The Rest Is History - 256. Germany: The White Rose

Episode Date: November 18, 2022

“Since the conquest of Poland, 300,000 Jews have been murdered in this country in the most bestial way ... The German people slumber on in dull, stupid sleep and encourage the fascist criminals. Each wants to be exonerated of guilt, each one continues on his way with the most placid, calm conscience. But he cannot be exonerated; he is guilty, guilty, guilty!” - Leaflet from the White Rose resistance movement, 1942. In today’s episode on Germany, Dominic tells us the heroic story of five German students who founded a non-violent protest group during the most oppressive days of Nazi control.  Join The Rest Is History Club (www.restishistorypod.com) for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. hello welcome to the rest is history um we are continuing our tour through all the various countries that have qualified for this year's football world cup and today dominic it is probably the england fans favorite opponent it's the germans yes it it is to the england football fan what australia is to the england cricket fan um the team that always seems to beat us um and which therefore we particularly like to defeat ourselves um and i guess that that also applies to world wars doesn't it i can't believe

you went there that's i did i did i saw that joke looming yeah but like a you're like a shaven headed yeah hooligan on the terraces but but dominic i'm now going to um i'm now going to soft soap that because you have chosen for us today it is a second world war focus it is 1940s story yeah but it, yeah. But it's not the kind of perspective that one might be expecting. It's a positive perspective. It's about good Germans. Exactly. So I want to start on a particular day, Tom. I want to start in

medias res. So I want to start in Munich on the 18th of February 1943 at the university, at the great university in Munich. And I want to start with a man called Jakob Schmidt, who was the caretaker of the building, a kind of ordinary Bavarian bloke. He is middle-aged. He is a loyal Nazi party member, very keen party member, in fact.

And he's the caretaker. It's a lovely kind of warm, sort of early spring day, sort of unseasonably warm. So all is right with the world as he sees it. And the war's not going very well, of course, because the Germans have had very bad news from Stalingrad. But he's just sort of minding his own business as the caretaker of the building. The students have all arrived. They've gone into their lectures and their classes and about 11 o'clock two people come into the great sort of hall the great inner courtyard which has this great glass vaulted ceiling. And he looks up, Jakob Schmidt, and he sees that these two people who he barely looked at, a young man and a young woman, are throwing pieces of paper, throwing leaflets down from the gallery of this university sort of lobby.

And he stares up at them and he shouts, stop, you know, you're under arrest or words to that effect, because he's so shocked at them throwing this stuff around. And at that very moment, the lecture halls, it's the end of the lectures. So the doors fly open and suddenly there are people everywhere, you know, students coming out of the lectures. So the doors fly open and suddenly there are people everywhere, you know, students coming out of the lectures. And the two people that he's shouting at start to come down the stairs to kind of lose themselves amid the crowd. But Jakob Schmidt is a man of great assiduousness. So he keeps his eyes on them. He pushes his way through the crowds and he manages to catch up with them and force his way to them grab them and he shouts

again stop you're under arrest and everybody around is appalled wondering what's going on and they don't try and run away they just um they just stand there you know like they're frozen like they've suddenly all the fight has gone out of them and he takes the two of them and he drags them away to the university rector's office. And it's there that the authorities find out who they are. And they are a brother and sister called Hans and Sophie Scholl. And that's what this podcast is about. It's about the story of Hans and Sophie Scholl and the White Rose resistance movement, which they were a part, and how they came to be there at the Munich University building that day in 1943, throwing their leaflets around and about what happened to them afterwards. So, Tom, you've probably heard a little bit about their story. A very, very inspiring story.

Yeah. And incredible displays of courage. And they're very, very young, aren't they? Sophie is 22 i think when she yes exactly and she and hans is a little bit older exactly exactly right they're students so i was thinking in dominion thinking writing about them i wanted a few bites of yeah i did and decided to go for tolkien instead right okay well but but it's it's a great story and very interesting for what it says about the relationship of devout Christians to the Nazi regime.

Exactly. So who are they? So Hans had been born in 1918, Sophie in 1921. So as you say, they're in their early 20s. They're the children of Robert and Magdalena Scholl. So Robert Scholl, their father, he had been a mayor in some small towns in Swabia in southwestern Germany. He's a big and very German-looking man. He's a tax consultant, so not exactly the most... No offense to our tax consultant fans or listeners, but perhaps not the most glamorous.

We don't normally talk about tax consultants, except for the Emperor Anastasius. Yes, very much a friend of the show. Yeah, or I suppose Antonio Salazar. But Robert Scholl, their father. So their mother, Magdalena, was a Protestant nurse, and Protestantism is very important to her. Their father, he's also a man of a very sort of strong inner conviction.

