This movie is currently only showing in nine theatres across the U.S. and for whatever reason our Drexel Theatre is one of them. I urge you to take advantage of our access to such a great film.
Sophie Scholl was part of a small student Nazi-resistance group in Munich called the White Rose. They believed the student/educated population in Germany had an obligation to speak/act out against the Nazis because the uneducated could not.
On February 18th, 1943, Sophie and her brother were caught distributing leaflets in their college atrium (the University of Munich.) This German film shows the final four days of her life that followed after she was caught, up to February 22nd, 1943, when she was condemned to death and executed by guillotine hours later. Fellow White Rose members Hans Scholl and Christoph Probst were executed immediately after Sophie. Hans’ last words from the guillotine were “Long live freedom!”
I think what struck me the most about this film was seeing the fear and blind following that was instilled in the German people. When we’re first taught about Nazi Germany we instinctively think “why didn’t the Germans stand up and say no to what Hitler was doing?” But unfortunately it wasn’t that simple. They couldn’t read, write, or even say anything that dissented from Hitler without fear of being caught and possibly killed. If they spoke of freedom and democracy they were accused of treason. If they spoke out against the war and the inevitability of Germany’s defeat, they were accused of troop demoralization.
Despite the risks, the White Rose distributed a series of six leaflets. Sophie Scholl and five others died trying to get these ideas out to people.
Thanks to today’s technology and freedom, the text from all six are available online.
It’s so interesting to read the contents of those leaflets and draw parallels to what our situation is like today. Just replace a few specific references…
- Germany with the United States
- Adolf Hitler with George Bush
- National Socialist Party with Neocon Republican Party
- World War II with War on Terror
- Stalingrad with Iraq
…and they’re every bit as relevent.
Here is the text from the sixth leaflet, the one Sophie Scholl was caught distributing, which lead to her execution:
The Sixth Leaflet of the Resistance
Fellow Fighters in the Resistance!
Shaken and broken, our people behold the loss of the men of Stalingrad. Three hundred and thirty thousand German men have been senselessly and irresponsibly driven to death and destruction by the inspired strategy of our World War I Private First Class. Fuhrer, we thank you!
The German people are in ferment. Will we continue to entrust the fate of our armies to a dilettante? Do we want to sacrifice the rest of German youth to the base ambitions of a Party clique? No, never! The day of reckoning has come – the reckoning of German youth with the most abominable tyrant our people have ever been forced to endure. In the name of German youth we demand restitution by Adolf Hitler’s state of our personal freedom, the most precious treasure we have, out of which he has swindled us in the most miserable way.
We grew up in a state in which all free expression of opinion is unscrupulously suppressed. The Hitler Youth, the SA, the SS have tried to drug us, to revolutionize us, to regiment us in the most promising young years of our lives. “Philosophical training” is the name given to the despicable method by which our budding intellectual development is muffled in a fog of empty phrases. A system of selection of leaders at once unimaginably devilish and narrow-minded trains up its future party bigwigs in the “Castles of the Knightly Order” to become Godless, impudent, and conscienceless exploiters and executioners – blind, stupid hangers-on of the Fuhrer. We “Intellectual Workers” are the ones who should put obstacles in the path of this caste of overlords. Soldiers at the front are regimented like schoolboys by student leaders and trainees for the post of Gauleiter, and the lewd jokes of the Gauleiters insult the honor of the women students. German women students at the university in Munich have given a dignified reply to the besmirching of their honor, and German students have defended the women in the universities and have stood firm…. That is a beginning of the struggle for our free self-determination – without which intellectual and spiritual values cannot be created. We thank the brave comrades, both men and women, who have set us brilliant examples.
For us there is but one slogan: fight against the party! Get out of the party organization, which are used to keep our mouths sealed and hold us in political bondage! Get out of the lecture rooms of the SS corporals and sergeants and the party bootlickers! We want genuine learning and real freedom of opinion. No threat can terrorize us, not even the shutting down of the institutions of higher learning. This is the struggle of each and every one of us for our future, our freedom, and our honor under a regime conscious of its moral responsibility.
Freedom and honor! For ten long years Hitler and his coadjutor have manhandled, squeezed, twisted, and debased these two splendid German words to the point of nausea, as only dilettantes can, casting the highest values of a nation before swine. They have sufficiently demonstrated in the ten years of destruction of all material and intellectual freedom, of all moral substance among the German people, what they understand by freedom and honor. The frightful bloodbath has opened the eyes of even the stupidest German – it is a slaughter which they arranged in the name of “freedom and honor of the German nation” throughout Europe, and which they daily start anew. The name of Germany is dishonored for all time if German youth does not finally rise, take revenge, and atone, smash its tormentors, and set up a new Europe of the spirit. Students! The German people look to us. As in 1813 the people expected us to shake off the Napoleonic yoke, so in 1943 they look to us to break the National Socialist terror through the power of the spirit. Beresina and Stalingrad are burning in the East. The dead of Stalingrad implore us to take action. “Up, up, my people, let smoke and flame be our sign!”
Our people stand ready to rebel against the Nationals Socialist enslavement of Europe in a fervent new breakthrough of freedom and honor.
August 5, 2006: PETA’s Work Continues as the Bombs Fall
