Reflections
"The value of a person can be seen in the dignity of his death. How and for what a person will die defines that person himself." Otl Aicher, writing of December 1942.
Three soldiers associated with White Rose resistance left us a legacy of thoughtful contemplation on war, peace, and their roles in fighting an unjust war.
Otl Aicher, best friend of Werner Scholl, refused offers of promotions despite the creature comforts he would have gained. He remained a lowly private, where he could witness the fighting up close, no questions asked by superiors regarding unauthorized activities. He took those observations back to Austria, where he and Sophie Scholl dissected “war” to bits.
Fritz Hartnagel not only accepted those promotions, he worked hard to achieve them. His letters from the front lines, mostly to Sophie Scholl, reported on the atrocities he saw firsthand. Initially Fritz did not seem perturbed by those atrocities. We watch him grow as a human being as it slowly sinks in what is happening in front of his face.
Both Fritz and Otl wrote or told Sophie about their experiences. She internalized every word, using the horrors they described to fuel her resistance efforts.
Willi Graf likewise documented his nightmares, nightmares that close friends from his more-religious days with New Germany would not hear. Every time they rebuffed his attempts to inform them what their country was doing – to Russians, to Poles, to Jews – they closed their ears. And every time, he died a little more inside, wrapping himself more tightly in a protective cocoon, until he encountered fellow student soldiers who not only listened, but who – like him – wanted to DO something.
It’s no wonder then that Willi Graf and Sophie Scholl seemed to have developed a closer friendship towards the end, as did Willi and Alexander Schmorell. They were not content to raise sand, to make a lot of noise that accomplished nothing. Willi, Alex, Sophie, these three wanted the war to end. They wanted to see the tyrant deposed. They wanted peace.
Their words are relevant to us today.
The below accounts are excerpts from White Rose History, Volume II.
June 1942.
While Alex cultivated his Russianness, Otl Aicher explored his Germanness on Russian soil. His unit had moved further north from its previous location in Donetsk. They heard rumors floating back from Kharkiv about a battle General von Paulus’ Sixth Army had recently won against Soviet forces. The Germans had taken 241,000 prisoners at the end of May, following a brutal two-week battle for the city.
Till now, Otl’s exposure to real warfare had consisted of hearsay. His infantry unit, freshly arrived on the Russian front, had seen plenty of destroyed towns and villages, but not much in the way of actual fighting. They had missed the action in Kharkiv, but knew it had been a major battle. His curiosity got the better of him. Would the aftermath live up to the magnificent tales his father had told him of his adventures in the first World War? Would everything his teachers had taught him about the sanctity of war, of the honor of dying for his country on the battlefield, match reality?
Kharkiv was a couple hours’ jog from his unit’s location, but Otl did not let that stop him. He sneaked out of camp when no one was looking, running for hours until he reached the town. The whole time, he tried to imagine what it would look like, this victory site.
He smelled it long before he saw it. And what he saw fascinated and horrified him. Dead horses and soldiers, vehicles blown apart. Otl went from dead soldier to dead soldier, memorizing the visages lying unburied and forgotten. One had a blank stare, another died with teeth snarled, and one more breathed his last breath trying to run away from a lethal foxhole.
These were German soldiers left there to rot in blazing June sun. Matthias Grünwald, Otl noted his name. He died making a tight fist.
“No angel of death had been at work in this place, no unceasing angel of death. No, here had walked a tormentor, a torturer, someone who inflicted pain, a butcher.” By that, Otl Aicher did not mean the Russian enemy.
Otl perceived that all these men, regardless of how they had received their fatal injury, had witnessed their own deaths “as a public disembowelment.” They were not heroes, they were not sacrificial lambs. “These are creatures of hell, of the devil. War does not allow man to end his life as man.” (WRH2, pp. 59-60. Otl Aicher, innenseiten des kriegs)
July 1942.
