Speaking of the White Rose:
Worth a listen; lotsa detail that I wasn’t previously aware of.
One point in particular jumped out at me: Hans and Sophie didn’t form the White Rose until 1942. Ten years after Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Chancellor.
Well, in 1933 she was twelve.
Yup. Which meant that she spent almost her entire life saturated in Nazi propaganda.
Despite that, she saw through it, while millions of adults around her did not.
The story of the CLC on the western front is in the second half of this one, BTW:
You know… but I don’t think it’s about “seeing through” anything. It’s a choice to believe the ideology, a choice whether or not to stand up to it if you don’t believe it. Many embraced it, some didn’t and some of those chose to do nothing, for any number of reasons.
We’re all still drowning in propaganda, and making choices about whether to believe it or not, to do something or not, based on whatever circumstances we’re in.
But the point is that she chose to do something, and lost her life for it. But here we are, still talking about her and wondering over her bravery, and questioning our own.
In order to be able to make a choice one must be aware that there is a choice, an alternative.
In 1934 Sophie Scholl joined the Bund Deutscher Mädel and was quite committed, raising from simple member to Scharführerin.
Likewise, her brother Hans Scholl joined the Hitlerjugend and also started to raise through the ranks.
This might have just as well set them on a path towards joining the NSDAP as a true believer and from there to God knows what.
But they were lucky to have people in their life who demonstrated that there were different ways of doing things.
Apart from their parents1), oddly enough one of them, Max von Neubeck, was the local head of the HJ unit Hans Scholl was in. Neubeck was an ex-member of Eberhard Koebel’s Deutsche Jungenschaft vom 1. November 1929 (dj.1.11)2) and ran things slightly different. (It gets quite complicated after that.)
A later influence was Otl Aicher and the teachings of Augustine of Hippo. And her experience of working as an educator at a kindergarten in Blumberg3).
What I’m trying to say is that I think that making a choice is preconditioned by acquiring the resources to do it. To realize that there is both a choice and the obligation to make it.
Like getting information from other sources, different viewpoints, objective facts (and learning how to do that). Develop independent and critical thought. Formulating one’s own standpoint. Seeing things as they are. All that.
And that’s a process that is unlikely to start spontaneously out of thin air, something, someone has to trigger it. The seed of doubt. Could be the most minute, trivial thing.
1) It is known that Hans joined the Hitlerjugend against the will of his father. The parents were politically liberals (in the Weimar-era sense) protestants, Magdalena was a deaconess until she married. Hans was a member of the YMCA before joining the HJ.
2) dj.1.11 was founded as an alternative to the Bündische Jugend and was somewhat leaning towards the left. They tried to come to some sort of arrangement with the Reichsjugendführung that would allow dj.1.11 to continue within the Hitlerjugend. Sort of worked for two years or so, after that is was toe the line, or else. The Scholls weren’t the only ones from that vicinity ending up actively resisting the regime, for instance Willi Graf and Helle Hirsch.
3) A rural village of 700, transformed overnight into a mining town in 1937 as part of Göring’s 4-year-plan. Iron ore for building up the military-industrial complex. Then, in 1942, the mine was closed down from one day to another.
Fascinating. Still quite obscure, the best I could find about this at a pinch is this:
Got me thinking about the calculations you might do as a parent in pre-war Europe. Sending your kids on a month long sea voyage to Australia in 1939 sounds incredibly risky, but stranding them in Australia, basically forever, might be the best way to save their lives.
That a child raised in that can’t see a choice, but an adult, born before or during Weimar can’t? I’m not sure I buy that. No ideology and propaganda apparatus is so totally and entirely encompassing that no other light or ideas get through.
I agree, and I’m sure there were some who felt like there was no choice, and it probably very much seemed like there was no choice.
Right… and if one was born prior to the rise of the nazis, the Weimar was much more open and connected to the rest of the world. Many came into nazi germany with the knowledge of alternatives.
Agreed, and those existed inside Nazi germany. They exist inside any and all totalitarian societies, because the beast, no matter how total, always has cracks.
My point is not to “blame” so much as to complicate here. People made choices as this was ongoing. I think our job here is more to understand how and why people made those choices.
That is part of the point I was trying to make; we were talking about people who were barely teens in 1933.
Anyone who was around 20 or so in 1933 has some explaining to do.
True, but… childhood can have a profound impact on one’s political development, probably more than we realize. I’d say that much of my current political views, while being informed by my training as a historian, we’re likely formed very early on, growing up in an environment that was very much still deeply segregated, but while also having other counterexamples, such as PBS showing Eyes on the Prize when I was a kid. I can’t imagine that other white children my age did not also see both of these, too? Yet in some cases, they made the decision to go with the prevailing white supremacy of where I lived… I’m not trying to say I’m special or whatever, just that there was a choice available to all of us, and we made it…
Although, given the time we’re discussing, have you seen The Weisse Band? I think that film fits into this discussion somehow? Like the authoritarianism of rural Germany in the 19teens and 20s played a role in the rise of Nazism.
Here’s an interesting short thread:
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And, not unrelatedly:
A dive into a national myth:
Oh, and next time you think you’re going to do good and buy from the local farmers market… do your research on who you’re buying from. Even if you want to avoid the multi-nationals, that “friendly local farmer” just might be a raging white supremacist.
Median, not mean. That definitely is new news to me. It’s not about the corporate farmers making so much more than the few family farms left if we’re talking median.
It seems like an appropriate time for this one:
