United States and studied political science at Harvard from 1949-1950. She had already dipped her toe into politics, becoming a member of the Munich city council in 1948. She would become one of Germany’s most prominent postwar politicians, fighting with everything she had to ensure that far-right extremism could not take root. Interesting that she stood for the office of president in 1994, the same year that Hans Hirzel ran for the same office on the neo-Nazi platform. She was the first woman to run for president, but when her own party supported a far more conservative candidate (Roman Herzog), she dropped out.

After 54 years in the FDP, Germany’s “federalist” party, Hamm-Brücher resigned from that party in 2002. It had become ever more populist and right-wing. The last straw for her came when party vice-chair Jürgen W. Möllemann refused to cease making antisemitic statements, which were tolerated by FDP chairman Guido Westerwelle. She could work with conservatives, but not with people who seemed to want to take Germany back to 1933.

Before I knew anything about the White Rose, I knew who Hildegard Hamm-Brücher was. Although her primary interest in government revolved around the functioning of government and state (she was a fearless politician), she would also speak or write about education, especially about educational reform. I remember reading one of those eloquent speeches in the 1980s, moved enough to write her a letter. I did not hear back from her, but I recall my immense respect for her person.

Small irony (or coincidence) related to this little book: It was published by Aufbau-Verlag, the same house that would publish Detlef Bald’s awful book a few years later.

The language in Hildegard Hamm-Brücher’s book is conversational German. Originally delivered as a speech, not intended to be published in book form, we “hear” this great woman speaking. Because of the accessibility of the language, it would be an important addition to an undergraduate – or advanced high school – class about the importance of White Rose, both then and now.

To bring this particular historiography post full circle: Although Hildegard Hamm-Brücher was at Salem in 1937, although she traveled in the same circles as Hans Leipelt, although she received copies of the leaflets… she never once mentioned Wittenstein as a person she knew between 1937-1945.

Bibliography:

Hamm-Brücher, Hildegard. “Zerreisst den Mantel der Gleichgültigkeit.” Die “Weiβe Rose” und unsere Zeit. Edited by Wilhelm von Sternberg. Berlin: Aufbau Taschenbuch Verlag, 1997.

Poensgen, Ruprecht. “Die Schule Schloβ Salem im Dritten Reich.” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 44, January 1996: 25-54.

Stuberg, Carol. Interview with Dr. George J. Wittenstein and Christel Bejenke. Shoah Foundation. Santa Barbara, California, March 22, 1997.

Wittenstein, George J. “Memories of the White Rose.” In Philip Gavin (ed.). The History Place: Points of View, 1997. Retrieved 2/29/2000 from http://www.historyplace.com/pointsofview /white-rose1.htm.

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