Fritz advised Sophie that his company would once again be on the move. They were being deployed a few hundred kilometers to the north. He welcomed the opportunity to see more of Russia, but regretted that they would be leaving an area he had just come to treasure.
An interpreter had helped Fritz get out and about among the populace. He talked to a farmer who hated the Russians (they were still in Ukraine, not Russia as he had assumed). The Russians were to blame for all their ills. This particular farmer had had two children. One starved to death almost ten years earlier. The other had been shot the same year “in a battle over bread when he and his family were out on a search for food.”
Fritz briefly described what is now called the Ukrainian Holodomor, or “genocide by starvation,” a sore point in 21st century Russian politics. The farmer told him that the Bolshevists had taken away the entire Ukrainian harvest, and half the populace died because of it. The effects of the famine were still being felt in Ukraine, Fritz told Sophie. “The streets here are filled with nomadic families who will exchange their last pieces of clothing for flour.”
While the outcome of the famine was indisputable – between 3 million and 9 million Ukrainians died of starvation in 1933/1934 – Fritz failed to ask the hard questions regarding the nomadic families who exchanged clothing for food. By the time he landed in the Donets Basin, the German military had as much to do with Ukrainians (and Russians) starving to death as any previous “Bolshevist” policy. In subsequent letters, Fritz himself would speak about how well they ate, the bounty of food commandeered from local farmers. He never made the connection between his full stomach, appropriation of Ukrainian housing, and starving, drifting refugees.
Additionally, the farmer he interviewed played on Fritz’s clear-cut religious sympathies by portraying “nearly the entire population” as Lutheran. The Bolshevists had exiled the local pastor to Siberia and closed the Lutheran church. Anyone caught praying? Siberia, the farmer said.
Fritz concluded, “I believe we have been exposed to the lesser evil, in light of this suffering.” He had quickly forgotten his anger at his C.O.’s callous approval of the Germans’ murder of all Jews in occupied territory. (WRH2, p. 108. Thomas Hartnagel (ed.), Sophie Scholl/Fritz Hartnagel: Damit wir uns nicht verlieren. Briefwechsel 1937-1943.)
August 1942.
Her [Sophie’s] emphasis on the importance of supporting Dr. Muth apparently got under his [Fritz’s] skin too. He would try to persuade his mother to sacrifice some of her rations for the professor, “even though that will be difficult, since she does not know him at all.” And the mere thought of him – Fritz Hartnagel – writing a letter to Dr. Muth with the intent of encouraging him? Absolutely not. It would be presumptuous, since he had never met the man. “Please do not think I am being narrow-minded, but I feel too underrated to do so.”
Her letter had obviously come at a bad time, when Fritz was in no mood to deal with elderly scholars who felt they needed better food than they could acquire with rations. The last two days, he had realized how close they were to the front lines, and what the additional danger meant to him and his men.
A routine Signal Corps operation could have ended with his death. His duties required him to fly to a command post near to, but not directly on, the front lines. A combination of bad German maps and lack of reference points in the desert terrain caused their navigator to become completely disoriented. While flying at an altitude of 20 meters (62 feet), they found themselves on the other side of the front line, in Russian territory.
Ordinarily they would have been shot down and either killed or captured. But luckily, Russians on the ground were in the process of surrendering to Germans. “Otherwise, things could have been bad for us.”
The delay caused by the dangerous detour meant they left just as dusk fell. The pilot transported them out of harm’s way, but the fighting on the ground prevented him from finding a safe place near the troops to put down. Instead, they set down in the middle of nowhere, no weapons, no blankets, afraid to light a fire for warmth (they would become an immediate target).
They tried to sleep – and failed. All night long, flares illuminated the horizon and machine gun fire reminded them that war raged nearby.
Fritz laid awake, thinking about everything he had seen that day and the days that had come before. “There are so many atrocious things,” he wrote Sophie. “Hour by hour, millions of soldiers on both sides are constantly endangered, engaged solely in trying to mutually kill one another. And another million or so think and work only for the same goal, and families are separated and plunged into deep sorrow.”
