This year an Instagram docudrama has attracted almost 800 thousand followers about a young woman who was born 100 years ago. With a weekly round-up in both German and English it is called Ich Bin Sophie Scholl. I am Sophie Scholl.

Who was Sophie Scholl? Most Germans can tell you, but very few Americans. In 1942 and ’43, in the midst of Germany’s total war and genocide of Jews, Sophie and her brother, Hans, with several other Munich University students and a professor formed a secretive anti-Nazi cell called The White Rose.  This arricle first appeared on Medium.com

In Germany hundreds of streets and schools are named after the Scholls. Dozens of articles, books, plays, and films have addressed the courageous work of the Scholls and the others in The White Rose: Willi Graf, Christoph Probst, Alexander Schmorell and Kurt Huber. Commemorative stamps feature Sophie Scholl’s image. A museum and memorial at the University of Munich are dedicated to Sophie, Hans and the White Rose. In 2003 Sophie Scholl was named the fourth most favorite German after Konrad Adenaur, Martin Luther and Karl Marx.

In honor of Sophie’s 100th birthday on May10, 2021 a German broadcast company launched the Instagram story featuring a young actress as Scholl, talking directly and intimately to camera and re-enacting scenes with her friends and collaborators while archival photos and film footage resurrect the era.

Focusing on Sophie, The Instagram narrative draws from her diaries, letters, and activities as a young student in 1942 Munich. We watch her wrestling with the moral and spiritual dilemma of living under the horrors of Nazism, a world war and choosing to resist while sorting out what it means to become a young woman.

The actions of The White Rose revolved around the writing and distribution of long-winded, single-spaced leaflets making impassioned moral arguments for passive resistance to the Nazi regime. Active resistance, they knew, meant concentration camps, torture and a potential death sentence.

…every individual has to consciously accept his responsibility…to arm himself as best he can to work against the scourges of humanity, against fascism and every other form of the absolute state. — from the first leaflet of The White Rose

The White Rose argued for their readers to seek truths, to think critically, and reclaim Christian ethics in resisting the evils of Nazism, its propaganda and total war effort. In those leaflets they quoted from the Bible and Lao Tzu, as well as German romantic writers like Goethe, Schiller, and Novalis, while appealing for justice and reason, for freedom of expression and spirit, condemning the racism, nationalism and irrationalism at the heart of the Nazi enterprise. They wanted to stop Hitler and his killing machine. Their actions during war were considered treasonous.

From the summer of 1942 into early 1943, when Axis and Allied bombings were escalating, Germany’s most brutal conflict was playing out in Stalingrad, The White Rose produced six leaflets. Sophie and others in the group not only mailed these leaflets out to addresses in Munich but took dangerous train trips with leaflet-stuffed suitcases to deliver to their collaborators — student resistance cells — in a half dozen German cities as well as Vienna.

It is almost impossible today to conjure the perils of such a project — even to purchase a duplicating machine, stencils, quantities of stationary, envelopes and postage stamps was highly suspicious. After nights of heated discussions together and conversations with their mentor, Carl Muth, founder, editor and publisher of Hochland, a cultural and philosophical journal shut down by the Nazis in 1941, they compiled names and addresses of intellectuals and some business owners who might be susceptible to their deeply humanistic arguments. (Carl Muth is my husband’s grand uncle).

Before Hochland was banned, Muth had published articles by Nazi-resisters like Theodor Haecker and Jewish writers using pseudonyms. In the Instagram story we also learn that Sophie and Hans sometimes lived in Muth’s house until it became uninhabitable from Allied bombing raids in late 1942. And when Sophie traveled to other cities to distribute leaflets, she had only to mention Muth’s name and sympathizers would offer a meal, a bed and a donation to support their efforts but were usually too cautious to become fellow activists.

Hans Scholl, like the other young male students in the White Rose, was a medical student, and like all young German men, obligated to join in the war effort. For part of 1942 they were all stationed at the deteriorating Russian front as medics. What they witnessed there profoundly affected them. They were appalled at the treatment of Russians and the sacrificing of hundreds of thousands of German youths in the belligerent campaign of a fascist dictatorship. On the way back to Munich Hans’ train stopped near a concentration camp, and he witnessed personally the devastated condition of people doing forced labor.

It is unclear whether in mid-1942, Hans or others in The White Rose were cognizant of The Killing Centers at specified concentration camps which had just been instigated by the Nazi high command. The Nazis had labeled their mass transportation of Jews to those “centers” as “resettlement” projects. In their leaflets the White Rose demanded an end to the persecution of Jews, revealing some knowledge of the catastrophic events in Poland.

