Why I don’t “talk politics” in this Substack

If we don’t question, if we don’t ask WHY, if we blindly accept stump speeches – even rousing stump speeches – without examination of facts in evidence, we are not free.

Aug 14, 2024

Statue of Liberty, New York — Photo by tom coe on Unsplash

I remember it like it was yesterday. I sat with Herta Probst and her son Michael on their veranda, children playing, cool breeze, pleasant company. They had been wary of granting me an interview, since previous “scholars” had twisted their words into an unrecognizable mass. A German fellow working on his PhD could not remember their responses from one question to the next, and an American duo had hopelessly misquoted them. Repeatedly.

Therefore, they were guarded with interviewers they did not know.

Luckily for me, Erich Schmorell had assured them I was trustworthy. Because of his recommendation, I found myself sitting on that veranda, the happy noise of children at play serving as background to a serious discussion.

Their stories gripped me. I already had immense respect for Christoph Probst, Christl to everyone I’d interviewed. It was clear that despite Scholl legend, despite the depictions of Christl as weak and unimportant, Christoph Probst had been the moral backbone of the group of friends we call White Rose. Lilo’s comment, “When Christl walked into a room, we all sat up a little straighter,” that was borne out by the memories Herta and Micha shared with me that day.

Towards the end of this interview-turned-conversation, Micha requested something of me that seemed odd at the time. Please don’t ever use White Rose for political ends, he said. Their memory should not be used for partisan politics.

The only political usage of White Rose that I was familiar with at the time involved his brother Vincent. Vincent, together with Christian Petry, had penned a political essay for the German magazine Stern in 1968. Probst and Petry argued that White Rose was apolitical and too idealistic.

In one way, we see students of today who demonstrate on the streets do exactly the same as the students of the White Rose. We oppose the Establishment in the name of a concept of freedom that means little to our fellow citizens. They do not understand our opposition. But parallels between White Rose and us end here.

To begin with, the Establishment that is the target of non-parliamentarian opposition in 1968 is not a perfect dictatorship. … Second, White Rose resistance is the unadulterated fruit of German idealism; it cannot be said that only good deeds have been done in the name of that idealism. Today, we campaign against the American war in Vietnam and for comprehensive reform of our universities that will totally destroy the [current] hierarchical structure thereof. We have absolutely no connection to the German idealism [of the White Rose]. In contrast, we see the frail and ineffective liberalism of our day as trapped in idealistic arguments. Therefore, we oppose it as much as we oppose the authoritarian powers in our nation and society.

Let us no longer perform deeds in the name of this sort of idealism. Even the deeds of the White Rose - which essentially was an act of martyrdom - had a thoroughly apolitical character. Their dead are martyrs of noble sentiments, but did not die in a political battle.

In this post, I will not rehash the ruckus those words caused as Inge Scholl took offense at Petry and Probst’s words. See “for further reading” below if you’re interested.

Micha Probst’s statement, therefore, puzzled me at the time, because I did not know about that ruckus. But even Inge Scholl’s heavy-handed response to the Petry-Probst essay didn’t fully explain Micha Probst’s reasoning.

In just a few years, I understood completely why he was so insistent that I distance myself from using White Rose for political ends. Because here are just a few of the ways their informed dissent has been exploited to justify political goals.

Communism/East German politics

Long before White Rose was “discovered” by politicians and Western scholars, East Germans ennobled White Rose as Communist heroes. In 1968, Klaus Drobisch wrote one of the earliest White Rose “histories,” glorifying the Scholl siblings as Communist heroes [Wir schweigen nicht – Die Geschwister Scholl und ihre Freunde – We Will Not Be Silent – the Scholl Siblings and their Friends]. This trend continued in the DDR. Soviets were the good guys, Germans the bad guys, and anyone involved with resistance was pegged as, and honored for being, Communist.

The irony in this case being that the Scholls did in fact have strong Communist leanings and ties. When Sophie Scholl was in Ulm shortly before their February 18, 1943 arrests, she visited her sister Elisabeth at the Scheringers’ farm. Elisabeth was nanny for the Scheringer family. The Scheringers were outspoken and well-known Communists.

Nevertheless, labeling either the Scholls or White Rose resistance as Communist was a stretch. A stretch the East German government was willing to take, just to advance the notion that their regime represented truth and beauty.

Note too that Inge Scholl apparently supported the East German representation of White Rose until the 1970s, when West German scholars latched onto the story.