So in the First World War, Robert Scholl had actually been a pacifist, and he'd worked as a medic, so he hadn't seen action. He'd done his bit for his country, but he didn't believe in violence. There's a word in German for somebody with, like Robert Scholl, they call them an Einzelgänger, a man who goes his own way, the man who goes on his own. So Nazis are not keen on that? Not at all, not at all.

However, Hans and Sophie, they're respectively, Hans is 14 and Sophie is 12, when the Nazis come to power in Germany at the beginning of the 1930s. And they both join with their sisters. They've got two sisters and a brother. The sister's Inge and Elisabeth, and their brother is Werner. And they join the Hitler Youth, like so many children and teenagers do in the 1930s.

They love it, don't they? Yeah, they do, because they think, like so many, again, like so many, they think it's a great lark, very exciting. You get to dress up. So the Hitler Youth, to give you a sense of its great explosion, the end of 1932, it had about 100,000 members. By 1935, it had 4 million. And a lot of that is obviously sort of coercion and getting in with the regime and all that sort of stuff.

But as you absolutely say, they're given a chance to dress up in uniforms. They get to go on torch-lit processions. And they genuinely believe that they're rebuilding Germany. So their sister Inge. They're only 12, aren't they? Right. They're still 12. So their sister Inga said later, we heard so much talk about the fatherland and comradeship,

the Volk community and the love of one's home. This impressed us and we listened with rapture. We were told that we should live for something greater than ourselves. And we were taken seriously in a strange sort of way. And you can sort of see that because the Nazis are saying to children and teenagers, you're very important. This new Germany belongs to you. Join the torch lit processions, dress up, come're very important. This new Germany belongs to you. Join the torch-lit processions.

Dress up. Come on the camps. It's going to be great fun. And Hans, he's really into this. Sophie's into it too. She loves all the hiking. She's very romantic, very idealistic. She writes.

There's this great tradition of kind of young people in Germany in the early 20th century getting out and enjoying nature and going on these sort of walks all together and this sort of collective recreation and stuff she loves all this now their father thinks it's terrible he's not a man he's not especially left-wing he's's not somebody who had been pretty disgusted by what he saw as the corruption of the Weimar Republic. But he hates the Nazis. He says to his children, they are wolves. They are wild beasts.

They are misusing the German people terribly. But his children don't listen. They're all in on the Hitler Youth, particularly Hans. So Hans, not long after he joins joins he's made a kind of squad leader and in a way i mean there's some listeners may think this is a terrible comparison but i don't think it's entirely inappropriate in a way for people like hands it's a bit like joining the boy scouts but that's i mean that's a that's a parallel that is made at the time isn't it i mean it's very you know dressing up in uniforms and learning how to build fires and things.

Right, whittling wood, exactly, all of that. So Hans, as he's a squad leader, he organises evenings in the clubhouse. They will put on the radio and they will listen, you know, a bit of modernity amid all the kind of wood whittling. And they will listen to the official programs of the Hitler Youth. They will listen to the message. And he never questions this until, interestingly, he goes to the Nuremberg rally in 1936. And he is chosen because he's such a big,

sort of a bigwig by teenage standards, a binoc. He is chosen to carry the banner of the Ulm, because they're from the city of Ulm, of the Ulm Hitler Youth Section. And everyone says, of course, they've chosen the Hans. He's so handsome. He loves all this kind of thing. But when he comes back from Nuremberg, the people in his family say it's as though something had sort of changed, that he had... So how old is he at this point?

So this is 1936, and he was born in 1918. So in other words, he's 18. Yeah. Okay, so he's old enough to start... To start thinking, exactly, yeah. And he said later to one of his sisters that he didn't like the fact that when he was at Nuremberg, there was no time and no opportunity to have proper conversations and debates about the future of Germany, that they were just sort of told what to do. And they were being, you know, that it was all mindless.

