by Joyce Lynn

It was a sunny day. I was carrying a child in a long white dress to be baptized. The way to the church led up a steep slope, but I held the child in my arms firmly and without faltering. Then suddenly, the footing gave way, and there was a great crevice on a glacier. I had just time enough to set the child down on the other side before plunging into the abyss.

          — Dream of Sophie Scholl, German student Nazi resister, February 21, 1943

 

A secret Nazi German “military-justice” court tried, convicted of treason, and executed 21-year-old University of Munich biology and philosophy student Sophie Scholl the day after her visionary dream.

Her crime: distributing leaflets calling for freedom from Nazi tyranny.

Sophie explained her dream to other prisoners: The child (in the white dress) is our idea. Despite all obstacles, it will prevail. We were permitted to be pioneers, though we must die early for its sake.

The idea immortalized in leaflets spread throughout Germany—”freedom, freedom of speech, yes; freedom to be human, especially.”

Like the biblical Moses and the civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Scholl envisioned a promised land of freedom and justice, but she would die before she could enter.

In her book The White Rose, Munich 1942-1943, Inge Scholl relates the dream of her sister on the eve of her execution and Sophie’s interpretation.

The Gestapo arrested Scholl, her brother Hans, 25, a medical student at the University of Munich, and their friend Christoph Probst, 23, on February 18, 1943. The hyperbolically named German People’s Court tried the college students. Four days after their arrest, the Gestapo beheaded by guillotine the young students.

Five months later, the Nazis also executed the other White Rose resisters— Kurt Huber, a professor at the University of Munich, and students, Alexander Schmorell and Willi Graf.

The White Rose

The White Rose, the self-anointed name of the student-led passive resistance group, mobilized “slumbering” Germans to rise against “fascist criminals.”

Their actions, which lasted less than a school semester, made a profound historical difference.

“You can see how life and death and how we live is a long game. You do the right thing, and 60 years later, someone unable to do the right thing at the same time is transformed by your example,” Deborah Ravetz, artist and curator of The Search for the Deep Self, a social sculpture project featuring Scholl and other historical figures, emailed me in 2011.

“When Sophie and her brother and friend died, everyone was astonished at their equanimity. Something profound held them together, and the dream is the mythology in its true sense. The deep story describes the meaning of their life and death.”

Hans and two friends secretly wrote the leaflets in mid-1942. In July, they were conscripted as medics and sent to the Eastern front where they witnessed or learned of the Nazi slaughter of Jews as well as Poles, Roma, gay men, people with disabilities, and others Hitler exterminated in pursuit of a “pure Aryan” race.

The men returned to Munich in the fall and began their peaceful resistance.

Sophie, raised as Lutheran, joined the passive resistance to Nazi fascism. The White Rose circulated their message in leaflets left on street corners, mailed to doctors and lawyers, and stuffed in telephone booths.

The White Rose distributed six leaflets.

The second leaflet excoriated the persecution and genocide of Jews.

From the third leaflet: “The state should exist as a parallel to the divine order, and the highest of all utopias . . .But our present ‘state’ is the dictatorship of evil. . . . Is your spirit already so crushed by abuse you forget it is your right–or rather, your moral duty– to eliminate this system.”

“It must be the sole and first duty, the holiest duty of every German, to destroy these beasts.”

“We must soon bring this monster of a state to an end. A victory of fascist Germany in this war would have immeasurable, frightful consequences.”

Heroine

Under the reign of the Nazi fascists, simply criticizing Adolf Hitler was punishable by death, so the students surreptitiously mailed the flyers or traveled with them stored in suitcases. Sophie and her companions were arrested at the University of Munich while scattering the sixth leaflet from a terrace of the central hall into the courtyard. It was their only public political act.

The sixth and final leaflet relayed the urgency: “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 . . .

“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.”

In July 1943, five months after the executions of Sophie and the White Rose protesters, Allied pilots dropped millions of copies of the sixth leaflet, “The Manifesto of the Students of Munich,” over Germany.

Many Germans recognize Sophie Scholl as the heroine of the twentieth century.

The plaza, the Institute for Political Science at the University of Munich, and hundreds of schools and streets in Germany are named after the Scholls. Stamps commemorate the young resistance fighter.

Sophie Scholl: The Final Days was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 2006.

The story of the courageous student led-White Rose resistance against the suppression and violence of Nazi Germany spread by email after 9/11 when the U.S. Congress enacted the repressive Patriot Act.

One emailer noted the blanketing—virtually—of the globe: “The numbers were far beyond what the small group could have imagined during World War 2 using a secret printing press to imprint their message against the Third Reich.”

Since October 2023, waves of students on US campuses, protesting the US-backed Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, have faced brutal suppression of speech to their peaceful resistance.

Jewish students are integral to the anti-war encampments, sit-ins, and marches.

Last May, more than 750 Jewish students at 140+ US universities signed the Students Encampment Solidarity Open Letter. They wrote: “Since October 7th (2023), many of us have shown up to fight for Palestinian liberation as Jews: Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi, practicing, secular, and everything in between.”

They said “the large populations of Jewish students,” participating and helping to lead the encampments, are “a true expression of our Jewish values. They stressed “the rich Jewish tradition of justice is on full display inside the encampments.”

Eight decades after Sophie’s dream, Jewish students of conscience, with their allies, rise against the violence and inhumanity of fascism perpetrated by the US and Israel against the people of Palestine and for the idea perpetuated by the White Rose—freedom for all.

JOYCE LYNN is the founding director of the Jewish Association of Spirituality and Dreams Ltd. JASD28.org