“…since the conquest of Poland three hundred thousand Jews have been murdered in that country 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…” — from the second leaflet of The White Rose

In the Instagram narrative, on Nov. 9, 1942 a distraught Sophie reflects on the horrors of Kristallnacht — the Night of Broken Glass — on that date in 1938 (four years earlier when she was 17) when Nazi SA troops took sledgehammers to synagogues and Jewish owned businesses, buildings, schools and homes throughout Germany, Austria and Sudetenland and some 30,000 Jewish men were taken to concentration camps.

Four years later, in 1942, with each leaflet by The White Rose their arguments became more strident and their understanding of the dangers they were courting grew more intense. Given that you could be imprisoned for listening to the BBC or speaking negatively of Hitler or the Nazi enterprise, their actions were not only courageous but suicidal.

By their third leaflet in mid-1942 they were provoking people to commit sabotage however they could. They encouraged readers “to sabotage armament industries…assembles, rallies, ceremonies and organizations sponsored by the National Socialist Party.” They challenged readers to “obstruct the smooth functioning of the war machine,” whether it be in universities, laboratories or technical agencies.

“Sabotage all branches of the arts that have even the slightest dependence on National Socialism or serve it in any way. Sabotage all publications, all newspapers, that are in the pay of the ‘government.’”— from the third leaflet of The White Rose

 

By early 1943 two White Rose members were also painting graffiti images around Munich — Down with Hitler or Freedom! Simultaneously they reached out to the now famous Berlin resistance group, The Red Orchestra, and to Rev. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran minister who spoke out against the genocidal persecution of Jews and the Nazi euthanasia program (that had already killed 200,000). Through his underground seminary and churches Bonhoeffer mobilized Protestants to resist the Nazi effort to create a unified Evangelical pro-Nazi denomination. While his ministry and writings were banned his underground resistance activities included helping Jews escape to Switzerland. The Scholls had been raised in a devout Protestant household. We can hear Bonhoeffer’s voice in some of the leaflets:

”…if he (the German) does not protest whenever he can against this gang of criminals, if he doesn’t feel compassion for the hundreds of thousands of victims — not only compassion, much more: guilt. For his apathy allows these evil men to act as they do; …indeed he himself is to blame for the fact that it came about at all!”— from the second Leaflet of The White Rose

Their sixth leaflet was directed at German youth, especially their fellow students at the university. It decries the three hundred and thirty thousand German soldiers who have been “led to slaughter at the Russian front,” (final numbers of casualties were much higher) and encourages German youth to “fight back, and atone, smash our tormentors and set up a new Europe of the spirit…the dead of Stalingrad beseech us!”

“We grew up in a state where all free expression of opinion has been suppressed. The Hitler Youth, the SA, and the SS have tried to drug us, to revolutionize us, and to regiment us in the most promising years of our lives.”— from the Sixth Leaflet of Resistance (The White Rose)

Here the writers are acknowledging that they, like all non-Jewish youngsters, had been part of Hitler Youth.

 

 

Then came their fatal mistake. Hans and Sophie decided to leave piles of this leaflet outside classrooms at the University of Munich. In a rash moment they threw the remaining leaflets over the balcony of the entrance hall — an iconic scene that has been reproduced in films about The White Rose. Their bold action was observed and reported by the university janitor, a Nazi sympathizer. The doors were all locked until the Gestapo arrived to arrest them along with fellow White Rose member, Christoph Probst, whose draft of the seventh, the next leaflet, was in Hans’ pocket.

The producers of Instagram’s I Am Sophie Scholl story have stated they will continue the series until February 18, 2022 culminating on that date in 1943 when Sophie, Hans and Christoph were arrested. How will they address what happened next?

Four days after their arrest, Sophie, Hans, and Christoph were beheaded following a one-day trial before the infamous Nazi judge, Roland Freisler. That year seven members of The White Rose were guillotined. Collaborators in the Hamburg resistance cell were also executed. Many more were imprisoned.

Copies of the sixth leaflet were smuggled out of the country by a close associate of the White Rose, Hans Leipelt, and found their way into the hands of the Royal Air Force who reproduced it and dropped millions of copies over Germany. Leipelt was arrested and guillotined in October 1943.

 

Given that the resistance in Germany made little difference in the Nazi steamroller of brutal war and genocide of the Jews of Europe, the endurance of the memorializing of the White Rose and Sophie Scholl in Germany could be a mystery. And one might ask: Why look at this history now?