You know, the Scholl children are terribly idealistic. They're great ones for kind of not only going on these massive nature walks, but also sitting around and talking about the meaning of life. And with their parents. With their parents. And he goes to Nuremberg. And I think there's parts of Hans that thinks, when I go there, that's what we'll be doing. But I mean, so one of the things about totalitarianism and particularly Nazi totalitarianism is absolutely the idea that the family should not be a safe space for private conversations, should it? Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, they have the problem of the fact that their father, who they revere in many ways, who is this very inspiring man who goes his own way, that their father has made completely plain to them that he despises the

Nazis and is horrified by the fact that they're throwing themselves into this. But there's a couple of other things as well. So one of them is that at some point, Hans was caught reading the books of Stefan Zweig, the great Jewish writer. And he clearly liked Stefan Zweig's, I assume his short stories, which are so fantastically readable and brilliant, perfectly formed. And he was obviously told by somebody, this is no good. He's a Jewish writer. And that made, that gave him kind of pause. But apparently, I mean, this,

I'm basing this on a wonderful book about the Scholl family by Annette Dumbach and Judd Newborn, which I recommend to listeners because it's a brilliant window into their kind of world. This is the kind of thing that will sound so banal, but you can completely see how to a teenager,

it would be a massive deal. He decides that he's going to, he'd carried the banner at the Nuremberg rally. And when he gets back to Ulm, he decides that as a project for his squad, they're going to design their own special banner and it will make them stand

out. And he designs this very colorful banner of a Griffin. And basically they go out in Ulm with their Griffin banner and some other sort of Hitler youth bigwigs come see them and are shocked and tear it down. And Hans is really offended and he has a fight. And they tear it down, not because they're offended by griffins, but because it's displaying individuality of thought. No, they've got nothing against griffins because it's individualism.

Yeah, because it's broken with the, you know, it's not what you're meant to have. And Hans is really shocked by this. And he has a fight with this bloke in the street. And from that point onwards, it's as though something within him is kind of broken. And his faith in the party and in the mission and the enterprise. You wouldn't want to live in a country where you can't have a Griffin banner. I definitely wouldn't, Tom. Yes. and that's merely scratching the surface the full iniquities yes um so hansen and sophie they start to sort of fall out of love with the regimes there's a there's an

issue that uh sophie has teenage girls are told that they have to have braided hair you know the sort of pigtails and stuff like they look look like a good German girl. And Sophie, she's not blonde. She doesn't want to have a sort of peasant hairstyle. She has a bob. She has a short bob. And that, again, kind of marks her out as different among, you know, how important it is for teenagers. The issue of, you know, whether you're going to conform with all the others or whether you're going to go your own way and be a different kind of person. Their father is always encouraging them to be different so there's a story that

they were once going for a walk along the river around the banks of the danube and robert shull said to his children all that i want for you is to walk straight and free through life even when it's hard we we talked didn't we in our episode on teenagers a long time ago about how there was this trend under the Nazis for some teenagers to kind of, I guess they were kind of prototypical teenagers. They were exploring the excitement of being different. The idea that to be different was what being a teenager is all about. Yes. Yes. There's groups called, there's the Navajos. There's a group called the Black Gang. There's a group called the Edelweiss Pirates. And they do things like they grow their hair or they wear sort of Czech shirts, sort of American-style shirts.

They listen to swing music. British jazz, American jazz. And they mock the Hitler Youth. They say, oh, look at all those kind of drones just sort of trudging along behind their banners. Absolutely that. There's another issue. Sophie has a Stefan Zweig-style moment. They are asked in one of their group meetings,

should we talk about literature? Should we talk about some of your favorite writers? And she says, oh, brilliant. I'll bring in some poems by Heinrich Heine, who's one of my favorite writers. And there's a sort of dead, horrified silence because Heine is Jewish and she's horrified. You know,

Heine's books have actually been banned by Goebbels. So again, you know, this is, this marks her out as, as unusual. So by, as we approach the sort of the end of the 1930s,

they're fallen out of love with the Hitler youth And Hans actually joins one of these sort of subcultural kind of teenage groups. It's a group called DJ111. And that stands for the German Youth of November the 1st, 1929. And that was the day that the founder of the group had been abroad and he'd come back to Germany. He decided to set up a youth group actually to counter what he saw as the rise of the Nazis and the Hitler youth. And so this group that Hans joins in Ulm, to give you a sense of the kind of things they do, they love hitchhiking. They love Balkan folk songs. They play the Russian balalaikaika so they're kind of they're cosmopolitan they're deliberately cosmopolitan they use or they write all in lowercase letters now that makes out a tiny thing but that's what the bauhaus did so that's a very sort of bauhausy kind of weimar republic-y kind of gesture also i mean we talked about the banner another thing they do is they have um there's a big deal among these sort of German youth groups about having their tents, that kind of military-like style again, marks you out as different, as going against the norm, as going against the sort of established pattern.

So anyway, Hans is involved with that. That's all fine. War breaks out in the end of 1939. Hans is studying in Munich, but he's doing his medical studies. He is sent into France as a medic. Sophie has a boyfriend by this point called Fritz Hardnagel. He ends up serving later on in the Eastern Front. Sophie spends time working in kindergartens.

