Silos
Get out of your silo, stop looking for confirmation that White Rose students lived as you want them to have lived. Stop trying to make them conform to your religion, your politics, your worldview.
Most of us are familiar with the term “confirmation bias” or “silos” – and we tend to associate this concept with politics. People who watch Tucker Carlson vote MAGA, with their political views reinforced by Carlson’s rhetoric. Democrats generally tune in for Rachel Maddow. “Republicans Against Trump” follow George Conway. As examples.
Implicit in the social contract: We know that watching Maddow buttresses our strongly-held progressive ideas, just as daily doses of Carlson or Conway will reinforce those political viewpoints. It is difficult indeed to persuade anyone outside those fiercely static silos to listen, to discuss, to debate. At least in any meaningful manner.
To quote WebMD’s definition: Confirmation bias is a psychological term for the human tendency to only seek out information that supports one position or idea. This causes you to have a bias towards your original position because if you only seek out information that supports one idea, you will only find information that supports that idea. This is in opposition to doing more comprehensive research that would expose you to opposing ideas. [Written and copyrighted by Dayva Segal, medically reviewed by Melinda Ratini, DO on September 15, 2023.]
Segal’s article is worth reading in its entirety. She explores the implications of confirmation bias on our mental health and friendships.
While continuing to work through the digital version of White Rose History, Volume II, I’ve paid close attention to footnotes. It’s important that you, my readers, can rely on the supporting documentation for this history.
This time around, I have noticed that the “legendary” telling of White Rose history is closely bound up with confirmation bias. Not directly of a political nature, but history based on politics. So-called historians and scholars have been willing to overlook glaring discrepancies in the historical record, because the storytellers are narrating events according to a viewpoint that we in the postwar West like. And because we like it, we ignore the self-serving nature of the lies.
The most egregious of these are – and please forgive the syntax, not all topics are listable:
Willi Graf’s family.
Father as prominent Nazi.
No mention of Kristallnacht despite the Johannishof’s location in a neighborhood of Saarbrücken with high Jewish population.
The National Socialist books Willi read and movies he watched, seemingly without objection.
We accept the image of a wholesome Graf family from which Willi drew strength, because we like the notion that someone as stable as Willi Graf came from a strong family unit with good ideals.
Also, please understand: Willi Graf himself was one of the three White Rose students with the most integrity, the other two being Christoph Probst and Traute Lafrenz. His family was a different story.
Kurt Huber’s strong National Socialist beliefs.
Published works [published during the war, censored by family postwar] in high-level Nazi magazines and with powerful Nazi publishers.
Close association and friendships with influential National Socialists, such as Karl Alexander von Müller and Justizrat Lorenz Roder.
Explicit agreement with the platform of the NSDAP, including making Germany Judenfrei.
We love Kurt Huber’s leaflet because it meshes with our American and postwar German political philosophy, namely that of freedom and honor. His leaflet takes on a whole new meaning when we acknowledge that he meant freedom and honor – for non-Jewish Germans only.
Communist leanings of many in the White Rose circle of friends.
Werner Scholl frequented the farm of Richard Scheringer, a former Nazi who had ‘converted’ to Communism. Werner’s friend Hermann Heisch was brother-in-law of Scheringer. Werner accompanied Hermann to Scheringer’s farm, Dürrnhof, even helping with harvest.
Elisabeth Scholl worked as nanny on that farm. After the execution of Hans and Sophie Scholl, neighbors in Ulm referred to Elisabeth as that Communist Scholl-girl.
Sophie Scholl’s last trip to Ulm before the February 18 arrest, she visited both Elisabeth and her friends the Scheringers.
Alexander Schmorell was suspected of Communist leanings, since he was half-Russian.
Hans Leipelt made no secret of his adherence to that political party.
Yet no one talks about it. We prefer the fiction that they all were good democrats who wanted nothing more than an American-style government after the war. Nothing could have been further from the truth.
Scholl family secrets.