US military presence in Europe, nuclear weapons, South American politics

Inge Scholl led the fight. German newspapers carried photos of her at the front of protesters. It’s not a matter of the righteousness of her adopted causes – “adopted,” because she made herself out to be a lifelong pacifist, which was an outright lie – but because anyone who disagreed with her, even by a millimeter, was pilloried and excluded from White Rose work.

US “draft dodgers” and conscientious objectors during the Vietnam war

Fritz Hartnagel and Walter Jens embraced this cause. Although both men were influenced by their connection to White Rose resistance, to their credit neither directly linked their actions to White Rose. Included here as example of the right way to pursue social justice without making it partisan.

Anti-abortion

Several decades ago, an anti-abortion group awarded the White Rose prize in the name of Hans and Sophie Scholl to individuals who murdered abortion doctors. Those “awards” have now disappeared from the Internet, but I saved printouts of the Web pages back in the day.

They have now been joined by a second, more “intellectual” anti-abortion group that calls itself White Rose, headed by Seth Gruber. That group seems to defy 501(c )(3) laws, mixing church and state at every opportunity. They bill themselves as speaking in the name of the White Rose.

Which is simply put, wrong-headed. The only reference to abortion in all published, uncensored materials comes from Susanne Hirzel’s memoirs. She speaks kindly of a woman named Ju K., who briefly shared a cell with her. Ju had drawn a five-month prison term for having had an abortion. The woman quipped to Susanne, “Actually, it should be a lot more, because I have had several abortions.”

It is my strong opinion – stressing opinion, based on reading the censored gaps in Scholl documents – that Sophie Scholl had either had an abortion, or had been sexually assaulted or outright raped by someone close to her. When I read her letters to Fritz Hartnagel where she rejects a simple hug, where the one recorded time they had sex made her feel dirty and ashamed, where she feels unworthy to be loved, I sense that there is a secret that Inge Scholl and her heirs have covered up for over eighty years.

When that secret finally is revealed, the people who have used White Rose as raison d’etre for their work will be mortified. It may be unrelated to sexual activity or abortion, but if it were less inflammatory, it likely would not have been covered up.

Anti-Islam

In 1994, the siblings Hans and Susanne Hirzel renounced their resistance work with White Rose. Hans Hirzel ran for the office of German president on the Republikaner ticket. At that time, the Republikaner party was the official face of banned neo-Nazism.

Hans Hirzel clearly stated in multiple interviews that he either disavowed his anti-Nazi politics or that he had never been part of resistance during the Shoah. This caused an uproar among friends and family members of the White Rose circle. The Weiβe-Rose-Stiftung kicked the Hirzels out, although Susanne Hirzel would state in a February 28, 1994 letter to the editor of the Südwest Presse that she had resigned from the Stiftung. Neither the Stiftung nor its competitor the Weisse-Rose-Institut would ever welcome either of the Hirzels back into the fold.

Less than five years later, Susanne Hirzel published her memoirs, Vom Ja Zum Nein. Not only did I enjoy that book, I appreciated her deep research into current events she had witnessed as a young woman. She gave clear perspective to what they knew and did not know as Germans of that era.

Because of her memoirs – recommended to me by Erich Schmorell – I interviewed her at her home in 2002. It was a pleasant enough interview. Susanne was an excellent musician, both as a young woman in Nazi Germany, and as an adult. She played with some of the best chamber quartets and orchestras around.

And by 2002, she had renounced her renunciation of their resistance work. Although she was still estranged from both Stiftung and Institut and the families comprising their memberships, I deemed her memoirs and my interview with her as a mea culpa of sorts. We did not discuss her brother’s 1994 unsuccessful bid to become a semi-fascist president of Germany.

Imagine my horror and surprise then, when less than six months later, she threatened to sue me for quoting her words! She claimed she had not said what she said, although I was careful to use text from her memoir and not from our interview. Among other things, she had written that pejoratives, hate speech became so rampant in her high school in the late 1930s and 1940s that friends used it without a second thought. Her specific examples included “don’t be in such a Jewish hurry” or “whaddya think this is, a Jewish school?”

I quoted her verbatim, using the quote in context, citing page number. And she took offense.

I struggled to understand how, why, until I started getting Google Alerts about her newfound political activism. Susanne Hirzel, writing as Susanne Zeller-Hirzel, now celebrated her “status” as a full-fledged “member” of White Rose resistance… because she became the face of anti-Islam in Germany.