She's sent to a munitions factory, and she's shocked by what she finds in the munitions factory. What shocked her? She doesn't get on with the other girls. It sort of fuels her sense of individualism. Right. So she doesn't like the fact that the other girls are... She doesn't like the regimented nature of it, the fact that they're being bossed around, the fact that it's sort of militaristic hierarchy. She doesn't like the fact that the other girls don't like discussing ideas,

that they don't question the regime, that they don't have this kind of restless, idealistic side that the Scholls have been taught to do. I mean, again, books are really important. After Lights Out, she reads Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain by Torchlight. That's not a Nazi. That's not a Nazi. That's not a Nazi book. No, not at all.

I mean, Mann is in exile at this point and is very much, you know, and he is absolutely an enemy of the Third Reich. And they are more and more, they're questioning the regime, but also the war. So Sophie says at one point, well writes to her her fiance fritz who's out on um on the eastern front she writes if you one believes in the victory of might one also has to believe that men are on the same level as animals which is what the nazis think on one level but they also believe that humans are just an animal like any other. Yeah, exactly right. So just as we come towards the break, early 1942, so that's a year before where we started this podcast,

that finds Hans in Munich where he is studying at the university. So he's come back from France. He's studying with the university. He's got in with a little group of medical students. So, I mean, this isn't, The White Rose isn't just the story of hansen so

it's often reduced to that but they have friends christoph probst villi graf alexander schmorl they are all what unites them is they're all influenced by and deeply interested in kind of christian ideas so they are your level this time you'd love this that's yeah because she's she's very keen on saint augustine right i was just about to say they're reading augustine's confessions they read thomas aquinas they read french catholic writers which is interesting because they're lutheran i mean they're from a protestant background but they're clearly very influenced by catholic but munich is very catholic yeah so they have a friend called villi graf he is a very very keen catholic he has been incredibly religious since he was actually a little boy and and actually when hitler took power when he was 15 their friend villi he wrote a huge

list of all his friends and then he crossed out then he crossed out on the list the names of all those who joined the hitler youth and he never spoke to any of them again but that would have included uh the shoals wouldn't it well it would have included the shoals ironically if he'd known them at the time and they have another friend alex schmorrell he's a fascinating person so he had been born in russia then he moved back to germany he was absolutely obsessed with russian culture and at the end of his life i mean after he was dead he was actually canonized as an orth saint. Blimey. So in other words, just to give you, before we go into the break, to give you a portrait of these guys. So these are Hans's friends.

They are intensely serious. I mean, I can't honestly say that they'd be the people I'd be friends with if I was at university, because I'm obviously far too unserious to get involved with this sort of group. They're much more impressive people, I think, than I am, Tom, and maybe even than you. They are reading Thomas Aquinas, they're reading St. Augustine, they're questioning the regime. You see, the thing is, I'm sure one of the reasons they're doing that is because in the context of Nazism, Christianity has become so countercultural. Yeah, absolutely. I'm sure that's right. That it's actually cooler than it would be in 2020s Britain.

Because what I found was, reading around this subject, was that there was a sense in which, particularly Lutheran Christianity, I think, but also to a degree, I mean, all Christianity full stop, comes to seem pallid to people in comparison with the glamour and the swagger of Nazism, which is itself influenced quite strongly by Catholic ritual. And there is a sense in which German Christianity under the Third Reich becomes, I mean, in Dominion, I described them as becoming like the Nazgul. The church becomes a spectral thing. But for those who are standing firm against Nazism, Christianity provides a sense of colour and depth and purpose that otherwise would be much harder for them to find, to get purchase on. And so the story of the churches under Nazism is simultaneously, you know, they

become Nazgul, but also unbelievably inspires unbelievable heroism. Yeah. Well, we'll come inspires unbelievable heroism. Yeah. Well, we'll come to the heroism after the break, because in the first week of May 1942, Sophie arrives to join her brother in Munich. He meets her off the train. He takes her to Schwabing, the place where the students will hang out in the cafes and their discussion groups and their lodgings and all that sort of stuff. And just a few weeks later, their lives are going to change completely. And we'll find out what happens after the break.

We'll be back soon. Bye bye. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.

Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History. Dominic is taking us through the dramatic and heroic story of the Scholls. Dominic, Sophie has just arrived in Munich. She has joined Hans, her brother. What happens next? She gets in with her brother's friends and the days pass. Just a few weeks after her arrival in the Bavarian city, a leaflet or multiple copies of a leaflet appear in Munich. Now the leaflets are, they're typed, they're single spaced on two sides of a sheet of paper and they're folded into envelopes and they're posted across the city to a very, very random group of people. So academics get them, civil

servants, but also people who own restaurants. They're sent to pubs. They're just sent to shops. They're sent just randomly to people and to addresses across the city. And these leaflets are signed by a group called the White Rose. Now, where that name comes from, nobody knows. There had been a novel called the White Rose a few years earlier, published in Berlin, by the author of the Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the great, later made into a Hollywood film, kind of piratical romance.

