“My” White Rose families. Lieselotte Fürst-Ramdohr.
Lilo and Alex vowed always to be friends, always to be true and honest with one another. “How lucky I am to be alive!” he exclaimed. Statements like these must be shouted for the world to hear.
September 5, 2024, I introduced you to a first “set” of White Rose families, people I’ve sat at table with or talked to, or whom I got to know from friends who preserved their memories. Wilhelm Geyer and his family: Wife Clara, children Elisabeth, Hermann, Martin, and Wilhelm Junior. Eugen Grimminger and Tilly Hahn, via the careful and caring work of Armin Ziegler. Susanne Hirzel and her brother Hans. Traute Lafrenz.
The voices of these people should not be silenced by legend, by shallow narratives, by writing them out of a story just because they offended the legend-keepers.
Today I will introduce you to Lilo. I enjoyed time spent in her home, as well as corresponding with her, reading books that stirred her fancy.
I care about “our” Lilo, Lieselotte Fürst-Ramdohr.
Erich Schmorell introduced us to Lilo. During the first research trip, 3-1/2 months in 1995, no one mentioned Lilo to us. Her memoirs, Freundschaften in der Weiβen Rose, were published after we had returned to the US. Dr. Schmorell told me, You must read this and you must meet this woman! She gets it right! He followed up by sending me a copy.
As I added Lilo’s memories to my database, I realized that some of her dates were wrong. For example, she has the White Rose leaflet campaign starting in March 1942 instead of June, and according to Armin Ziegler’s digging, misdated the time that Lilo and Alex were at the Osteria when Hitler arrived.
I asked Lilo about these dates, and she urged me to correct them. She explained that after the war, maybe around 1947 or 1948, she had jotted down notes about her experiences in the 1930s and 1940s. She had not kept a diary during the war, so she simply penned her thoughts as she recalled them five or more years after the fact. And her memoirs were based on those notes.
When my mom and I visited her in May 2002, we made an immediate connection. Lilo’s openness, her willingness to open old wounds and speak frankly, touched us.
She had a difficult life. The Ramdohr side of her family held political views that caused them financial hardship, as the NSDAP retaliated for stands they took. On the other side of the coin, her mother landed firmly in the Nazi camp. Lilo’s friendship with Falk Harnack became her political education of sorts. Their conversations revolved around the danger that Hitler and the NSDAP posed to their homeland.
As part of that education, Falk took Lilo to a rally where Adolf Hitler was speaking. The Party conference took place at the famed Hotel Elephant in Weimar. Admission was open to the public. Falk, Lilo, and several of Falk’s theater friends wended their way to the front, as close to the stage as they could possibly get. They observed every little movement, every small gesture, that Hitler used as he spoke.
Lilo said she thought, How is this man dangerous? Anyone who’s halfway intelligent should be able to see through him!
But Falk straightened her out and explained the reasons behind Hitler’s speaking style, and what his ascension to power meant to Germany.
Because of Lilo’s antipathy to Nazi politics, she was unwelcome in her own mother’s home. Falk Harnack, his brother and sister-in-law Arvid and Mildred, and their mother Clara aka “Muhmi” became Lilo’s safety net.
Lilo eventually moved to Munich, where she met and married Otto Berndl in February 1940. She remembered how upset he had been at her for fulfilling her war auxiliary service, telling her she should have refused. He was a civil engineer, employed by the city of Munich.
After Otto was drafted into the military, she met Alexander Schmorell – Schurik – during art class. Schurik was in love with Angelika Probst, and Lilo with her Otto, so for both of them, it was a safe friendship. She felt like Alex was her brother. The Gestapo tried to paint her as an immoral woman who had an affair while her husband served on the front lines. No, she exclaimed, we told everyone we were cousins, because we were NOT having an affair!
For Lilo, her vows meant something. And her husband, Otto, he was a man of conscience as well.
Until December 1941. Otto wrote Lilo that his three-week leave from the Russian front had been revoked. That news disappointed her, but the rest of his letter upset her. He said that his military service was a “wonderful fulfillment of duty,” and that this new attitude he had adopted gave him “new strength to fulfill every job, every duty that is given me here.”
And Lilo’s Otto, the same Otto who had been angry with her for not revolting against mandatory war work in a hospital? Now he wrote her that he had seen the “big picture,” and he believed Lilo should volunteer for duty in a military hospital before she was drafted to do so.
Otto Berndl was killed on the Russian front a few months later. By that time, Lilo was numb.