In an interview dated October 2009, she stated that Nazism and Islam are equivalents, that Hitler had wanted to turn Germany into an Islamic state, and that that had informed her decision “to do something against Hitler.” She falsely put herself squarely in the middle of the leaflet campaign in Munich, placing herself in the company of Kurt Huber and the rest. In reality, her only “offense” was timidly posting a few hundred leaflets that her brother brought to her, already stuffed into envelopes and stamped. Not to hear her in 2009, however. She claimed she was front and center in their work.

That interview, granted to an anti-Islam group when Susanne Hirzel was 88, is rife with errors. She stated that the Scholls were Catholic (they were Lutheran), that her brother Hans served in the army (he was deemed unfit and never served), she calls them the White Rose Society (they were not organized and were not a “society”), she said Robert Scholl was a “determined Catholic pacifist and a sincere Christian” (he was agnostic, was never a pacifist according to Elisabeth Scholl, and pretty much hated Christianity), she claimed Falk Harnack sought out the White Rose friends (other way around), she said her teachers “voluntarily” wore Nazi garb (she wrote in her book that it was forced).

Although Zeller-Hirzel obviously was in her dotage when she granted this interview, that did not prevent Stop Islamization of America (SIOA) aka American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) or the Peoples Movement PAX EUROPA (BPE) from using her as their poster child. When she died in 2012, it was those groups – not ones associated with White Rose – that eulogized her. Our In Memoriam post for Susanne Zeller-Hirzel acknowledges the complexity of her life.

This was all happening at the same time that Jewish groups in Germany, initially led by Ignatz Bubis and then by his successor, were working hard to protect rights of Muslims in Germany.

Anti-vaxx politics

A group calling themselves White Rose and working in the name of the White Rose originated on Telegram. In addition to their anti-vaccination, anti-mask activism, they promote antisemitic tropes and “sovereign citizen” ideology. Their messaging frequently includes swastikas. They are conspiracy theorists. So far there’s no proven link to Q-Anon, but their goals mesh well with that far-right group.

Religion

Almost every religious denomination on the face of the earth has tried to claim White Rose resistance as its moral ground, as their “see there were good Catholics-Lutherans-whatever during the Shoah” rationalization. Once I was even blown away by the assertion of an American Pentecostal pastor that the Scholls had to have been Pentecostals (in German, Pfingstler) because they lived God’s grace. Oy.

In reality, not one single friend in the White Rose circle would have been happy to hear their religion endorse their work as evidence of moral anything related to that church or religion. Traute Lafrenz told me that while they were all spiritual, none of them was religious. Even Willi Graf, Katharina Schüddekopf, and Alexander Schmorell – the only three who attended church with any degree of regularity – possibly would have defended their churches, Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox. And I doubt that even they would have done so.

Willi Graf felt abandoned by his church. He went to Mass even when the priest’s sermons irritated him. For Schurik, going to church preserved his connection to Russia. Käthe never spoke of her reasons for attending Mass. We only know she did, because the Gestapo in Magdeburg held it against her as evidence she was not a good Nazi.

The Hirzel siblings, preacher’s kids, resented their reverend father. For Hans Hirzel, church was a way to earn money playing the organ. Susanne enjoyed the pastor of the Lutheran church in Stuttgart who gave her a room while she studied there. But her own father? Please. And he was one of the ‘good guys’ who signed the Bonhoeffer-Niemöller confession both times!

The rest simply ignored “church” or organized religion. Both Hans and Sophie Scholl went only when they accompanied someone else who was going. In uncensored Scholl documents, we read of maybe five times total between the two of them, outside of confirmation, that they went to any sort of church service. Sophie even insisted on wearing her Jungmädel uniform during confirmation, although that uniform was officially prohibited by the Lutheran Pauluskirche.

For any religion to hide behind the nobility that was White Rose resistance is shameful and inappropriate. Especially when that religion refuses to own up to its culpability in the Shoah, to its actions that enabled and strengthened the fascist regime that was National Socialism.

And by that, I don’t mean a weak-tea version of “if we wronged anyone” or even “we were wrong.” I mean a full-throated, detailed confession that includes defrocking of the priests, pastors, and theologians that posted Hitler’s picture in their churches, that made the prayer to Hitler part of liturgy, that ‘got out the vote’ in 1933 when all was not yet lost.

They must address clergy that kept silent when the T-4 program was enacted, or worse yet supported the operation, as mentally ill Germans were gassed in the name of patriotism. Notable exceptions: Bishop Galen (Catholic), Lutheran theologian Friedrich von Bodelschwingh, Pastor Paul-Gerhard Braune. Meanwhile, Bishop Theophil Wurm (Lutheran) advised the NSDAP on how to keep the deaths quiet to avoid protests. And Reinhold Sautter, a preeminent Lutheran theologian, got around the “thou shalt not kill” commandment by stating it was a Jewish construct. And the Catholic Bishop Heinrich Wienken of Berlin used his support for the T-4 program to leverage additional concessions on behalf of the Catholic church.