But maybe the title came from there, we don't know. The leaflets are burning with passion against the regime so the very first leaflets to give you an indication it says every individual has to consciously accept his responsibility as a member of western and christian civilization in this last hour to arm himself as best he can to work against the scourge of humanity against fascism and every other form of the absolute state adopt passive resistance resistance wherever you are block the functioning of this atheistic war machine before it is too late before our last city is a heap of rubble like cologne and before the last youth of our nation bleeds to death

because of the hubris of a subhuman. So, Sophie doesn't know who's produced the leaflets. The truth, of course, is that her brother and his friends have been producing them. They decided earlier that summer that they really need to do something, to make some kind of gesture against the Nazi regime. They earn a decent amount of money. They earn 250 Reichsmarks a month, which is more than most workers earn. And they pool all their money. They bought a

duplicating machine. They bought a typewriter. They bought printing paper. They bought the stamps. They bought envelopes. They bought everything. And they have produced the leaflets themselves and just sent them out randomly to people across the city. So Sophie sees this leaflet and she takes it to Hans's room to show him. And he's not there, but lying around on his desk are all these books with quotations and things that are in the leaflets. He comes in, she says, this is a bit weird. I found this leaflet and it looks like all this stuff on your desk. And he denies it at first, but eventually he admits it. She's quite shocked initially. And she talks to his friends. And as they talk, she ends up being convinced.

And she's the only girl. She's the only girl. Yes. The rest of them are all blokes. They're all his sort of very male. The Germans love these kind of fraternities. a bit like tolkien and his group of friends it's just like tolkien and the inklings they are you know we were talking in our tolkien podcast weren't we about tolkien and his friends at king edward's birmingham who were unbelievably idealistic and serious and masculine and yeah and they were going to change the world by smoking pipes drinking beer and writing finnish style poems yes and the white rose guys they think they're going to change the world by smoking pipes drinking beer and writing finnish style poems yes and the white rose guys they think they're going to change the world by producing these very christian leaflets

attacking the nazi regime and sophie decides yeah you know i'm in i'm in i'm all in so the next leaflet number two appears a couple of weeks later, so it's the third week of June 1942. And I mean, I'm not going to read huge extracts from all the leaflets. What's striking about this leaflet is it talks about the crimes against the Jews. So it says explicitly, since the conquest of Poland, 300,000 Jews have been murdered in a bestial manner. Here we see the most terrible crime committed against the dignity of man, a crime that has no counterpart in human history. Is this a sign that the German people have become brutalized in their basic human feelings? And it goes on to say, everyone shrugs off this guilt, falling asleep with his conscience at peace, but he cannot shrug it off. Everyone is guilty,

guilty, guilty. So that's leaflet number two. Then there's a third leaflet a couple of weeks later. Our state is the dictatorship of evil. The first concern of every German is not the military victory over Bolshevism, but the defeat of national socialism. And then there's one more, leaflet number four, so a few weeks after that. So this is all packed into a very short period of time, June, July 1942. Leaflet number four,

I mean, here's your Christianity, Tom. Every word that comes from Hitler's mouth is a lie. When he says peace, he means war. When Hitler speaks of God, he really means the power of evil, the fallen angel, Satan. But it's also very Orwellian, isn't it?

It is, I guess it is. Yeah, it is Orwellian. You know, peace, war, all that stuff. Well, it's Tolkien fused with Orwell, the two great British novelists writing about the Second World War. I suppose you're right. I mean, it's striking how imbued it is with the Christian stuff, how important that is to them.

I don't think it's surprising. I really do think that this is, well, because Nazism is so ideologically opposed, not just to institutional Christianity, but to the moral fundamentals of Christianity as they've traditionally been understood. Sympathy for the duty of care that is owed by the strong to the weak and by the sense that there is a common human dignity that transcends gender, race, social standing, whatever. And obviously Nazism absolutely despises both those principles it does i've made a terrible error choosing this tom because this is giving you the opportunity to mount your favorite hobby horse but you're right you're absolutely right of course i mean the two things the christian emphasis on the kind of dignity of each individual human and sanctity

of human life and all that stuff could not be more implacably opposed to the values of the nazi regime in the in the middle of the second world war now that that leaf number four it ends with the words we very famously we will not be silent we are your bad conscience the white rose will not leave you in peace but actually the funny thing is that why i was then kind of do leave people in peace because they've done four leaflets. They haven't really achieved, you know, there's been no mass uprising. There's no demonstrations, nothing. Their student life continues.