Historians Annette Dumbach and Jud Newborn, authors of Sophie Scholl and The White Rose offer one explanation:

“The impact of the White Rose cannot be measured in tyrants destroyed, regimes overthrown, justice restored…their significance is deeper; it goes even beyond the Third Reich, beyond Germany: if people like those who formed the White Rose can exist, believe as they believed, act as they acted, maybe it means that this weary, corrupted, and extremely endangered species we belong to has the right to survive, and to keep on trying.”

We may never know the level of fear of the Nazi state and military machine that so many shared. Most who experienced the depths of its depravity perished. If you were not Jewish…or Communist… the temptation to keep your head down and close off any counter information to the Nazi dis-information apparatus must have been powerful. You might lose your job, your business, your home, or your life.

Why did the Scholls and their collaborators choose to resist when so few others did?

 

In Germany scholars have unearthed more documents to indicate that Hans Scholl had been briefly jailed as a teenager for a homosexual relationship. His age liberated him from a lengthy prison sentence, but the episode may have been the final break with Hitler Youth and Nazi ideology which he had been pushing back against. Robert Zoske, a Protestant minister, has insisted in his writing about Sophie Scholl that it was her Protestant faith that propelled her.

Some scholars have drawn attention to the father of Hans and Sophie. Robert Scholl was a tax administrator and mayor of his town. He had been a pacifist during WWI and then jailed twice for his comments opposing Nazism. One scene in the Instagram series shows the Scholl family reuniting after he is let out of jail.

Robert Scholl had argued vigorously with his kids when they wanted to be part of the conformist and ideologically controlled Hitler Youth organization where young people bonded over hikes in the countryside and rallies singing nationalist songs. These experiences had an enormous galvanizing effect on the consciences of young people eager for a sense of belonging and acceptance.

 

Hans and Sophie began to question their Hitler Youth experience when only certain activities, books and folk songs were permitted. It explains why they took such care to critique conformist thinking in their leaflets, to use the arguments of philosophers and theologians to challenge the mindless obedience to Nazi propaganda.

In Munich they were also influenced by Carl Muth who may have offered the final push in their speaking truth to power. Apparently, Muth tried to discourage them from distributing leaflets so flagrantly at the university. A family anecdote reports that the Gestapo ransacked his office on the day of their arrest, but the sixth leaflet that they had brought by earlier stuck to the inside top of his desk when the police yanked open the drawers. While he was not arrested — perhaps because of his age, 76 — at the news of their execution, he suffered a heart attack which ultimately killed him.

What meaning does this history have today?

In Germany, the contemporary Left has made claims to Sophie Scholl. Annalena Baerbock, the Green Party’s candidate who had a shot at becoming the new Chancellor, has named Sophie Scholl as one of her “heroes.” And Carola Rackete, the former captain of the migrant rescue ship, Sea-Watch, who defied Italian government orders to stay out of Italian waters with her refugee ship, has tweeted, “If #SophieScholl was alive today I am pretty sure she would be part of local #Antifa organizations.”

On the other side of the political spectrum, almost eighty years after her execution, Sophie Scholl is being appropriated by the far right in Germany. In November 2020, at a right wing AfD party rally against Covid restrictions in Hanover, a young woman burst onto the stage screaming: “Hello, I’m Jana from Kassel. And I feel like Sophie Scholl because for months I have been active in the resistance, given speeches, attended demos, handed out flyers.” She said that she too was 22 years old, “just like Sophie Scholl when she fell victim to the National Socialists.” The video went viral. It was an act that shocked a lot of Germans. One guard at the event, apparently, removed his vest and handed in his resignation.

Ludwig Spaenle, Bavaria’s Anti-Semitism Commissioner, was one of the first to speak out, “By trivializing the Holocaust and dictatorship these activists are endangering democracy.”

Jana from Kassel’s act was not an isolated instance as anti-vaxxers, Covid deniers and conspiracy theorists have used Sophie Scholl’s statements in their materials. At a street demonstration one anti-lockdown demonstrator hung a placard around her neck featuring Sophie Scholl’s photo.

Journalist Klaus Neumann reports that in 2017, a few months before the national elections propelled the AfD into federal parliament for the first time, the party’s south Nuremberg branch posted an image of Sophie Scholl on its Facebook page with a quote taken from the first leaflet of the White Rose:

“Nothing is as unbecoming for a civilized nation as to let itself be ‘governed’ willingly by a ruling clique that acts irresponsibly and is driven by dark instincts.”