Why did Magdalena Scholl allow Ernst Reden into their home after she knew he sexually assaulted her son Werner? Why did she not stop Hans Scholl in the middle of assaulting a very young member of his Hitler Youth group – in his bedroom? She walked in on them and turned around and walked out. She allowed the rape (not assault, rape) of a young boy to go unhindered in her home.
Kristallnacht, Scholls as only “Aryans” among Jewish families, yet radio silence.
Ellipses, that is, censorship, every time touchy subjects appear in correspondence, for example, Hans Scholl’s calling Mr. Kammerer a “Jewish lackey,” then scissors.
Inge’s position as Ringführerin, responsible for teaching Jungmädel leaders antisemitic and racial ideology. Which she did. Enthusiastically.
Robert Scholl’s close friendships with high-ranking Nazis: Friedrich Mussgay, Ferdinand Dietrich, among others. Thirty of Ulm’s highest Nazis were his tax and accounting clients.
Why was Sophie Scholl suicidal? From her conversation with Otl Aicher, it appears that something dreadful happened to her in their home, so that she hated her family, while at the same time, she was unable to escape their clutches. She thought herself unworthy of love, unworthy to pray, unworthy to love herself. Why?
Why are Scholl Archives still heavily censored? Why aren’t they open for all the world to read? This is a direct challenge to the IfZ to challenge the terms of your agreement with Scholl heirs. IfZ: You are perpetuating a lie.
Wittenstein.
It is the “Wittenstein” point that triggered this post.
To begin with, Wittenstein apparently was on the American payroll after the war. Like Inge Scholl, he received consideration from our government to write and deliver a speech1 promoting democratic ideals. State Department, DoD, OSS (predecessor to CIA), and the funds they administered – they did not care about the political viewpoints their German mouthpieces had espoused during the war. They cared about the message that could be promulgated among the [West] German populace. They also cared about hunting down and eliminating Communists. But that’s a different – though related – story.
Wittenstein used the connections gained from that speech, which he delivered throughout Germany and the UK in the immediate aftermath of VE-Day, to leverage a visa to the USA, and eventually citizenship. Remember, he was a full-fledged member of the NSDAP, and an NS-Führungsoffizier. He therefore did not qualify for a visa to the USA. In turn, his visa and subsequent citizenship were used to establish his “bona fides” as a supposed non-Nazi. Which in turn led to a successful medical career on the West Coast.
In the 1990s as White Rose books and speechifying became a fixture of Holocaust education, Wittenstein got in on the action. Before long – again, on the basis of that 1947/48 speech and the photographs he took – Wittenstein showed up at American and German universities, delivering a revised version of that postwar speech.
As research into White Rose resistance increased and improved, Wittenstein started editing his speeches to incorporate new knowledge – something he would not have had to do if he had actually been part of White Rose resistance. If you are interested in how Wittenstein’s “memory” improved and evolved, check out Evolution of Memory: Jürgen Wittenstein (published 2011).
This post is not about Wittenstein’s evolving memory. The previous paragraphs merely set the stage for our susceptibility to confirmation bias even with things as simple as the historical process.
Wittenstein’s 1947 message, carefully honed after reading the Gestapo interrogation transcripts and reviewing Ricarda Huch’s collection of letters together with Inge Scholl, adopted a distinctly American voice and purpose. Postwar Americans wanted to hear that those awful Jerries had all spied on one another? Wittenstein said that. Postwar Americans wanted to hear how evil Hitler was? No problem. Wittenstein delivered. Postwar Americans wanted to hear about noble students who loved all that was good and honorable? OMG, Wittenstein was in his element. With Inge’s help (her book was a few years out), he wove a mythology guaranteed to make every strong American soldier freshly returned from war weep. Weep with gratitude about these perfect students.
We enabled the false narrative because we wanted to hear it.
Fast forward to 2003. After a good 20+ years trying to get many, many writers – including me – to tell his story, and failing because of the heavy-handed censorship he imposed, Wittenstein finally found someone who would write “his” White Rose story, exactly the way he wanted, permitting him final say-so before the book went to press. That writer was Detlef Bald.