Three of them, Hans, Vili and Alex, they're sent as medics to the Eastern Front. Sophie is conscripted to go back to Ulm to work in an armaments factory. I mean, the thing that's interesting about that also, talking about how there are groups within Nazi Germany that presaged the teenage revolution. But this is, I mean, also they are students. That must be important, mustn't it? I mean, that's a prefiguring of the role that students will play in the 60s. The sort of idealism, I suppose, but also the...

The idealism and the radicalism and the sense that you're sticking it to the man. Yeah. And to students in the 60s, the idea that the French or the American authorities are fascist is very important. Oh, of course it is. I mean, this is what people say all the time in Germany in the 1960s and 70s and the Baader-Meinhof kind of people. Yeah. this is what people say all the time in Germany in the 1960s and 70s and the Baader-Meinhof kind of people. That there's no difference between the fascism of the third Reich and the fascism of, you know,

Gerald Ford's America. But the Scholls, I mean, are impressive because they literally are taking on fascists. But also it's, they, they use that word, they use the expression passive resistance,

I think in leaflet number four, perhaps because of their interesting kind of religious stuff and whatnot, that they've got an interest in Gandhi or they've known what's been happening in India. Well, I imagine also that they are influenced by the tradition of Catholic pacifism. Yeah, I'm sure that's right. There's absolutely no hint at any point that they would consider violence i mean that's obviously the difference with the students of the 60s and 70s where you know in every country virtually you have a tiny tiny group that is so radicalized but also to be against violence in the context of fascism is the most radical step you can take agreed so sophie's back in ulm. Her father, Robert, I mean, he knows nothing of this, but at this point, he actually is sent to prison briefly for having sounded off against Hitler. So he's been informed upon he's sentaments factory, alongside a lot of forced laborers from Russia. So the war is being kind of brought home to her.

That autumn, later that autumn, her brother and his friends, they return to Germany from the Eastern Front. They never really talk about what they've seen or what they've done. But, you know, it doesn't take much imagination to speculate that they, even if they haven't necessarily seen terrible things, they'll undoubtedly have heard of them from other people on the front. Sophie's fiancé Fritz, I mentioned in the first half, he has now been transferred to Stalingrad.

Blimey. So, you know, they've really been sort of sucked into the war. They all assemble back in Munich later that autumn. Munich has had its first direct air raid at the end of October, Allied air raid. So morale generally in Germany is plummeting in the final months of 1942. There's a real sense of kind of urgency, of looming disaster, of a kind of final confrontation and all this kind of stuff ragnarok got a dameron exactly exactly they feel at this point okay let's let's restart the white

rose let's get it back up and running but also let's make it more political we need to reach more people more places we need to forge links they know they've heard rumors that there are other similar groups in other places there are maybe more overtly kind of more secular, more overtly political kind of left-wing groups of people meeting and talking about overthrowing the regime, talking about what comes next, all of this stuff. So they're keen to link up with all these groups. And they decide to do a new leaflet. So that comes out at the beginning of 1943, January 43. This is leaflet number five. They don't call themselves the White Rose. The leaflets are headed leaflets of the resistance movement in Germany. Leaflet number five begins with the

words, a call to all Germans. It talks about how Germany should be federalized. The working class must be liberated from its degraded conditions of slavery by a form of socialism. It talks about human rights. It talks about what a new Germany would look like after the war. So it's a bit less Christian and it's a bit more political.

There's also a lot more of these. So they produce about 10,000 copies of this leaflet, and that is 20 times more than any of the others. And what they do, this is the first leaflet that really gets the Gestapo alarmed because it's spread beyond Munich. And the Gestapo actually get their guy called Robert Moore. He is told, okay, get to the bottom of who these White Rose people are and what's

going on. And when he looks into it, he sees the leaflets are appearing all over Germany. They found them in Stuttgart, they found them in Ulm, they found them in Frankfurt, they found them in Augsburg, they found them in Berlin. They've even found them in Vienna, which has of course been incorporated into Germany after the Anschluss. How are they getting there? Well, this is a brilliant scheme by the members of the white rose what they do is they will pack their bags full of leaflets then they get on a train they put the bag in a different carriage from the one they're in so that if the bag is discovered they won't be yeah they're not suspected but what they do is they go to a different city and they post the

leaflets from there to yet another city so So in other words, you go to Vienna with a thousand leaflets and you post leaflets from there to Frankfurt. So in other words, there's no link to Munich and there's no link to them. So Sophie, for example, she goes, gets on the train, she goes to Augsburg, she goes to Stuttgart, and she sends herself about 800 leaflets from there all over Germany. So the Gestapo are furious about this. I mean, the leaflets are now becoming, there's now enough of them that they're becoming a bit of a story and they're keen to stamp them out. What is more, very soon after these leaflets start appearing, the Germans surrender at Stalingrad. Including Sophie's boyfriend? He was at Stalingrad, right?