These powerhouse religions should also honestly face up to clergy that either did nothing or encouraged the marginalization of the Other in German society – German Jews, Communists, socialists, Roma/Sinti, Jehovah’s Witness, and LGBTQ+. Clergy that stood by as Nazi Brownshirts and SS deported the Other. Clergy that yearned for political power and gained it by aligning their religion to the National Socialist platform, sacrificing every tenet of their “faith” for money and influence.

Just as we should honor individual clergy who resisted, we should also expect German Catholics, Lutherans, Methodists, Seventh Day Adventists, Baptists, Pentecostals, New Apostolic, Pietists, Christliche-Gemeinden, Christian Science, Salvation Army, and Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) to clearly and plainly recant their corrupt theology, their power grab. The clergy from those churches that facilitated National Socialist crimes, that preached the messiahship of Adolf Hitler, should be expunged from their privileged positions in the history of those churches, shamed and forever footnoted as apostate. As heretics. Of the worst sort.

So far, that has not happened. Only Roland Blaich, a Seventh Day Adventist, has dared to get specific.

Two notes before moving on:

First, all of those denominations listed above except for LDS were present and active – and pro-Nazi – in Ulm during the Shoah. LDS was famously pro-Nazi wherever it had its wards and stakes, holding to “Romans 13” as justification for not resisting the corrupt government.

Second, as Roland Blaich’s excellent essay points out, the American equivalents of the above-listed denominations also by and large supported the NSDAP regime. American Methodists especially.

When religion is politicized, it ceases being faith.

Micha Probst was right. White Rose should never be used as a political weapon.

That said, we can and should look to White Rose resistance as signs – and not examples – of what we should do to fight injustice, to stand strong in the face of lies and innuendo, to do simple things like giving a seat to forced labor (Willi Graf) or taking food to Russian POWs (Alexander Schmorell) or doing the paperwork that allows endangered people to find safety (Eugen Grimminger) or challenging racist, misogynist remarks (Traute Lafrenz) or even simply providing tea, cookies, and a safe haven for those doing the hard work (Lilo Ramdohr).

Because among the White Rose friends, fighting injustice, standing strong, doing the little things – all of that informed their work.

And yet, they were socialists, monarchists, federalists, nationalists, anarchists, Communists, and yes, democrats (little-d). They had vastly different ideas of what Germany’s political landscape should look like after the war. Their debates about planned economy versus capitalism, about meritocracy versus money, about separation of church and state versus status quo (Germany has never enjoyed that feature of our democracy) – those debates were heated and sharp and painful.

Despite the vast political divide, they worked together because they could not keep silent in the face of crimes against humanity. Despite their disparate religious backgrounds, they knew unrighteousness when they saw it. Despite differences of opinion on almost everything philosophical, metaphysical, or logical, they held firmly to the notion that every individual had the right to be free, that they all had the right to “freedom, peace, domestic happiness, hope, and gaiety” and economic stability (Christoph Probst in Leaflet VII). That freedom and honor were important and necessary (Kurt Huber in Leaflet VI). That the basis for a new Europe consisted of “freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the protection of the individual citizen from the caprice of criminal, violent States” (Hans Scholl, Leaflet V). Freedom!

These concepts are not limited by party affiliation or religious affiliation. Nor by whether we are rich or poor, educated or not. Not even by our geographical location. These concepts are universal. Or at minimum, should be.

And that is what I write about in this Substack. Here you will not find political endorsements. You will not see eyerolls at political pronouncements. I won’t take a position on the platform of either American political party in these posts, nor will I comment on German, Israeli, French, British, or Mexican politics.

I will simply hold your feet to the fire, try my best to make you think beyond campaign slogans, challenge you to ask questions, no matter your political or religious affiliation.

If we don’t question, if we don’t ask WHY, if we blindly accept stump speeches – even rousing stump speeches – without examination of facts in evidence, we are not free. Only by thinking and holding our politicians to account can we preserve the glorious freedom we have taken for granted these last 248 years.

In the name of the White Rose, we can and should ask these hard questions and then take action. And as they did, join together with those on the other side of the aisle or sitting in different pews who share our passion for “liberty and justice for all.”

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