Where I and other writers refused to accept Wittenstein’s two sets of diaries as gospel without asking hard questions of him, Bald based his book about White Rose and the Russian front on Wittenstein’s two sets of diaries.
The first “diary” appears to be cut and paste of a photocopy of a “diary” generated immediately after the war, purporting to have been written as events unfolded from 1938-1944. The typewriter appears to be the same one, or similar to, the American typewriter used to type his 1947 speech. No umlauts, no s-zet. American typewriter. That first “diary” is literally a cut and paste, where he clearly took a document, cut out the excerpts he wanted us to read, and pasted them onto a sheet of paper. Then photocopied that. I do believe that those “memories” are semi-authentic, perhaps written for his American handlers. Who knows? At minimum, they are highly censored and out of context.
The second diary, the one Detlef Bald used extensively, is an outright joke. Anyone who is as old as dirt – like me – and worked in an office before computers, would be familiar with IBM’s Correcting Selectric typewriters. In the 1980s, we thought they were the best thing since sliced bread. You could correct a typo by backspacing! Progress! In an office, prestige was determined by the sort of typewriter an accountant, geologist, or secretary had. IBM Correcting Selectric meant you were special.
And, Wittenstein used an IBM Correcting Selectric typewriter until at least January 2001. He typed on it during the 3-1/2 day interview at his home in Santa Barbara. I saw his typewriter with my own eyes. I have many letters from him, badly typed on that typewriter.
The second diary, which he called his “reconstructed diary,” was typed on an IBM Correcting Selectric typewriter. In that “reconstructed diary,” he told stories that included modern-day events, contemporary medical advances, comments about politics of the mid-20th century. None of us would accept it on any level. It was too far-fetched.
But. Detlef. Bald.
Detlef Bald chose to accept Wittenstein’s fiction. Not only did Bald accept Wittenstein’s fiction, he created more of his own. And Aufbau Verlag apparently did little or no fact-checking, because they published Detlef Bald’s book with Wittenstein’s fiction and erroneous statements regarding Warsaw Ghetto and Russian front experiences of Hans Scholl, Alexander Schmorell, Willi Graf, Hubert Furtwängler, Raimund Samüller, Hans Goltermann, and Werner Scholl.
Three of us reviewed Bald’s book almost immediately and simultaneously. Completely independent of one another, we pointed out the same inaccuracies, the same exaggerations, the same incongruities. My review was the least aggressive of the three, yet seemed to have riled up Bald the worst, as the Aufbau people tried to come after me. Aufbau successfully forced a Jewish-German Web site in Munich to remove my review from their site (Hagalil.com) by threatening them with a lawsuit.
Johannes Tuchel similarly panned Bald’s book, two articles, two journals. Armin Ziegler published the longest, most extensive critique of Bald’s book. See postscript for details. Tuchel’s reviews should still be available in university libraries. Ziegler’s is available only in our archives, the IfZ, and the archives of the Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand.
Finally – to the point.
Both Wittenstein and Bald seem to have persuaded people to accept their version of events, uncritically, without fact-checking, because what they said and wrote conforms to what we want to hear about the evils of Nazi Germany. Please do not misunderstand. Nazi Germany was an evil place, an evil time. The world is still trying to recover from the aftermath of that genocide and the effects on a truly civilized country that elected a megalomaniac in January 1933.
That does not mean that everything written by people claiming to have been resistance, claiming to be a survivor, claiming to have seen through National Socialist rhetoric – this does not mean that all those things written are true. They must still be subjected to historical process. Databases and sharp eyes still must compare narratives.
A few examples of Wittenstein-Bald storytelling that are utterly false, but that “we” don’t mind incorporating into our historical record, because, well: Silos! Confirmation bias!
Manfred Eickemeyer stated in his April 9 interrogation that he knew of “one or other German measures taken in the Generalgouvernment.” Detlef Bald took that simple but profound statement and created a new mythology out of it, namely that Eickemeyer told the White Rose friends about Hans Frank’s tirades. Problem (thank you, Johannes Tuchel): The quotes Bald attributed to Hans Frank were not from any public tirade that Eickemeyer could have overheard. Rather, they were from Frank’s private journals. One quote attributed to Hans Frank was really stated by Herbert Hummel.