He had been, but no. He had been invalided out to a Polish hospital. Like so many Germans on the Eastern Front, he had suffered severe frostbite, Tom, and his hand had had to be amputated. Oh, no.

Yeah. So he actually survives this whole story, Fritz Harden-Eagle. He became a judge later in life he died in 2001 would you believe by me so that sort of slightly messes with the sense of time yeah anyway so uh actually when stalingrad fell hans and his mates went out and they painted on the on the walls around the university um the words freedom and down with hitler um which is an extraordinarily how much courage would you yeah i was about to say brave and and reckless i suppose

you would say a thing to do so that's the third of february that stein grads the news of stein grads surrender starts to percolate percolates exactly there's then a sixth leaflet and they go out they go out a couple more times actually to write down with hitler on the walls and so on and freedom and all this kind of thing and then it's the 18th of february where we began the podcast with hans and sophie going in with these so they've got these suitcases full of leaflets they go into the university building they distribute the leaflets and then this act which i suppose you can only describe as reckless do you think they wanted to be caught i mean to there's a kind of martyrdom i did wonder that tom because when the guy schmidt the caretaker as far as we can tell as i said the doors open

loads of students came out and they tried to lose themselves in the crowd then he shouted to them again stop you're under arrest and they then did stop this like they froze but also the cunning with which they you know they're going to all these different cities and then on to other cities and so on to cover their tracks and then they're standing in a university throwing yeah the flyers out i mean it's is it high spiritedness is it recklessness is it as you said is is it a desire for a subconscious desire for martyrdom? It's really hard to tell. So the guy who I mentioned a little while ago, Robert Moore, the Gestapo guy, he gets a call from the university. They say, over. They don't seem nervous. They don't seem anxious or anything like that. He talks to them. They give their names.

They say, oh, no, it's nothing to do with us. He doesn't believe at first they're the culprits because they're clearly well-educated, from good families, middle class, all of this sort of stuff. He thinks, oh, it can't be these people. He says, well, why are you walking around with an empty suitcase?

And they say, oh, we were going to go back to Ulm on the train, and we were going to pick up stuff from home, new clothes, and bring it back to Munich, so we needed to take it empty. You know, it all kind of vaguely makes sense. But at that point, his men have collected all the leaflets, and they try to fit them in the suitcase, and they find that they fit perfectly, which is a bad sign. And about that point, Moore says, well, we'll take them and ask them a few more questions and hands pulls up

i mean very foolishly i would say um although it's easy for me to say from here he pulls a piece of paper from his pocket and shoves it in his mouth and starts to chew it which is a dead giveaway and that's actually a draft for yet another leaflet that his friend Christoph has been writing. So at that point, they're handcuffed. They're taken through the crowds outside for interrogation. Moore decides he will interrogate Sophie personally. And what's interesting is he says to her, he tries to give her a get out. So he says to her, I imagine that you don't really believe in all the stuff that your brother's led you into he's probably been you know tricking you yeah he he wants her to say brother splaining you're right yeah exactly and she says you are wrong i would do it all over again because i'm

not wrong it is you who are wrong and at that point you know it's pretty obvious how this story is going to end so the narcissists have got the two shells and they've got their friend Christoph, whose paper Hans had been trying to chew up. And there's amazing sort of stories, very moving stories from, for example, Sophie's cellmate about her looking out through the barred windows at the sunshine, you know, talking to herself and saying, how many are dying? How many young lives full of hope?

What difference will my death make if our actions arouse thousands of people and all this kind of stuff? Very idealistic. February the 22nd, which is four days after the event, they are taken from their cells and they are taken for trial.

