Just the Facts

Why tell the story of White Rose - and other - resistance, when it was all for nothing? Because: Their deaths and imprisonments were not in vain. They changed the people around them.

White Rose (desert rose). Photo © 2016 Denise Heap.

I am one of the lucky few who had excellent teachers from the very beginning. No other aspect of education ranks as highly as the women and men who, while often underpaid, undersupplied, and overworked, stand in front of classrooms day after day and year after year.

Somehow, during my early elementary years I was always assigned to yet another teacher who could have been honored as Educator of the Year if such accolades even existed back in the 1960s. Except for my third grade teacher. Poor thing, she took over our class barely six weeks into the new school year, as she assumed the desk of the beloved Mrs. T.

But this woman was no Mrs. T. She did not understand how to positively challenge us or motivate us to think out loud like Mrs. T did. “Miss R” was a rookie teacher who mistook mischief for badness and sass for impudence. She never took us outside to examine wildflowers or sat us down in small groups to work cooperatively on assignments. Instead, she hung poor handwriting samples on the bulletin board and encouraged students to mock the cursive scrawls of their less coordinated classmates. My Ps and Qs often took front and center on that dreaded bulletin board of shame.

Whether naturally lazy or just ill-equipped, this woman simply could not teach. Even so, I took away two important lessons from her class that I remember to this day. First, Miss R demonstrated the power of reading aloud. When she ran out of things to say, she would pick up a book, Charlotte’s Web perhaps, perch on her stool, and read to us for the rest of the day. I still enjoy hearing the sound of language, words crafted like a painting on a white page, but spoken aloud instead. It’s magic, that rhythm. No accident that mysticism often invokes chants that are uttered, not sung.

And Miss R’s second gift? It was something that she likely never intended as such. When she got angry, she would mete out fact-writing as punishment. The greater the offense, the more facts we students had to write. The content didn’t particularly matter as long as that Big Chief tablet contained a nice neat list… of facts.

Miss R probably didn’t realize that whenever I pulled an encyclopedia off the shelf or was sent down the hall to the library, I was in heaven. There was so much to learn! And the more I learned, and the more I knew, the more I understood just how big this old world is.

My hunger to learn, to know, and to understand was soon dissatisfied with copying superficial facts. I went from writing Texas is the very best state in the USA - an acceptable “fact” in a third grade Houston classroom - to learning how Texas gained its independence, to its flora and fauna, to its surrounding states, to Valley Forge, and so on.

And in what seemed like the blink of an eye, I was studying overseas, still fascinated by the people and cultures and trees and everything else that gives life to our planet. I found myself in Germany, searching for the underlying truth about a group of college kids who were executed for daring to speak the truth about Hitler.

The usual dust cover summary of the White Rose story tells us that they were a group of friends at the University of Munich, who committed themselves to resisting Hitler. That they began doing so by writing leaflets calling for the overthrow of the Nazi regime. That on February 18, 1943, two of them (Hans and Sophie Scholl) threw leaflets off the balcony of the university building that housed lecture halls for philosophy and the humanities. That the janitor reported them and that they were subsequently arrested. That they, along with Christoph Probst, were tried and beheaded on February 22, 1943. That fourteen others were tried on April 19 and four more on July 13, 1943. That in all, six were executed by the Nazis, and eleven served prison sentences.

This dust jacket version of the White Rose story leads the casual reader to believe that these daring young students were near saints. An edition of their personal letters highlights innocent love affairs and chaste liaisons without even the breath of a kiss. They are ascribed purity of heart, purity of mind, and above all, purity of soul.

But let’s remember that an otherwise pretty awful third grade teacher inadvertently taught me to chase rabbits. Who knew where that might lead? I could have ended up in Wonderland with Alice, munching carrots with Bugs Bunny, or studying meerkats in the Kalahari. Chasing rabbits certainly got me off the dead center of the traditional telling of the White Rose story.

For starters, I learned that much of the secondary literature about the White Rose is inaccurate. Yes, there are bits and pieces of it that ring true, but that is hardly the complete story. These “wonderful” young students were that same mix of good and bad that you and I are, humans that exist far outside the scope of the usual dust cover summary.

When they fell in love, it was with hormones raging, riddled with angst and guilt and desire. Pure passion. They fought the same battles that confront us, too. Christoph Probst’s demon was his clinical depression, knowing that his father had died of the same disease and by his own hand. He found comfort in a solid woman, whom he finally married after the birth of their second child. His family hobnobbed with the premiere banned artists of their day. Emil Nolde painted a portrait of Christoph and his sister.

Willi Graf decided early on to distance himself from Hitler’s hordes. He marked through the names of friends who had joined Hitler Youth, leaving his address book as a stark reminder of how few dared to risk everything for the courage of their convictions. When Willi was 15, he and eleven friends marched as a group in a throng of several hundred thousand Hitler Youth boys, their lack of proper uniforms and a proper flag a thumb in the eyes of the Nazis and their supporters. Later assigned to a medical unit on the Russian front, Willi witnessed unbelievable brutality by his “comrades”. His nightmares ended only with his execution.

These young people dealt with petty jealousies, sexual compulsions, and drug addictions. They wrote love letters, sketched scenes from their hometowns, and went skiing over New Year’s. Sophie loved the Varieté, Hubert started a string quartet, Alex sculpted a bust of Beethoven. Several excelled at fencing, one was allegedly a petty thief, a few played the piano, and they devoured all the banned books they could get their hands on.

They had their mentors, too. Wilhelm Geyer (whom Julius Streicher named the most dangerous artist in Germany) taught Sophie how to paint and Alex how to make stencils from tin. Eugen Grimminger funded their efforts with the equivalent of more than $50,000 in today’s money. Carl Muth, friend of Hans Jonas, taught some of them how to find answers to theological questions on their own. And a “regular” Army guy, Commander Buehl, managed to outwit the Gestapo and protect several White Rose members who were in his Student Company.

Some had Jewish family members. Christoph’s beloved stepmother Lisl was Jewish, as was Eugen Grimminger’s wife Jenny. Most had neighbors they had seen ruined, financially or physically. They differed from their classmates by perceiving the Nazi noose as an outrage that needed righting, as an illegal act against fellow human beings. And the ones who saw Warsaw? Well, mere words cannot describe the fury that possessed them from that time on.

The White Rose students never came close to overthrowing Hitler. They painted anti-Nazi slogans up and down the main streets of Munich, “seventy times!,” the Gestapo screamed. Though the tar-based paint kept the White Rose graffiti visible long after the students’ executions, virtually no one rushed to topple the regime just because a few students proclaimed that Hitler was a mass murderer. While a few were sorry that a pretty young girl like Sophie had to die, most people expressed the sentiments overheard by a fellow student in class, “They should have strung them up in front of the university!”

So, why tell their story, when all they did apparently was for nothing? Why do I fight this battle to get the real White Rose story out there when many seem happier with the feel-good version? The answer is the same to both questions. These young people did not die for nothing. Sophie’s sometimes-boyfriend back-tracked on his original plans to raise chickens after the war. Instead, he became one of Germany’s most respected and ethical judges. Often Fritz Hartnagel represented the sole voice of justice in a court where too few Nazis were disbarred.

Traute Lafrenz came to the United States and worked hard to make our world safer, healthier, and more compassionate. Anneliese Graf took to heart her brother’s admonition to keep the torch lit. She worked tirelessly in the field of education.

These people have in turned inspired others, to help all of us recognize our limits, our shortcomings, our very humanness. Yet there is something at once strengthening and comforting in knowing that, no matter how often each of us may fail, we are still capable of such great good.

Even me. Even you.