What came after
Our White Rose friends lived postwar history too, not just the epoch we call the Shoah. We do them a disservice if we celebrate their youthful nobility, without considering who they became.
Have you ever wondered what happened to the people related to White Rose resistance after the war? Can you imagine what that world looked like, what it meant to navigate postwar Germany? What it meant to distrust your neighbor, not because he was a Blockwart who would report you to NSDAP authorities, but because he was a former Blockwart who was making nice with Americans?
Our database of primary source materials contains several hundred entries from May 9, 1945 and on. That is merely a beginning. As we’ve run across documents pertaining to White Rose, but that relate to post-resistance activities, we’re adding them to the database. These, together with records from October 13, 1943 through May 8, 1945, form the basis for White Rose History, Volume III. [See section for paid subscribers for more on WRH3.]
A couple of weeks ago, I got a small taste of that postwar period. Not nearly enough to satisfy my curiosity. Just enough to know that WRH3 may turn out to be the most important of the three volumes of this history.
Martin Hake recommended a visit to Badehaus Waldram, on the grounds of the former DP-Lager [displaced persons camp] in Wolfratshausen, in the Föhrenwald district – now Waldram. The NSDAP built the Badehaus or bathhouse in 1939 as part of the housing complex for workers in the nearby munitions plant. Houses constructed for those workers did not have bathtubs or showers. This single communal bath serviced the neighborhood.
The nearby “town” of Geretsried formed part of the munitions complex. Prior to 1937-1939, Geretsried barely existed. It was pretty much a collection of farms, not really a town. Two different munitions plants, along with the primary warehousing of all munitions manufactured in Wolfratshausen-Föhrenwald and Geretsried, were located in that not-town.
Germans provided management skills for the munitions plants. The housing complexes benefited them. For the era, the houses were considered more than adequate. After all, most German homes did not have bathtubs or showers until the late 1950s. A reader of an early draft of White Rose Histories, Volumes I and II grew up in Augsburg. She noted that Scholls, Schmorells, and others who mentioned enjoying showers or baths in their homes were deemed wealthy. Her family did not get a shower in their home until the 1960s. They used the basin and pitcher method of sponge baths.
Workers in Föhrenwald and Geretsried tended to be forced laborers from Eastern Europe. They lived in hastily constructed barracks with minimal creature comforts. And apparently no access to the Badehaus.
In April 1945, the US Air Force bombed the smithereens out of the munitions plants in Föhrenwald [now Waldram] and Geretsried, especially the munitions warehouse in Geretsried. Bomb squads and firefighters still find leftover, unexploded bombs in Geretsried, which now has more than 20,000 residents. Occasionally, someone who doesn’t know the area’s history will complain that Americans bombed civilian targets – how could they! – not understanding the military nature of Geretsried’s existence during the war.
But it’s after May 1945 that the history of this area becomes most interesting.
Despite the bombing of the munitions plants and warehouse, much of Föhrenwald and Geretsried remained intact after the war. It was just far enough south of Munich to have missed the massive bombing runs of late 1944 and early 1945.
The Allies were faced with thousands upon thousands of Jewish survivors of extermination camps, some from Dachau, but most on “death marches” from camps in the East. These survivors were barely clothed, most starving, in ill health, separated from family members, desperate.
At the same time, thousands upon thousands of ethnic German refugees from e.g., Poland or Czechoslovakia were driven out of Eastern Europe, sent to live in Germany with no family, no money, few belongings. [Note however, that ethnic German refugees generally were not classified as displaced persons.]
And these two groups descended on the little towns of Föhrenwald and Geretsried simultaneously.
Initially the Americans in charge (US Zone) put both groups into the intact homes and barrack-style accommodations of Föhrenwald. Naivety, perhaps? Lack of comprehension about what was bound to happen with ethnic Germans and Jewish survivors in the same spaces?
Within a few months, the conflict became insurmountable. The American Military Administration in conjunction with the United Nations moved ethnic Germans to Geretsried and other nearby towns, including Bad Heilbrunn where I just spent five weeks. Jewish survivors remained in Föhrenwald.
