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The White Rose - Peter Lemkin - 11-12-2024
The White Rose, 1942-43: An Anti-Fascist Social Network in an Analog Era
In June 1942, one hundred people in Munich received a shocking letter in the mail. Signed by “the White Rose Society,” it asked Germans to “adopt passive resistance – resistance – wherever you are, and block the functioning of this atheistic war machine before it is too late…Don’t forget that every people gets the government it deserves!”
Three more missives appeared over the next six weeks, reaching thousands throughout southwest Germany and up to Hamburg. A fifth (written with Munich University professor Kurt Huber) appeared in early 1943.
The Munich University students behind the letters had absorbed lessons in mass communications from the regime they so despised. As the brother-sister conspirators Sophie and Hans Scholl stated, their goal was to produce “compelling propaganda” that would “impact a large part of the population.” While the Scholls grew up with an anti-Nazi father, they knew how Nazi institutions operated. Hans Scholl was a former Hitler Youth squad leader, and other members of the group had served in the military.
Building a chain of collaborators that reached to Vienna, the White House expanded from letters to graffiti actions, like painting “Hitler mass murderer” on a Munich bookshop, and they distributed leaflets at train stations and phone booths. Most recipients of the letters were chosen because their jobs put them in contact with many people, as with educators, doctors, and owners of restaurants, pubs, and bookshops.
The White Rose letters asked the recipients to copy the messages and spread them “from person to person.” Working in an analog era and in a police state, they tried to construct an anti-fascist social network.
The White Rose eluded the authorities throughout eight months of activity, even when the Gestapo hired a philologist to examine the letters for clues to their identities. But on February 18, 1943, Sophie Scholl was spotted distributing copies of their 6th letter at Munich University. She and Hans were arrested and executed just four days later. Their fellow students and Huber were also rounded up and killed.
In death, the White Rose gained the mass audience they’d dreamed of; Allied aircraft dropped tens of thousands of their letters over the country. “I had to act out of my inner conviction and I believed this inner obligation was more binding than the oath of loyalty I had given as a soldier,” Hans Scholl told Gestapo interrogators, explaining his actions.