Her deep friendships with both Alexander Schmorell and Falk Harnack filled a traumatic void in her life. These two young men respected her opinion, valued her artistic bent, and cherished her as a person. She could have wonderful fun with both of them. And with both Falk and Alex, Walchensee was the spot they generally chose when they needed to breathe good air, far away from the Brown that pervaded Munich. You can hear the laughter in her photo, where she’s rowing the boat and Falk is relaxing.
Lilo was proud of the fact that she introduced some of the White Rose friends to “her” lake. And it was an immediate plus for me when she learned that I too deem it a respite, when city life overwhelmed me during my sojourns in southern Germany. I “got it,” and her smile rewarded me. Although I would have enjoyed being a fly on the wall as she interacted with Erwin Rommel in that place.
After the war, Lilo raised a daughter as a single mom. Initially, she was able to live at her family’s estate in Aschersleben. Once the DDR (German Democratic Republic) was formed, they privatized many larger residences. Lilo’s home was taken from her by the state. She fled to the West in 1948.
Lilo returned to Munich with her small child and eked out a living, teaching dance (Dalcroze method) and sports. When we met her in 2002, she was still living in her tiny one-bedroom home. Never wealthy. Modest lifestyle. But close to Starnbergersee, her second-favorite Bavarian lake.
After the war, you’d have thought her mother would have welcomed having her in the family, as someone positive during the denazification process. Lilo’s mother apparently never reconciled with her. She lived a fairly solitary life.
My mother, who could identify with many parts of Lilo’s life, asked her, “Have you ever regretted then what you did, wished you could undo it, knowing what you know now about how much it would cost you?”
And in all the time we talked to Lilo, that is the only moment she ever hesitated with an answer. Her eyes watered, she looked away, then she stared straight in my mom’s eyes. “No. I would do it all over again, even knowing what it would cost me.”
Lilo was an endearing, funny, yet serious woman. Bayerischer Rundfunk had featured her in one of their programs a few years earlier. As we started talking, she quipped, When Bayern 3 was here, I swam across Starnbergersee for their program. But I was only 85 then. Now I’m almost 89, and I can’t do that any more. Dayumm. I doubt that I could have ever swum across Starnbergersee!
She also considered herself extremely wealthy, although she never had much money after the war. But. She had the piano on which Alex had pounded Beethoven. She had the broom closet where she’d stored extra leaflets. She had some of Alex’s sketches, and most of hers, from those days when they drank tea, talked about life, and put charcoal to paper. Those treasures? Worth more to her than anything money could buy.
The second time we sat with her and talked and laughed, we also lucked into meeting her grandson Domenic Saller. Unlike many next-gen White Rose family members, Domenic cares about preserving her memories and legacy. He has taken her memoirs and is fleshing them out with additional documentation.
Believe me, Lilo kept everything. If I wrote her and asked for a direct quote from the letter Maria wrote, verifying that she (Maria) witnessed Lilo and Alex burning his uniform and paybook in February 1943, Lilo would go me one better. She made a photocopy of the actual letter itself. When we talked about the poetry she and Alex liked to contemplate, she bought me a copy of Hermann Hesse’s Bäume (Insel-Verlag, 1984), with its twenty-two Hesse poems about nature, especially trees. Her inscription makes that little volume one of my priceless treasures!
And when I asked her for more information about the Fritz Rook letter that inspired the White Rose name, she again sent me a photocopy of the letter, as well as one of the extra Max Baur White Rose postcards like the one Fritz Rook sent her.
If only everyone associated with White Rose were this transparent and open!
Along with Wilhelm Geyer, Traute Lafrenz, and Eugen Grimminger, Lilo is one of the few whose Gestapo interrogations, postwar “memories,” and interviews match. Except for the few dating issues, I could rely on her memories to be authentic, because she was authentic.
After the war, Inge Scholl put out a call for White Rose memories. Lilo wrote Inge Scholl a nine-page letter. Typewritten. Which Inge promptly ignored, just as she ignored the letters from Traute Lafrenz and Wilhelm Geyer.
Lilo did not participate in duplication and distribution of the leaflets, but her apartment became their safe haven. Her happiest stories, as we sat and talked, shone a bright spotlight on these young men she loved so dearly: Christl, Hans, Willi, and Schurik. Her narratives informed mine – I can “see” those four sitting on her sofa, side by side, stiffly, trying to be grownups, with pipes firmly clenched between teeth. “And they had no tobacco!” Her guffaw still makes me smile.
