“We have grown up in a state of ruthless gagging of free expression.” These words, referring to Germany in the 1930s, were written in 1943 by a Munich University philosophy professor, Kurt Huber. They appear in the sixth and final pamphlet written and distributed by White Rose, the pacifist resistance group of a dozen or so brave members who for a time were successful in creating and distributing counter-propaganda in Nazi Germany, giving the impression of being a much larger organisation than they were.
Most were much younger than Huber. Sophie Scholl was just 21 when she and her elder brother, Hans, were captured by the Gestapo after a tip-off by a university janitor that they were distributing their leaflets on campus. The Scholls and several of their resistance colleagues were guillotined soon afterwards. Hans shouted out “Long live freedom” just before the blade fell.
Huber’s pamphlet argued that ideological indoctrination at school was designed to suffocate any independent thought and sense of values in a fog of empty phrases, something the group’s young members had experienced in the decade leading up to their dissent. Huber wanted Germans to rise up and rid themselves of the “dictatorship of evil”, and to achieve free self-determination, individual and collective autonomy. He wanted Germans to take responsibility for who they were and react against totalitarian control.
But by 1943 it was far too late and too dangerous for Germans to resist Nazism by intellectual means. Overt opposition to the party line could lead to imprisonment, torture and death. Yet, despite this, some courageous Germans still risked everything by speaking out. Not being a bystander would cost 5,000 or so opponents of Nazis their lives. Executioners were kept busy. This was the perilous world in which White Rose briefly bloomed.
The last living member of the group, Traute Lafrenz, died last week at the age of 103. She modestly played down her role in comparison with her friends, describing herself as a witness but no hero. Yet, as a medical student at the time and a friend of the Scholls, she was involved in planning, carrying leaflets from Munich to Hamburg, and helping the group to find printing ink. She was part of the network, a dissenter, an active enemy of Nazism.
In 1943, she too was arrested and sentenced to a year in prison for complicity with the group. She managed to persuade the Gestapo that her involvement was more superficial than it had been. After a year she was released, then re-arrested, and was awaiting trial and likely execution when the Americans liberated her shortly before the end of the war. She emigrated to the US, had four children, and went on to run a school for disadvantaged children in Chicago.
Lafrenz later credited her inspirational schoolteacher Erna Stahl as a major influence. Stahl encouraged and exemplified radical independence of thought. She never hid her anti-Nazi views. She was never a bystander. Though sacked from the school and banned from teaching elsewhere, she continued to encourage her loyal young students by running discussion groups ostensibly about literature and culture, yet really about the immorality of Nazism.
While I can’t make this claim for Stahl, the Scholls and for Lafrenz, I like to think that Huber’s background as a philosopher with a special interest in freedom and democracy helped him speak out so forcefully against Nazism. Ever since Socrates declared himself a gadfly irritating the Athenian state with his biting criticisms – and was executed for following his conscience – philosophers have been ready (some would say too ready) to challenge the status quo and to speak truth to power.
Yet, this is wishful thinking: studying philosophy is not a panacea. It didn’t stop the philosopher Martin Heidegger from becoming an enthusiastic Nazi, nor, earlier, prevent the philosopher of language Gottlob Frege from being an antisemite. Argue rigorously from false premises and you can end up just about anywhere.
The White Rose pamphleteers followed their consciences and acted with great bravery. Meanwhile, most of their German contemporaries were silent or else enthusiastic supporters of what was being done in their name. By 1943, even with Hitler’s disastrous war in the east in flow, the intellectual resistance had little chance of stirring up significant dissent.
When the Scholls were executed, a large and noisy demonstration took place in Munich attended by hundreds of students. It was in support of the janitor who had betrayed them. The chance to stem the flow of poison had been missed long before that.