Once the Föhrenwald complex housed only Jewish survivors, Rabbi Yekusiel Yehudah Halberstam asked that a mikveh be installed in the basement of the Badehaus. The US complied, ensuring that observant Jews had access to the requisite ritual bath. It’s not clear that the mikveh was entirely kosher, but after years without even a semblance of this essential structure, it had to have been a welcome sight. In orthodox Jewish practice, a mikveh is more important than synagogue or Torah scrolls.
And in the Badehaus, Jewish survivors finally had this most sacred of places.
Americans intended that the DP-Lager in Wolfratshausen-Föhrenwald would house Jewish survivors for a year or two at most. Those two years stretched to almost thirteen, as Föhrenwald was one of the last two camps to be closed.
The crisis should have been foreseeable, but somehow the Allies failed to grasp the enormity of the problem. The assumption that Jewish survivors from Poland, or Russia, or Ukraine, would be willing and able to return to the homes from which they had been dragged? Not only had Poles or Russians or Ukrainians (etc.) appropriated their homes and belongings, although that indeed was Obstacle #1… The bigger dilemma: How could anyone expect Jewish survivors to return to towns, to neighborhoods, where they could trust no one?
Adding to the headache the US, the Allies, the United Nations faced: If Jewish survivors could not return “home,” where could they go? Even the United States had such tight immigration quotas that it barely made a difference. Estimates show that 1.5 million “displaced persons” now needed a home, and preferably not in Germany. US quota was 200,000 per year?! And only after June 1948. The rest of the world followed the lead of the United States.
For survivors of the extermination camps, the DP-Lager became home for the next 10+ years. These were not beautiful facilities full of light and joy. Conditions were clearly better than in the extermination camps, but only relatively.
As far as I know – and please contact me if I am wrong – Badehaus Waldram is the only “museum” dedicated to remembering the DP-Lager and the people who passed through them in the aftermath of the war. We remember the war, we remember the Shoah, we remember the history between World Wars I and II. But it’s as if we run as fast as possible in the opposite direction, so we do not have to think about what came after.
Why should we care? This has nothing to do with resistance, with informed dissent, with civil disobedience, right?
No.
To begin with, families and friends of the White Rose did not stop living as of October 12, 1943. They also did not stop living after May 8, 1945. Herta Probst and her three tiny children apparently lived as DPs (not refugees) for several months after the war, as both her husband and her father had been murdered for their resistance activities. Russian administrators appropriated Lilo Ramdohr’s home in former East Germany, leaving her homeless and bereft with a young child. Eugen Grimminger had to navigate postwar life without his beloved Jenny nee Stern, who had been murdered in Auschwitz.
Fritz Hartnagel spent months as a prisoner of war, wondering if he would face trial at Nürnberg. Traute Lafrenz had just been released from Nazi prison, liberated by Americans in April 1945, two days before she was to have been executed.
And then there were those who learned how to work the system, gaming American and Allied regulations, casting off their Nazi affiliation, selling themselves to the victors in exchange for new identities and cold, hard cash. Among White Rose families and friends: Inge Scholl and her father Robert, Franz Josef Müller, Jürgen Wittenstein…
We know next to nothing about how each of these individuals navigated the postwar years. I am gaining a bit of a sense of things, with the documents in my database and the new documents I am receiving. Every new text sheds light on character, on personalities, on the ethics and morality exhibited by each individual.
Because: They inhabited this world, this world filled with millions of ethnic Germans run out of Eastern Europe. This world of excruciating pain, a few million Jewish survivors with no place to go, traumatized by years of hate and oppression. This world of rubble, of wasteland, of chaos. This world where they too were deemed just another part of vanquished German society, by conquerors who knew too little about those who had resisted.
Our White Rose friends lived this history too, not just the epoch we call the Shoah. We do them a disservice if we celebrate their youthful nobility, without taking the time or effort to learn who they became.
I encourage every one of you who reads these words: Keep going. The executions were not the end. If anything, the trials and executions were just the beginning. Who these students and adults who mentored them would become? That is truly a beautiful story.
© 2024 Denise Elaine Heap. Please contact us for permission to quote.
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