Over a period of nine months in 1942-43, a group of students from the University of Munich distributed half a dozen leaflets, collectively titled “The White Rose,” throughout Germany and Austria. The writings declared that their once-beloved country could be saved only by losing the war, and advocated sabotage and the idea that German youth rise up “in both atonement and vengeance to crush its tormentors and to build a new and nobler Europe.”
On Feb. 22, 1943, three of them were tried for high treason-and shortly afterward executed-by the Munich Gestapo, whose arresting officer learned to his horror that the students (two more would eventually be added to the death list) were Aryans, that two of them had been Hitler Youth group leaders and that two were now in army uniform, one a veteran of the eastern front. As a result, the trial was hushed up and a press blackout ordered so as not to stir up the citizenry.
“Stalingrad had just happened-Germany had lost over 300,000 young men-and the population was furious at the defeat,” says Lillian Garrett-Groag, whose play “The White Rose,” based on the trial and executions, opens Wednesday at Evanston’s Northlight Theatre under the direction of Russell Vandenbroucke. “People wearing Nazi Party badges were beat up on the streets. So a trial that should have taken a few months took two hours. These students were a problem, which is why they got rid of them so quickly.
“They arrested them on a Thursday and tried them on Monday morning and killed them at 5 o’clock that afternoon. The news didn’t come out until August. By the end of the year, the last of the pamphlets was smuggled into England, and the (Royal Air Force) made millions of copies and dropped them over Berlin and Munich.”
Early in the play, Robert Mohr, head of the Munich Gestapo, wryly notes that two of the suspects, Hans Scholl and his younger sister, Sophie, “look more Aryan than Frederick the Great.”
None were Jewish
“The main point is that none of the five who were executed-the others were Christoph Probst, Alexander Schmorell and Willi Graf-were Jewish,” Garrett-Groag says over a plate of mussels marinara in an Evanston restaurant (where the waitress, it turns out, is understudying the role of Sophie). “The Nazis tended to equate intellectuals with Jews. This is why they were baffled. A Jew had no choice, but all these kids had to do was keep their mouths shut. Just shut up. This is why I find what they did so spectacular. The White Rose, which became the name of their movement, was powerful, but very few know about it.”
Her interest in writing the play was piqued by stories told about the organization by her father, who had fled Vienna in 1938 after Hitler’s annexation of Austria.
The oldest martyr-not counting the students’ university mentor, philosophy professor Kurt Huber, who would be guillotined in July-was 25. “About 80 students were arrested at one time or another,” Garrett-Groag says. “They helped pass the material around-in places like Hamburg and Stuttgart and Salzburg-and made contacts with other universities. But these five were the core.”
The first leaflet of the White Rose-the origin of the name is a mystery, but it may have been designed to symbolize beauty and purity-was circulated in June 1942 and attacked the state’s “monstrous” crimes and “the hubris of a maniac.”
Risky readings
“Nobody dared to mention that he got a leaflet, and nobody dared to keep them,” says Dr. George Wittenstein, a member of the White Rose who later became professor of surgery at UCLA and is now semi-retired in Santa Barbara, Calif. “Because if they found them in someone’s possession, they would end up in a concentration camp.
“I sort of edited the third and fourth leaflets,” says Wittenstein, who was a student at the University of Munich and a soldier in the Student Medical Company, and who was “interviewed” by the Gestapo. “Then I took them to Berlin. Traveling was extremely risky because all men on a train who were of draftable age were constantly searched for ID papers to show they weren’t AWOL. So most of the distribution of leaflets was done by female students. I discovered that if you took a sleeper, you were not searched. You had to leave your papers with the attendant at night, and the police checked the papers with him.”
“You know,” says Garrett-Groag, “when most people hear about `The White Rose,’ they think it’s a `Nazi play.’ They think it’s `The Diary of Anne Frank,’ and that they’re going to watch atrocities. To tell the truth, the kids were very well-treated. They were not beaten up, they were not tortured. Their guards gave them cigarettes and apples. Very odd.
“Actally, the Munich Gestapo was very, very lax. The henchmen out on the street were middle-class guys with suits that were a little worn and who screwed up a lot. So my Gestapo is opposed to our Hollywood impression of the well-oiled machine: the guys with the trenchcoats and black hats arriving in the screeching cars.”
Garrett-Groag, who is also an actress and director, was born in Argentina (where her father settled after escaping from Austria), educated in South America and France and earned her master’s and doctoral degrees in French literature from Northwestern University.
Her father would talk about the White Rose with great respect, but she couldn’t remember what it was about. In 1983 she saw a German movie, “The White Rose,” directed by Michael Verhoeven, and was “blown away.” A couple of years later she was reading some history books, ran across accounts of the movement and began reading memoirs, letters, interrogation transcipts.
Sophie refused acquittal
“They gave all the kids cellmates, so they wouldn’t commit suicide. The woman who was put in the cell with Sophie was a communist named Else Gebel, and she left an entire account of her five days in jail.
“I used the circumstances of what happened in 1942-43 mainly to present the confrontation between Sophie and Mohr, the arresting Gestapo officer. I found myself thinking, `What went through his mind?’ I knew that he had tried to save her life by giving her a paper to sign that said she didn’t know what she was doing. The big thing for them was not to try a girl. They were very embarrassed by the whole thing. They said she was just following her ringleader brother. But she wouldn’t sign.”
“The core of the play is about what happens when the everyday guy takes extreme action, as well as the degree of compromise we all have,” Garrett-Groag says over her seafood. “What would we do if our lives were at stake? Well, I would say anything. Just don’t shoot me. I wouldn’t have joined the Resistance. I would have just sat in my house, paralyzed with fear. But at least the Underground had a group of people behind them. These kids had no one. Even Joan of Arc had the French army. But they had nothing. A mimeograph machine. I mean, it’s just so heartbreaking.”
Wasted lives
And what of those who say the White Rose was a waste of energy and lives because it did nothing tangible to bring down Hitler?
“What concrete thing did they achieve?” Garrett-Groag asks. “Nothing. But I think we’re better off for their having been there. They died for something spectacular. They basically wanted to restore Germany to its glorious past. The hardest thing has been for me to convince the young actors in San Diego and New York who played these roles that there were people who really did die for Schiller and Brahms and Bruckner and symphony orchestras and poetry and a civilization that was being pounded.”
Says Wittenstein: “I don’t think any American can imagine what it is like to live under a dictatorship, where the state is all powerful, you cannot have weapons, where all communication-telephone, radio, newspapers-is under government control. So to have a national movement was absolutely out of the question.
“Also, you never knew who would turn you in. High school and even elementary students were exhorted in school to denounce their parents. Therefore, the only body that could possibly have done anything was the army, but they tried very late. So the aim of the White Rose was not to create an organized resistance, but to wake up the German people. And, in that, it was successful.”
It was Willi Graf who wrote in his diary: “Sometimes you can’t just go where favoring winds send you. Sometimes you must take a direction that isn’t easy.” And it was Sophie Scholl who said sometime during those nine memorable months: “With all those people dying for the regime, it is high time that someone died against it.”
