Advent Day 19: Hans and Sophie Scholl
There is no greater love than to lay down one's life for friends
I will cling to the rope God has thrown me in Jesus Christ, even when my numb hands can no longer feel it. Sophie Scholl
Advent Day 19: Hans and Sophie Scholl
It was June 1942 when the leaflets first appeared in Munich, strewn about university hallways, tucked into telephone booths, mailed to students, professors and prominent citizens:
Every word that comes from Hitler’s mouth is a lie…[Nazism can only] survive on the basis of constant lies…And what is the German nation doing? It sees nothing, it hears nothing. It is blindly following its seducers to destruction…The day of reckoning has come…Everyone is guilty, guilty, guilty!
The leaflets were erudite, quoting heavily from the Bible, Aristotle, iconic German poets Goethe and Schiller, and other wisdom masters. They were also treasonous, imploring Germans to rise up and crush Nazism. And if anyone wished these resistors, who went by the name White Rose, would disappear, or at least stop sending them mail, they were to be disappointed.
We will not keep silent. We are your guilty conscience. The White Rose will not let you alone!
When the leaflets began to surface all around Germany, and the White Rose extended its messaging to urban graffiti, stenciling Down With Hitler and Up With Freedom on city walls, the Gestapo assumed they were facing a sophisticated, nationwide resistance. So in February 1943 when officers made their first arrests in the case, they could not have been more shocked. White Rose was no vast conspiracy. Rather, it was a small, scrappy band of students led by siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl.
Hans Scholl was born in 1918, followed three years later by Sophie. Their early childhood years was lived during the vibrant yet shaky Weimar Republic where the arts flourished and civil rights expanded, especially for women, but where inflation and unemployment were also rampant. A commitment to public service and social action was baked into the Scholl family philosophy. The elder Scholls, Robert and Magdalene, were intellectual, socially-conscious Christians, who expected their children to know the Bible and use it as a guide for living. Robert, especially, urged his children not to be armchair Christians but to play a part in creating a more just world. To make his point he often quoted scripture like James 1:22:
Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you are a listener when you are anything but, letting the Word go in one ear and out the other. Act on what you hear!
Robert Scholl implored his children to always do the right thing. In the future, this ethic would cost the Scholls dearly.
When Hitler came to power, Hans was fifteen and Sophie was twelve. Over the objections of their vehemently anti-Nazi father (Robert would later serve prison time for calling Hitler the scourge of God), they joined the Hitler Youth. This was not out of ideology but rather because all groups not bearing the Nazi stamp of approval were outlawed. For a German kid in the 1930s who wanted to participate in scouting or go camping with friends, there was simply no other choice. However, as the Nazi noose tightened around Germany—as books were banned, Jews were shut out of society and fear turned neighbor against neighbor—Hans and Sophie became disillusioned. The final break came in 1937 when Hans was arrested after removing the swastika from his youth group flag. Though he was released without punishment, the foundation of the siblings’ anti-fascism was laid.
After the outbreak of World War II, all German youth were required to perform terms of service. Sophie was assigned to the National Labor Service as a teacher. The work of indoctrinating young children into Nazi ideology was dispiriting. Sophie got through it by repeating day-in and day-out like a mantra a line from Goethe:
Hold your powers together for something good and let everything go that is, for you, without result and is not suited to you.
Hans was drafted into the miliary where he served on the Eastern front and witnessed firsthand the atrocities committed by Germans against Russians, Poles and Jews. The experience led him to conclude that his faith and upbringing offered him no choice but to try and topple Nazism.
It's high time that Christians make up their minds to do something . . .What are we going to show in the way of resistance-as compared to the Communists, for instance-when all this terror is over? We will be standing empty-handed. We will have no answer when we are asked: What did you do about it?
Sophie also grounded her call to action in a faith that taught her that she only loved God as much as she loved, and was willing to sacrifice for, her neighbor:
I’m a Christian and I’m German. Therefore, I’m responsible for Germany.
When their terms of service ended, Hans and Sophie met back in Munich where they enrolled at university and shared an apartment. It didn’t take long for the two, along with a few friends and a sympathetic professor, to hatch a plan to destabilize the Third Reich. Using a hand-copier and paper they’d attained at great risk, they decided to blanket Munich in leaflets calling for the overthrow of Hitler, and signed by the name they chose for their secret group: White Rose.
The first leaflet appeared in Munich in late June 1942. Others soon followed. To give the illusion of a mass movement, they traveled to other cities where they distributed broadsides and graffitied buildings with anti-Hitler slogans. Their work provoked outrage. Nazi students protested, calling for the deaths of the traitors. The Gestapo assigned a team of detectives to root them out.
Hans and Sophie managed to avoid detection for months. Then, the morning of February 18, 1943, they passed through the empty hallways of Munich’s Ludwig Maximilian University, dropping fliers outside lecture halls. When classes ended and students poured into the hallways, the Scholls still had fliers left. In a spontaneous act, Sophie flung them over a railing where they floated like confetti down through the building’s atrium and landed in the university courtyard. A janitor who witnessed the action promptly reported them. Within minutes, Hans and Sophie were arrested, followed soon by their best friend Cristoph Probst.
During his interrogation, Hans was asked if he understood the gravity of what he’d done. He replied with clear purpose and without regret:
I knew what I took upon myself and I was prepared to lose my life by so doing.
Four days later he, Sophie and Christoph were put on trial. The outcome was not in question. The Nazi judge railed at them as degenerate traitors and allowed no witnesses in their favor. Sophie offered their sole defense:
Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said is believed by many others. They just don’t dare to express themselves like we do.
In the middle of the proceedings, Robert Scholl forced his way into the courtroom to try and defend his children. As he was carted out by guards, he shouted, “One day there will be another kind of justice!”
At 4pm on February 22, 1943, Hans, Sophie and Cristoph were sentenced to death, with their executions set for 5pm. In a short visit with their parents, Hans said little while Sophie remained steadfast and bravely cheerful. When her mother gently told her to keep her mind on Jesus as she went to the guillotine, Sophie reassured her she would. Then Hans and Sophie were led back to their cells where Sophie’s bunkmate recorded her last known words:
How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause? It is such a splendid sunny day, and I have to go…how many have to die on the battlefield in these days, how many young, promising lives. [My death will] matter if by our acts thousands are warned and alerted. Among the student body there will certainly be a revolt.
Sophie went to her death silently as did Cristoph Probst. Hans followed a few minutes later. As he laid his head on the block he cried out, “Long live freedom!”
By most worldly standards, Hans and Sophie Scholl and their friends were spectacular failures. Their actions led not to the uprising Sophie predicted but to their deaths. And yet, like so many mystics, saints and prophets who met untimely ends—like Jesus himself—death is not the criteria by which history has judged them. Rather, it is the timeless example of their humility, sacrifice and courage. While thousands of schools and streets are named for the Scholl siblings and their friends, none are named for those who convicted and killed them. Their success lay not in avoiding death but in their brave embodiment of Jesus’s teaching from the Gospel of John: There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for friends. This is, as Hans and Sophie’s father would say, another kind of justice—the light that the darkness has never, and will never, put out.
Practice
Set an intention to honor the legacy of Sophie and Hans Scholl by standing up for justice, mercy and love in 2023. You can do this through prayer, meditation, journaling, candle-lighting, or any other practice to which you bring your presence and purpose.
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Didn't know that story. So glad I do now. Thank you.