If you attended public school in America, there is a good chance you never heard of Sophie Scholl and her patriotic siblings. There are some things even our allegedly free speech supporting government does not want kids to learn about in school. Like the low tech way “White Rose” came up with, to run an effective underground resistance movement. What do you do when the oppressive Socialist dictators control all the media outlets? Turn to leaflets and graffiti. Today, there’s an even better idea. Stickers.
Story of Sophie Scholl
Sophie Scholl was defiant up to the very minute she lost her head to a Gestapo guillotine, along with her brother and a close friend, at the age of 21. “It was worth it,” she declared.
“I am, now as before, of the opinion that I did the best that I could do for my nation. I therefore do not regret my conduct and will bear the consequences that result from my conduct.”
In the earliest days of Adolph Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, mind control and propaganda were rampant.
Young teenagers today, swayed by the anarchist antics of Antifa® and buffaloed by Black Lives Matter™, have become the newest brown shirts. Just like them, Sophie Scholl fell for the Socialist party. Hook, line, and sinker.
Her dad was a former mayor turned accountant for the local government, where he had an office in the Medieval town of Ulm. Robert Scholl was politically conservative and didn’t approve of his daughter’s Socialist ideas and barbaric friends.
By age 11, Sophie, “along with most of her siblings, was an excited and happy follower of the National Socialist cult of youth.” She got sucked into the movement by “the focus on nature and communal experiences.” She quickly became active in the League of German Girls, “rising in their ranks.” Her dad meanwhile “viewed the developments in Germany and their children’s interest in Nazism with growing fear and horror.”
Founders of White Rose
Robert Scholl managed to convince his kids around the dinner table to put the propaganda under a microscope. When they did, “Sophie’s siblings, especially her oldest brother Hans,” went underground, to start a resistance movement.
Hans and Sophie were founding members of White Rose. Like other “non-Nazi groups of young people,” they focused on the “love for nature, outdoor adventures, as well as the music, art and literature of German Romanticism,” but not the Nazi propaganda and rigidly controlled functions.
As one such alternative group after another “were slowly dissolved and finally banned by 1936,” Hans “was arrested in 1937 along with several of the Scholl siblings. This arrest left a mark on Sophie’s conscience and began the process that eventually turned her from happy supporter of the Nazi system to active resistance fighter.”
White Rose gradually evolved into “a resistance group run by students at the University of Munich who distributed leaflets and used graffiti to decry Nazi crimes and the political system, while calling for resistance to the Nazi state and the war.”
Hitler invaded Poland bringing France and Britain into the war so the “older Scholl brothers were sent off to fight on the front.” They were not happy with the barbarically evil things they were seeing from their German officers. Sophie hoped to evade the civil version of the draft requiring everyone to “work for the state” by becoming a kindergarten teacher but it didn’t work.
She had to put her plans to study biology and philosophy on hold. Instead, While studying Biology at the university in Munich, she put the philosophy she had already learned into practice. “Starting in June 1942, they began printing and distributing leaflets in and around Munich, calling their fellow students and the German public to action.”
The inner circle
They brought others into their inner circle, eventually writing four pamphlets by the end of the year. Along with Hans and Sophie Scholl, “fellow students Alexander Schmorell, Willi Graf, Christoph Probst, and a professor of philosophy and musicology at the University of Munich, Kurt Huber” joined the plot. “Together, they published and distributed six pamphlets,first typed on a typewriter,then multiplied via mimeograph.”
They went through the phone book to find addresses of professors, scholars and others who may be sympathetic to the cause but stamps and envelopes were hard to come by, being closely regulated by the Gestapo. That’s where their supporters came in. Today we have email which is free and email addresses can be collected from all over the place.
The next stage was recruiting White Rose supporters to copy and distribute leaflets on their own, thereby giving the impression that the group was active all across the country. One of the most powerful leaflets the Scholl siblings wrote could apply just as well today.
“Our current ‘state’ is the dictatorship of evil. We know that already, I hear you object, and we don’t need you to reproach us for it yet again. But, I ask you, if you know that, then why don’t you act? Why do you tolerate these rulers gradually robbing you, in public and in private, of one right after another, until one day nothing, absolutely nothing, remains but the machinery of the state, under the command of criminals and drunkards?” Instead of drunkards we have crack heads but the idea is the same. The rats at the FBI have been guarding the federal cheese for years.
Their campaign was so effective it was having an effect on the war overall. By then the Eastern Front was collapsing and Hitler was on the run. On February 18, 1943, Hans and Sophie were passing out flyers around campus until Sophie Scholl thought she had a great idea. They went to a balcony over the central hall and tipped a whole stack over the rail. It really pissed of the janitor. He happened to be a devout Nazi and turned them in.
Two days later, they were decapitated for it. Their friends were rounded up and met the same fate. That’s what happens when you’re right and it messes with a powerful regime. Today, once again there are folks ready to die for their principles. They need support. All it takes is a printer to join the resistance.
