Underground resistance: The White Rose Group

On 22 February 1943 two siblings, Hans and Sophie Scholl, and their friend Christoph Probst, were sentenced to death by the Nazi regime. They were executed – beheaded – on the same day. Sophie was 21 years old, Hans was 24, and Christoph was 23.

They were part of the White Rose Group from Munich, a network that secretly distributed pamphlets calling their fellow Germans to resist National Socialism. They were unique among German resistance groups because they explicitly mentioned the mass murder of Jews as it happened in real time and called out this out as inhumanity. They were five university students in Munich and their professor: Hans and Sophie Scholl, Alexander Schmorell, Christoph Probst, Willi Graf; Professor Kurt Huber. All six were discovered and executed by the Nazi authorities.

The White Rose Project run out of Oxford University, and the book Defying Hitler: The White Rose pamphlets by Alexandra Lloyd, are excellent sources of English language information about the collaborative effort of this group of friends.

When we describe the White Rose resistance, it seems that it’s helpful to use metaphors of the forest and its underground.

The White Rose members hoped that post-war Europe would flourish again. Even in the dead wood of German culture, nutrients had been stored in underground root systems, nutrients that could generate something wholesome and new.

The White Rose shared cultural nutrients via their underground network as they connected with friends, fertilized their imaginations with art, literature, and Christian theology; and cultivated a moral and ethical vision to resist National Socialism.

One of the White Rose pamphlets expresses the belief that “True anarchy is the generative element of religion.”

Jesus pictures his “kingdom of heaven” – his new religion- as a tiny seed that grows up into a tree with room for birds to nest in its branches. This divinely-planted kingdom is slow-growing but generous and hospitable as it expands. The White Rose resistance shows us how an underground network of friends and the deliberate sharing of cultural goodness can help nurture a new ecosystem into life, even if what is visible above the ground looks chaotic, bleak and barren.

Sophie Scholl’s words, from that day:

How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually for a righteous cause? Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us, thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?

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