Bald said Eickemeyer could have told the White Rose friends that the SS drove through the Warsaw Ghetto and shot at anything that moved with automatic weapons. Sigh. Yes, that happened. In December 1942. Five months after Manfred Eickemeyer supposedly told them about it during the July 1942 farewell party.
Bald conflated Alexander Schmorell’s desire not to shoot either Russian or German with a general White Rose feeling towards killing others. Only Alex expressed that conviction. Only Alex.
Wittenstein claimed, and Bald accepted as gospel, that “they” could see over the fence into the Warsaw Ghetto. By the time “they” were in Warsaw, the wall around the Ghetto was 11’ tall. Only Willi Graf saw it with the lower barbed wire fence, and that was the year prior. Note too that Bald accepted as gospel that Wittenstein was with them in Warsaw. There is not only no evidence to suggest he was, but there is also pretty strong evidence that he was not, especially from Hubert Furtwängler. Who was there.
Bald also accepted Wittenstein’s tales of awful things witnessed in the Warsaw Ghetto, such as ‘Ukrainian soldiers shooting Jews out of windows for a cigarette.’ When I first read Wittenstein’s account of the Warsaw Ghetto, I was struck by the many similarities to Jan Karski’s narrative in the epic 1980s TV series Shoah. — Note that in the last years of his life, after too many people started siding with Johannes Tuchel’s analysis of Bald’s book and Wittenstein’s memories, Wittenstein completely changed his story. He stated that, oh, you know what, he wasn’t with White Rose friends in Warsaw at all. He was in LODZ!
If Wittenstein said it once, he said it a million times, that Germans violated the Geneva Convention by bombing Warsaw, since it was an Open City. Not only did Detlef Bald repeat this untruth, but countless National History Day projects, senior honors papers, even PhD dissertations and published scholarly works have repeated this untruth, and footnoted one of Wittenstein’s speeches or essays. Simply not true. In fact, a Nazi propagandist of the 1940s correctly pointed to the fact that Cologne was an Open City in May 1942, but that Warsaw was a fortified city. The entire essay by Toni Winkelnkemper can be read in the German Propaganda Archive of Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. If you want to get out of your silo and understand what Germans were hearing in 1939 on, this is a good article to try to wrap your head around. It’s in English translation, so no excuses. – Armin Ziegler gets the credit for catching this error. I was ready to cite Wittenstein and state that Warsaw was an Open City.
Bald took a negative statement by Hans Scholl and created yet another new mythology. Hans Scholl merely stated that Warsaw would sicken him in the long run. He described provocative jazz, bars seething with revelry while half-starved children lay in the street and begged for bread. Clearly, this was not in the Ghetto. No provocative jazz to be found there. Detlef Bald turned that into a ‘convulsive’ reaction to the Ghetto. Verhoeven and Krebs made the same extrapolated mistake when they said that the White Rose friends had seen Jewish Ghetto-dwellers moving through the city to the train station (deportations to extermination camps had just begun). Nope. Didn’t happen.
It may sound like I am picking on Jürgen Wittenstein and Detlef Bald. I am not. I am picking on us, I am criticizing all of us who read a work of history and don’t ask questions. If we accept as true a factoid penned by a “scholar” and we don’t examine the underlying documents, but choose instead to perpetuate the mythology because it confirms what we want to believe, we are just as guilty as the person who consciously narrated the untruth, whether for personal gain or to reinvent a sordid past.
Granted, that makes it difficult to read works of nonfiction. Am I personally responsible to check every word that e.g., Heather Cox Richardson or David McCullough writes (wrote)? I don’t have access to their archival materials, nor to their interviews.
I must therefore rely on their publishers, their editors, their fact-checkers. If there had been a single non-siloed fact-checker at Aufbau Verlag, Bald’s book would never have been published. If anyone who cites Wittenstein’s speeches or essays had had their work truly peer reviewed, and I mean truly peer reviewed, his speeches and essays would have long since been pulled from university Web sites. Here’s looking at you, Philip Gavin, Siena College, Boston College, Oregon State University.