This post was accompanied by the statement “Sophie Scholl would have voted AfD.” Anti-vaxxers in the UK and Netherlands have also used Sophie Scholl on their websites.

“Followers of conspiracy theories like to imagine themselves as victims,” says Samuel Salzborn, Berlin’s Anti-Semitism Commissioner, “while demonizing and delegitimizing the democratic field.” Jens-Christian Wegner, a scholar who specializes in the politics of memory, agrees. “The far right is rewriting history and reversing guilt.”

We are familiar in the United States with the far right posing as victims and blaming others. During the extreme right and Neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville in 2017, torch bearers rallied under the chant. “Jews will not replace us!” The following day a car was intentionally driven into a crowd of protestors killing Heather Heyer and injuring others. At this months’ trial of the alt-Right leaders involved in organizing that rally, evidence revealed the strategic plan to drive cars into crowds of protestors purposely to kill them.

There is much to learn from events in Germany from the end of WWI to the end of WWII in terms of how a fascist movement gains credibility and power, how other political perspectives are silenced, how facts are turned into opinion, how economic issues are exploited, how labeling an enemy within builds, how tyranny takes hold. By promoting the fear of Communism, Nazis made people believe that the Social Democrats (the oldest party in Germany) and Communists were the worse evil. Jews were objectified as Communists, the enemy, rats and vermin. Next, it became legitimate to eliminate them. So, too, anyone in the U.S. who believes in the role of the federal government to provide affordable housing, health care, a decent minimum wage and a social safety net for the poor and vulnerable, is branded a “socialist” or Communist. What is the next step in the objectification process?

As I write, Trump and his Republican supporters are endorsing a Congressman who has posted a video whereby he kills “AOC,”(Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) an outspoken progressive Congresswoman, labeled Communist by Republicans, and is going after President Biden with a sword. This man sits in the U.S. Congress. As do others who supported the Jan. 6 attack on the nation’s Capitol.

Reversing victim and perpetrator, the verdict on the Kyle Rittenhouse case is in, as this piece publishes. His acquittal for all homicide charges when he took a semi-automatic rifle across state lines (at age 17) to an anti-racial protest “to protect a business from rioters,” but ended up shooting and killing two protestors and wounding a third sends a chill to Americans who have a right to peacefully protest.

American historian, Heather Cox Richardson, quotes from a Neo-Nazi website, VDARE, following the verdict: “Rittenhouse is the kind of hero we’ve been waiting for throughout the turbulent summer of 2020, where a Black Lives Matter/Antifa/Bolshevik Revolution has our country on the brink of chaos.”

 

Our democracy is under serious threat as we watch conspiracy theorists, extremists and White supremacists take over the Republican Party, moving toward majorities in Congress and the Senate, state legislatures, the federal courts as well as the Supreme Court. Robert Kagan, writing in the Washington Post warns that the stage is being set by Trump and his supporters for chaos. “In other countries a fascist leader arises when would be opponents are paralyzed in confusion…appeasement begins with underestimation” which is an analysis Timothy Snyder has proffered in his book, On Tyranny.

Today, conservative and extreme right parents are challenging school boards — often with the threat of violence — because of mask mandates then demanding certain books be banned. Some even call for the burning of books, a grim reminder of the book burning that began in Nazi German in 1933. The attack on the Capitol in Washington, D.C. on January 6 was a warning that the extreme right is willing to use violence as it threatens the lives of democratically elected leaders.

Kagan argues that the potential for mass violence is becoming increasingly credible. “Already, there have been threats to bomb polling sites, kidnap officials and attack state capitols. ‘You and your family will be killed very slowly,’ the wife of Georgia’s top election official was texted earlier this year. “

As we witness the rise of fascism in the U.S., Eastern Europe, and elsewhere, we need models of heroic behavior as a beacon for our existence. As rational individuals committed to democracy and egalitarianism, to human rights, planetary and species rights, respect and non-violence we ask: What would I do? Would I have seen it coming? Will I see it now? How long will I watch hate crimes, the persecution of others, the loss of rights, the manipulation of institutions and ethics until I will act? Blacks in the U.S. have long wondered when Whites would ask these questions about how White Supremacy — and its handmaiden, fascism — has functioned.

In the U.S. we have witnessed brave resisters take on the powerful White Supremacist forces of our body politic, most particularly during the era of Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement. In 2020, a multi-racial movement, organized by Black Lives Matter, challenged the impunity for White police officers who kill Blacks. It spread like a prairie fire around the globe. But racism and its collorary, fascism, continue to grow.

Will you resist? What will you do?