TEXT View source
# 2025-01-31 - We Will Not Be Silent by Russell Freedman
I first learned about the White Roses in 1997 when
Information Society included a scavenger hunt at the end of their
album Don't Be Afraid. The reward for completing this cyberspace
scavenger hunt was a bonus track titled White Roses.
HTML White Roses (song)
TEXT White Rose (student resistance movement)
Since then i have taken an interest in the White Rose. My local
library has an award winning book on this subject in the Young Adult
section: We Will Not Be Silent: The White Rose Student Resistance
Movement That Defied Adolf Hitler by Russell Freedman. The book
includes clear writing, thorough research, and historic photos.
This book was published in 2016, two years before the author died.
What follows are excerpts.
# Chapter 2
When membership in the Hitler Youth became mandatory in 1936, the
Nazis outlawed all other German youth groups.
# Chapter 3
In the autumn of 1937, the Gestapo began a sweeping crackdown on
members of the banned youth group d.j.1.11 and its sympathizers. All
over Germany, young people were arrested and taken to Gestapo
headquarters in Stuttgart, among them Hans's brother, Werner, fifteen
at the time, and his sisters Sophie and Inge. "My parents were
shocked," Inge recalled. "They could not imagine that there were
serious charges against us... Each of us was put in a cell and no one
knew what was going to happen."
# Chapter 4
They asked themselves: How should a responsible citizen act under a
dictatorship? How could they resist the Nazi regime? But it was
dangerous to speak openly in public. "You had to keep everything
secret," recalled George Wittenstein, a fellow medical student who
often joined the group. "You could not even trust your friends... It
would be weeks or months before you knew someone well enough that you
could talk to them."
They heard rumors of death camps in Poland, of the mass murder of
Jews in the Soviet Union. Their Jewish friends and neighbors were
disappearing. It was difficult to know exactly what was going on,
because the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda censored newspapers and the
radio. It was a crime to listen to foreign radio broadcasts.
# Chapter 6
... Sophie was working at a munitions factory in Ulm. Along with her
university studies, she was required to devote two months each summer
to war service work.
All of her fellow workers were women, and most of them were forced
laborers conscripted in Russia...
Sophie made friends with a "delightful" Russian woman working at the
machine next to her. They communicated by sign language and smiles.
> Thoughts are free,
> Who can guess them?
> They fly by
> Like nocturnal shadows.
> No man can know them,
> No hunter can shoot them
> With powder and lead.
> Thoughts are free!
TEXT gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Die_Gedanken_sind_frei
# Chapter 7
Speaking at a mass assembly marking the 470th anniversary of [Munich]
university's founding, [Paul] Giesler had launched a tirade against
students who kept their noses in books while a war was going on.
"Falsely clever minds," he said, where not an expression of "real
life." Then he added: "Real life is transmitted to us only by Adolf
Hitler, with his light, joyful, life-affirming teachings!"
Many of the mail students, Giesler charged, were shirkers using their
studies as an excuse for draft dodging. And he singled out female
students for his most biting criticism. "As for the girls," he
suggested, "the natural place for a woman is not at the university,
but with her family, at the side of her husband." Instead of
studying, women should be using their "healthy bodies" to produce
babies for the Fatherland. "And for those women students not pretty
enough to catch a man," he said with a leer, "I'd be happy to lend
them one of my assistants."
Giesler's remarks were met with a rising chorus of hisses, boos,
whistles, and shouts. As outraged members of the audience got up to
leave, scuffles and fistfights broke out with the storm troopers who
tried to hold them back. Dozens of students were arrested on the
spot. Hundreds more poured into the streets. Linking arms, men and
women students together marched down the boulevard and shouting in an
open display of political protest that had never been seen before in
Nazi Germany. A state of emergency was declared in Munich.
Telephone service was suspended. Radio broadcasts were silenced.
# Chapter 8
At 5:00 p.m., Sophie was led to the execution chamber. ... Five
seconds after she entered the chamber, the blade was released. It
dropped with a dull thud. Sophie Scholl was dead at the age of
twenty-one.
Hans followed her into the chamber. He was twenty-four.
Finally, Christoph, twenty-three and the father of three, was
beheaded.
Sophie and Christoph went silently to their deaths. But Hans could
not resist a final act of defiance. Just before they positioned his
head on the block, he called out, "Long live freedom!"
# Chapter 9
Within days of their execution, a new slogan appeared on the walls of
Munich University:
> SCHOLL LIVES! YOU CAN BREAK THE BODY BUT NEVER THE SPIRIT!
Under the Nazi policy of Sippenhaft, or clan arrest, the parents,
spouses, siblings, and children of "political criminals" were held
jointly responsible for acts of resistance.
More arrests, more trials, and more executions took place in the
months that followed. ... But even as the Gestapo tried to crush every
sign of dissent, a new version of the White Rose leaflets was
circulating in Germany and beyond.
We are told that the Christian martyr Saint Denis, after being
beheaded around A.D. 250, picked up his head and walked several miles
while preaching a sermon the entire way, a feat that has always been
regarded as a miracle.
The story of the White Rose movement and its decapitated martyrs
tells us that miracles still occur. We hear their voices even today,
speaking truth to power. They will not be silent.
See also:
TEXT René Carmille
TEXT André and Magda Trocmé
TEXT French Resistance
author: Freedman, Russel
TEXT detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Russell_Freedman
LOC: DD256.3 .F74
tags: book,history,holocaust,non-fiction
title: We Will Not Be Silent
# Tags
DIR book
DIR history
DIR holocaust
DIR non-fiction