At some point, a fact-checker somewhere, sometime told an editor, “No, George Washington did not chop down a cherry tree.” And that editor reviewed the underlying documents, agreed, and forced a change to a manuscript. At some point, a fact-checker said, “No, Thomas Jefferson did not have a platonic relationship with Sally Hemings. He slept with a 14-year-old slave, had children with her.” And an editor reviewed the underlying documents, agreed, and forced a change to a manuscript.
I am still waiting for us to get to that point with White Rose history. Over the past twenty-plus years, many so-called scholars have ranted against me, cursed me – not so much my work, but the fact that I don’t say that George Washington chopped down a cherry tree. In our histories, I try to tear down silos.
Admitting that the collective “we” has told the history of resistance groups during the Shoah wrong is not Holocaust denial. It is not “Gestapo tactics trying to peek behind doors.” It is not besmirching the honor of truly honorable young people and the adults who joined their work.
Rather, it is getting out of the silo, listening to dissenting viewpoints about the effectiveness of their work, what their goals really were. It is accepting them as Catholic, Lutheran, Buddhist, Seventh Day Adventist, anthroposophist, agnostic, and not forcing them into our specific religious mold. It is actively seeking to understand this awful, and awfully complex, era.
Understanding it, not from the lens with which we were raised, democratic, freedom-loving, moral-but-flawed. No, it’s understanding that fighting evil doesn’t require a unified political front. It requires understanding what is right and just, and pursuing that.
And that, my friends and readers, is what our White Rose students and the adults who joined their work did. They were flawed, they represented political and philosophical viewpoints you and I may find distasteful, they screwed up their lives and the lives of others.
Get out of your silo, stop looking for confirmation that they lived and behaved as you want them to have lived and behaved. Stop trying to make them conform to your religion, your politics, your worldview. They were not all that. Honestly, if you got to “know” them as human beings, you probably wouldn’t even like some of them.
But. They understood what was right, what was just. And they did everything they could to change their world. That is what you will gain – whom you will gain – if you let go of your confirmation bias and embrace these young people as they were.
I promise, it’s worth the effort.
© 2024 Denise Elaine Heap. Please contact us for permission to quote. To pre-order digital version of White Rose History, Volume II, click here. Pre-publication price is $48; after that date, price will increase to $54.
Tuchel, Johannes. “Neues von der ‘Weiβen Rose’? – Kritische Überlegungen zu Detlef Bald: Die Weiβe Rose, von der Front in den Widerstand.” In Arbeitshefte des Bereichs Historische Grundlagen der Politikwissenschaft am Otto-Suhr Institut für Politikwissenschaft. Berlin: Otto-Suhr-Institut für Politikwissenschaft, 2003. A must-read. Confirms many of the things my “instincts” told me about Wittenstein. This is the source for Wittenstein’s membership in the NSDAP; he cites archives that are otherwise hard to access.
Tuchel, Johannes. “’Von der Front in den Widerstand’? Kritische Überlegungen zu Detlef Balds Neuerscheinung über die ‘Weiβe Rose’.” In Friedrich Veitl (Ed.) Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, Heft 11 (pp. 1022-1045). Berlin: Metropol-Verlag, 2003.
Ziegler, Armin. “Gehörte Jürgen Wittenstein zum inneren Kreis der ‘Weiβe Rose’?” Retrieved from www.weisse-rose-studien.de/41604.html. [Web site is now defunct after Ziegler’s death.]
Ziegler, Armin. Jürgen Wittenstein und die Geschichte der ‘Weiβe Rose’: Ein Beitrag zur ‘Weiβe Rose’ Forschung. Schönaich: Self-published, 2004.
We know from Wittenstein’s own account that this is so. Center for White Rose Studies has filed a FOIA request, asking for all documentation related to Wittenstein’s service for the US government and what our government knew about his Nazi Party membership and actions as a NSFO.