German History
Appended below is a translation of the sixth and last anti-war leaflet of the White Rose group. This group, which was founded in 1942, composed, printed, and distributed anti-war leaflets under extremely dangerous conditions and for which the penalty, if caught, was death. In the period during which the group operated, June 1942 to February 1943, Germany had already begun to lose the war. The annihilation of the 6th Army at Stalingrad was completed by the end of January 1943.
The quantity of the first four leaflets printed was approximately 200 each. The fifth had approximately six to nine thousand and was distributed in cities in southern Germany. The Gestapo was aware of the existence of the leaflets but was unable to trace their source until they were notified by a janitor at Munich University who saw Sophie and Hans Scholl distributing them. The two were arrested on February 18, and, along with Christoph Probst, tried and executed on February 22. Three additional members of the group were tried and executed in April and until mid-1944 there were five additional trials which resulted in prison terms up to 12 years.
Interestingly, British intelligence obtained a copy of the last leaflet from which it prepared a leaflet which was air-dropped over Germany in July 1943.
Men and Women Co-Militants!Devastated, our people are confronted by the utter defeat of our men at Stalingrad. The brilliant strategy of the World War I Private has senselessly and irresponsibly rushed three hundred thousand German men to death and ruin. We thank you, our Leader! There is growing unrest among the German people: Do we want to continue to trust the destiny of our army to a dilettante? Do we want to sacrifice the rest of our German youth to the basest power instincts of a Party clique? Not any more! The day of reckoning has come, the reckoning of German youth with the most loathsome tyranny that our people has ever had to put up with. From Adolf Hitler's government, and in the name of the entire German people, we demand personal freedom, the most valuable possession of the Germans, out of which he cheated us in the most wretched manner. We grew up under a government which ruthlessly gagged every free expression of opinion. The HJ [Hitler Youth], SA [Storm Troops], and SS [Protective Staff] have sought to uniformize, to revolutionize, and to narcotize us in the most fruitful learning years of our lives. This contemptuous method of suffocating emerging independent thinking and self evaluation in a fog of empty phrases was called "Real-Worldly Visualization Training." A leadership elite, a more diabolical and at the same time more narrow-minded example of which can hardly be imagined, trains its future Party bigwigs in monkish citadels to be ungodly, shameless, and unscrupulous exploiters and murderous gangs, to blind and stupid obedience. We "intellectual workers" were right to turn this new ruling class into a negative example. Front line soldiers were disciplined like schoolboys by student leaders and district leader aspirants, district leaders injure the honor of female students with dirty jokes. German female students at Munich University have given a proper response to this defilement of their honor and male students have defended their female comrades and stood their ground. That is a beginning to regaining our independent self-determination without which spiritual values cannot be achieved. We are grateful to the brave male and female comrades who, with their illuminating example, have preceded us! We have only one slogan: Struggle against the Party! Leave the Party organizations which seek to keep us politically silent! Leave the lecture rooms of the SS sub-Brigadiers, Brigadiers, and Party toadies! For us the issue is true knowledge and intellectual freedom! No threats can frighten us, nor the closing of the universities. The struggle of each of us matters, for our future, our freedom, and honor in a government that is conscious of its moral responsibility. Freedom and honor! In ten years, Hitler and his comrades have made those glorious German words loathsome by emptying them of their content, turning them into clichés, and twisting their meaning the way only dilettantes, who throw the highest values of a nation before swine, can. In ten years of destroying all material and intellectual freedom and all moral substance in the German people, they have amply demonstrated what freedom and honor means to them. The bloodbath they have instigated, and each day continue to instigate, in Europe in the name of freedom and honor of the German nation has opened the eyes of even the most ignorant German. The reputation of Germany will be forever disgraced if German youth doesn't finally stand up, and both avenge and expiate, smash its tormenters, and establish a new, spiritual Europe. Men and women students! The German people are looking to us! As it expected us in 1813 to smash the Napoleonic dictatorship, it expects us in 1943 to smash the National Socialist terror with the power of the spirit. Beresina and Stalingrad are blazing up in the East, the dead of Stalingrad beseech us! "Wake up my people, the smoke is a sign of flames." Our people are standing up against the enslavement of Europe by National Socialism in a new religious breakthrough of freedom and honor! |