In this series, Fr. John Murray, Parish Priest of St. Michael the Archangel parish in Belfast, reflects on some of those who have followed in the footsteps of Jesus.
Readers will recall how firmly Pope Benedict addressed the issue of the ‘new atheism’ and modern political correctness when he made his pilgrimage to England and Scotland last September. He reminded his listeners that the Nazi regime under which he suffered had tried to deny the presence of God in the life of his own nation. It was a challenging link which no doubt made many people sit up and take note even if they did not agree with his words.
The people I wish to remember this month would have identified with the Pope’s words. In the Summer of 1942 the citizens of Munich – where Josef Ratzinger was briefly archbishop in the 1970s – were astonished by a series of leaflets which began to circulate throughout the city. Slipped into mailboxes by unknown hands, left in empty bus stops or on park benches, the leaflets contained a sweeping indictment of the Nazi regime and called on their readers to work for the defeat of their own nation. At a time when the merest hint of dissent was an act of treason the boldness of this open call to resistance threw the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police, into a rage.
Although raised as Lutherans Hans and Sophie School had been initially stirred into action by reading the courageous sermons of a Catholic bishop, Clemens Von Galen, the ‘Lion of Munster’, who denounced the euthanasia policies of the Nazi regime whereby the lives of many mentally retarded and ‘infirm’ people were ended. Several of the Scholls’ pamphlets also described the mass executions and deportations of the Jews to the Death camps. Such free speech was forbidden in Germany as it was felt it undermined the war effort. An interesting footnote also to this period was the fact that Sophie sent two volumes of the sermons of Cardinal John Henry Newman – beatified by Pope Benedict in September 2010 – to her boyfriend who was a soldier on the Russian front.
Contrary to the initial suspicions of the authorities this work was not that of any sophisticated organisation or any external body. They were in fact a few dozen university students who had been inspired by their Christian faith and the idealism of youth to challenge the brutal and tyrannical regime which held sway in Germany at that time. At the centre of the group were a brother and sister, Hans and Sophie Scholl, who were twenty-four and twenty-one years old respectively. Hans was a medical student and his sister studied philosophy. They had no other weapons than their courage, the power of truth and an illegal duplicating machine.
Hans in fact had originally enlisted in the German army but one day he saw a young Jewish woman under forced labour digging a trench. He reached down to give her a flower but she saw only a Nazi and she rejected his offer. This moment was crucial in his own ‘conversion’ and when he returned to medical school he moved further to the cause of truth and freedom. Sophie too had been an exemplary German citizen and initially a leader in a Nazi youth group. At university the brother and sister found others of like mind who were drawn together by a shared love of music and literature as well as hiking in the local Bavarian mountains. A question they often pondered was how the individual must act under a dictatorship.
Hans and Sophie were devout Christians, members of the Lutheran church. They believed that the struggle in which they were engaged was a battle for the very soul of Germany and thus a duty for all Christians. One of their leaflets read ‘Everywhere and at all times of greatest trial, men have appeared, prophets and saints who cherished their freedom, who preached the One God and who with His help brought the people to a reversal of their downward course. Man is free, to be sure, but without the true God he is defenceless against the principle of evil … we must attack evil where it is strongest, and it is strongest in the power of Hitler … we will not be silent. We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace.’
As their campaign continued their boldness grew. Soon graffiti appeared on walls – ‘Down with Hitler’ on street signs and the sides of buildings. This group of amateurs,however, must have known that their efforts would be shortlived. On 18 February 1943 Hans and Sophie were caught distributing leaflets outside a lecture hall in the university and were arrested. Jacob Schmidt, the university handyman and Nazi party member, saw the Scholls with their leaflets and reported them. Under arrest they bravely confessed to all the actions of the ‘White Rose’ (a name they took from a Spanish novel) in order to try and spare some of the other members of the group. Despite their efforts the Gestapo quickly rounded up the other conspirators in the circle both in Munich and Hamburg, where there was a sister group.
There was a trial but the verdict was a foregone conclusion. The judge scarcely listened to their arguments and so the brother and sister along with a third man Christophe Probst, also a medical student, were sentenced to death. On her way to sentencing Sophie’s mother turned to her and said, ‘You know, Sophie, Jesus’, and the daughter nodded in agreement. Just a few days later they were executed by guillotine and the sentence was all the more cruel in that they each had to lie on their back without a blindfold and see the falling blade before it struck.
Understandably it has taken Germany time to recover psychologically from the memories of the war. However, in a poll in 2003, a television station invited viewers to vote for their ten most important Germans of all time. Hans and Sophie were catapulted into fourth place ahead of Bach and Goethe and even Albert Einstein. The memory of the ‘White Rose’ is not forgotten.