Afterwards, Sophie Selmay finds on her bed um sophie has left a piece of paper with a single word written on it which is freedom in hans's cell i mean it's all it's very hollywood in a way because it's so kind of inspiring um hans has written in pencil on the wall, despite all the powers closing in, hold yourself up, which is his father's favorite line from Goethe. So they're taken for trial. The judge is a guy called Roland Freisler, who is a fanatical Nazi, and he finds them guilty and pronounces the death sentence. And they don't really say anything until the end when Friesler says, your sentence to death. Hans just says, you will soon stand where we stand now. So they're taken off to Stadelheim prison, where the executions will take place. Somehow,

I don't really know how, to be completely honest, their parents managed to persuade the authorities to let them see them one last time. they go in i mean this is incredibly moving to read about so robert shull goes in and meets hans and hugs him and says you'll go down in history you know everybody one day will know your name and know that there is justice in the world then his then they get to see sophie her mother has brought her some sweets. Hans didn't want the sweets, but Sophie takes them. Does it remind how young they are? Yeah.

Mrs. Scholl supposedly says to Sophie, Oh, Sophie, Sophie, you'll never come in the door again. And Sophie says, Oh, mother, but what are those few years anyway? And then her mother says, Sophie, remember Jesus. Sophie says, Yes, you too. And then she's taken away. And she, more the Gestapo guy, later goes past her son mother says, Sophie, remember Jesus. Sophie says, yes, you too. And then she's taken away. And she, more the Gestapo guy, later goes past her cell and says he sees her weeping in her cell. They're given access to a Protestant priest, a chaplain, who comes and reads Psalms with them.

They take communion. They're taken out. They're taken into the courtyard. The guillotine is there. It's five o'clock in the afternoon. Sophie is executed first. And Hans, just before Hans is executed, he shouts, long live freedom. And then the blade comes down. And you might say that's the end of the story, but it isn't. Because in 1943, there are all kinds of roundings up of resistance people. So it's impossible actually to put a real figure on how many people were

rounded up as a direct result of this, but obviously quite a number. But news of this, the Nazis tried to suppress news of it. But obviously in their deaths, the White Rose Movement won a victory. They win their martyrdom. They win their martyrdom in a way that their leaflets probably never would have done. So Thomas Mann, I mentioned Sophie reading The Magic Mountain. Thomas Mann, who was, of course, in America, he writes an article about their deaths not long afterwards.

A new faith in freedom and honor is dawning. Good, splendid young people, you shall not have died in vain. You shall not be forgotten. The Nazis have raised monuments to indecent rogues and common killers, but the German revolution, the the real revolution will tear them down and in their place will memorialize these people who knew and publicly declared that a new faith was dawning and all this kind of stuff don't the raf drop copies of the pamphlets i hadn't heard that story tom is that true that's a great story it was all about the intersection of the raf and the firebombing, but also the...

Do you know, Tom? It is true. It is true. Yes, I thought it was. So I was going to kind of work that into the chapter, and then I didn't because I didn't include the shoals. Some people consider this a terribly banal end to this podcast, but I've just checked it and there's a Daily Mail story about it in 2011.

Blimey. That, yes, in July 1943, copies of this final leaflet were dropped over Germany by Allied aircraft, which is a sign of how much the story had spread. I mean, the story that I always like comes from the quotation is, there was a half-Jewish Austrian poet

called Ilse Eichinger, a very left-wing poet. The Germans had done their best to suppress, the poet. The Germans had done their best to suppress, the authorities rather had done their best to suppress, you know, knowledge of what's to happen to Hans and Sophie Scholl. But one day, Ilse Eichinger said later, she saw a poster on the wall with the names of the White Rose and the people who had been sentenced to death.

She said, I read the names on the poster. I'd never heard of any of them. But as I read those names, an inexpressible hope leaped up in me. And I was not the only one who felt this way. This hope was not just the hope for our survival. It helped so many that still had to die that even they could die with hope. It was like a secret light that expanded over the world. It was joy.

And that, in a way, is how the White Rose had been remembered. That in this sort of, is how the White Rose had been remembered, that even in the deepest darkness, there was still a candle lit. And to this day, of course, they're almost, dare I say, sacred figures in post-war Germany. I think you could absolutely say that. You know, streets are named after them. There are memorials, there are prizes. If you go to the University of Munich, to the place where they were arrested, outside that building, there are piles of leaflets as memorials to their courage. So if you go to that university today as a student, you literally walk past piles of the leaflets. They are incredibly moving and inspirational figures.

And the fact they're so young. Yeah. So young. Such courage. Great episode, Dominic. We're normally much more flippant than this, aren't we? Well, we have many different tones. There's good in us.

There's good in us too, you know. That's the main message to take away. It's a fabulous story and a great choice. And thank you for doing it. And I hope that you all enjoyed it too. And obviously we will be back, probably with something slightly less heroic and inspirational. But who knows?

I can't tell. We don't know what order these are all going out in. So who knows, but we'll see you tomorrow. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes,

early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip, and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets,

head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.