He told her how Germans were needlessly destroying everything in their path, something that bothered him more than he could express. Cattle and vegetable gardens had been totally plundered to feed the German army, leaving nothing for the populace to whom they rightfully belonged.
“But prisoners probably suffer the most,” he said. “A few days ago on a stretch of road about 3 km (1.8 miles) long, I saw about fifteen to twenty dead Russians along the road. They had not been there only a few days earlier when I drove down this same stretch of road. Therefore these could only have been prisoners who had collapsed from exhaustion and hunger, who had been shot to death by their guards.”
For a man who despised the injustice of the sentences meted out by German military courts, such obvious barbarism pained him deeply. It was all he could do to bear the wretchedness and insanity. (WRH2, pp. 168-169. Thomas Hartnagel.)
September 1942.
[Otl Aicher’s contemplations of desertion.] The long distances did not frighten him, nor did Otl worry about what would happen when he finally reached the British, or Americans, whichever, it did not matter. He had grown weary of investing precious time in a cause he did not believe in.
“I did not want to lift so much as a little finger for the Führer, for this Volk, for the Fatherland. Not my littlest finger.”
Fritz Hartnagel apparently was getting his fill of the death and destruction he witnessed daily. “It is so terrible that hour after hour, millions of soldiers are in constant danger, only so that they can be about the business of killing one another.”
He had not reached the same place that Werner, Otl, Arvid, Mildred, Schurik, Hans, Christl, Traute – and yes, Sophie – had, that of directing anger at senseless death into something sensible, of reacting to stupid militaristic moves militantly. But Sophie probably was pleased that Fritz at least moved from defense of the Fatherland to recognition of its absurdity. (WRH2, pp. 196-197. Aicher, innenseiten. Thomas Hartnagel.)
September 1942.
Slow days, these, when war ground to a halt and wounded stopped flowing like blood. Willi got more mail on Saturday, a greeting from Hans Scholl. And swimming was delightful. Otherwise, another terribly, terribly dull day.
Willi’s Sunday began inauspiciously. No Mass – worship of any kind was rare, and Willi seemingly accepted that by this last Sunday in September – but sun’s power and scintillating trees lifted his spirits nonetheless. He thought nothing of playing the role of paramedic to fetch a sick soldier from the First Company. The walk would take him out of the dark forest and into brilliant sun-strewn meadows. He knew barbed wire was never too far away, but this day, he could not see it.
In the distance, Willi spied a village: Afanassyevka. It looked so peaceful. The closer he got, the less beautiful the village appeared. It had been completely gutted. “Soon I saw the death and destruction,” Willi wrote in his diary.
He would not have known this as he strolled trench-lined roads, but neither would he have been surprised. On February 18, 1946, the sixty-first day of the Nuremberg trials, prosecutors detailed German war crimes against Soviet civilians. Specifically mentioned: The atrocities committed in and around Vyaz'ma, Gzhatsk, Ržev, and Kolesniki. The latter town was about four miles from Afanassyevka.
SS advance troops, and German Military Police bringing up the rear, had one awful habit. They would round up all civilians in a town, lock them inside a single barn or large house, and set the building on fire. Most of the civilians were over seventy and under ten years of age.
It is on this day that one wishes Willi had entrusted more to his journal and been less cryptic. Without a doubt, the day invoked memories of Katja and the burning village that Willi had witnessed in January 1942. His mind had been forced to grapple with so much misery, so much terror, that he could never rid himself of the thoughts.
He said they carried the sick man across open country as he hung limp in their arms. The return trip through the “oppressive” atmosphere with “numbness in the landscape” was filled with mixed emotions. On the one hand, he wished he could get outside more often, away from the stifling bunker. But the mental images, those pictures in his head… Willi sat in the bunker that afternoon, not wanting to do a thing. “I thought about all the scenes I had seen.”