Or the times when Alex would drop by on important “business,” and she would look out her window and see Willi Graf below, waiting for his friend. When she told me that, information gleaned from interrogations and pithy, inscrutable comments started to make sense. How Alex and Willi shared common beliefs about active resistance, and how that negatively affected their friendships with Hans and Sophie. To Lilo, it was a little memory, a “huh” of sorts. To me, it filled in a gap I hadn’t realized existed. Because towards the end, it was Alex and Willi, not Alex and Hans, who would visit Lilo.
When Michael Verhoeven filmed his White Rose movie in 1982, he initially – correctly – wrote Lilo prominently into the script. Again, not as participant in duplication and distribution, but as that safe haven, as the friend whose door was always open, ready with hot tea, and if butter were available, with cookies as well.
If you’ve seen Verhoeven’s movie (which is wrong on so many levels, I don’t recommend you watch it), you know that he used “Inge Scholl’s” photographs as establishing shots or opening scenes. Turns out most of the photographs weren’t Inge Scholl’s, but rather Wittenstein’s (and one of the Huber photos belonged to Lilo), but in 1982, apparently Scholl Archives claimed copyright for Wittenstein’s photos.
Lilo said that Verhoeven told her that he had to change the script to meet with Inge’s approval. So one of my favorite Lilo-Alex scenes – riding bicycles as bombs are falling – was converted to a Sophie-Alex scene. Lilo showed me Verhoeven’s original screenplay, with redline. Putting Sophie in scenes where Lilo should have been.
For readers interested in historical accuracy: That scene is important because if it had been portrayed correctly, it’s the occasion when Alexander Schmorell began to think about, and openly discuss, the notion of assassinating Hitler. Active resistance.
He and Lilo had been eating white bread and drinking red wine at the Osteria (a rare treat for themselves), when Adolf Hitler and posse entered the Osteria. It happened to be Hitler’s favorite restaurant, because in the early years when Hitler was broke, a waitress there would save leftovers for him. So he frequented the Osteria when he was in town.
In her memoirs – and again in person – Lilo told how Alex refused to stand when Hitler entered the restaurant. And how he leaned over the table and said, in a stage whisper, “Suddenly I don’t feel so good. You can smell the sulphur in here.” And how she begged him to please leave before they were arrested. And how the air raid sirens began to wail as RAF bombers flew overhead. And how Alex wondered aloud if the British pilots knew Hitler was at the Osteria, and what it would be like if Hitler were buried beneath the rubble of his favorite restaurant.
“Consider the possibilities,” Alex shouted to Lilo, before they finally, but finally took refuge in an air raid shelter. From White Rose History, Volume I:
When the all clear signaled an end to temporary hades, the shaken friends wended their way to Lilo’s apartment. She put a Bach record on the gramophone, stuffing rags in the speakers to muffle the noise (neighbors). Alex made tea, and the two friends talked late into the night. First about Hitler, who had been close enough and far too close. … The man who would murder those closest to him for suspected treachery had this strange immutable loyalty to the “little” people who had helped him when he was helpless. Completely unpretentious, and yet they all were serfs.
“I value true friendship far above muddle-headed love,” Alex confessed that night. She knew what he meant, and why, and how. They vowed always to be friends, always to be true and honest with one another. “How lucky I am to be alive!” he exclaimed.
Statements like these must be shouted for the world to hear, Lilo resolved. Doubters must know the treasure they hold in their hands, they should take heed that life itself is grace. It is a horror for a single man to presume to murder millions, because creation itself is infinity and she herself was a new creation of that infinity.
Yes, oh yes, I care about Lilo. Her voice should not be silenced.
Postscript #1: In 2002, we also visited Herta Probst and her son Michael. We mentioned Lilo’s book and our impressions of her. Herta commented, That is the best book anyone has written about the White Rose friends. She captured their essence.
Postscript #2: Lilo’s grandson Domenic is also near and dear. During our 2013 White Rose conference, Domenic stayed with me. Sometimes I wanted to throttle him, but most of the time, I just wanted to hug him and tell him how much I appreciate his efforts on his grandmother’s behalf.
Lilo died three weeks after my mother died. If there’s a heaven, those two women haven’t stopped talking yet.
Postscript #3: Anyone in Detroit — after the war, Lilo participated in an exchange program. The April 26, 1949 issue of the Detroit Times not only has a story about that exchange, but Lilo is one of the two women pictured.
© 2002, 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.
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