Werner Scholl visited Hans the same night. It was a less enjoyable visit, with Werner not talking much at all. “He’s growing very taciturn,” Hans told his parents. (WRH2, p. 200. Knoop-Graf, Anneliese and Jens, Inge (Eds.). Willi Graf: Briefe und Aufzeichnungen. Jens, Inge (Ed.). At the Heart of the White Rose: Letters and Diaries of Hans and Sophie Scholl.)
December 1942.
That night – probably snuggled under the covers as they had at the inn in Freiburg that March – Otl and Sophie talked on about Stalingrad, and war, and friends, and death. And that night too, Sophie told Otl they wanted to “send a political signal saying that Hitler could be defeated.” He knew it. There had been more to Christl and Willi than Sophie had first let on.
We could have made things easier for ourselves if we had just stuck with what we learned in school: Wars are valueless. We could have simply made Darwinian socio-biology our own: Existence is a battle, and he who survives is superior. Or as Hegel defined it: What is Rational is what is real.
Then Stalingrad would have simply been another battle. But this night, we shivered with joy as we knew: Unscrupulous evil had been defeated. We trembled with a hope we hardly dared express, that this distortion of humanity, draped though it may be in the flag of the Fatherland, was coming to an end.
Even idealists like Otl and Sophie recognized that their hope and joy meant certain death for friends they deeply loved. Fritz was in Stalingrad, Sophie reminded Otl. Otl’s buddy Frido was in Kessel. Grogo, Werner, Axel, where were these dear, dear comrades even as they talked? Would they really be so ready for Hitler’s overthrow if it presaged death for them? For Fritz, and Werner?
The value of a person can be seen in the dignity of his death. How and for what a person will die defines that person himself. Every individual has the right to an honorable death that belongs to himself alone. That the Nazis stole this dignity from millions of people turned them into cynics of a naked insanity.
We tried to determine what dignity or honor the death of one of these friends could possibly have, a friend who had perhaps already fallen in Stalingrad.
This was not an easy conversation for Sophie, but it allowed her to give vent to feelings no one else comprehended. She could barely speak of such things with Hans. Inge certainly would not “get” it, and if she told her parents that she would be willing to sacrifice Fritz for the greater good of Germany? (WRH2, pp. 311-312. Aicher, innenseiten.)
Oh!, how their memories are for a blessing! Oh!, how badly we need these discussions in our 2024. Discussions that ask hard questions, discussions that break new ground, discussions that move us to a higher plane, towards peace!
This matters. Oh!, this matters!
Postscript: The photo for this post is the Soldiers’ National Monument at Gettysburg National Cemetery, where thousands of US (Union) soldiers are buried, soldiers who died in July 1863. At the base of the monument sit a soldier, representing war; Clio, muse of history; Plenty, holding wheat; and Peace, in the form of a mechanic.
At the top of the monument stands The Genius of Liberty, holding a sword in one hand, and a wreath of peace in the other.
Mere feet from this monument, President Abraham Lincoln spoke words that applied in 1863 to the fallen of Gettysburg, words that applied eighty years later as White Rose students were executed in Munich, words that apply today, eighty years after White Rose deaths.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
This concludes the Memorial Day series commemorating White Rose deaths. While I usually write about their extraordinary lives and work, and while considerations of their deaths generally resembles a ‘moment of silence’ on the anniversaries of their executions, it’s also appropriate to dig deeper and understand the meaning of their deaths.
If this series has made you think deeper about their sacrifice, it will have been worth the effort and discomfort of having spent so much time focused on such a dark topic.
© 2024 Denise Elaine Heap. Please contact us for permission to quote.
To order digital version of White Rose History, Volume II, click here. Digital version of White Rose History, Volume I is available here. White Rose Histories excerpts © 2002, 2003, 2007.