Die weisse Rose

Saw a movie about Sophie Scholl some time ago, and remember it as being well done, must’ve been this one:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0426578/

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Sorry about this Mr Garner, but I would just like to know how you’re getting on with your He51!

I’ve just updated the He 51 thread. I’ve been meaning to do this for ages.
Thanks for your interest!

Peter

Sorry about this Mr Garner, but I would just like to know how you’re getting on with your He51!

You get a taste of how being suspected of being a member of the German anti-Nazi movement was dealt with in the book “A Higher call” that’s now out. The German fighter pilot’s brother, himself a Luftwaffe pilot, was suspected of having questionable loyalty because his girlfriend/wife had close ties to the Catholic church which was seen as anti-Nazi. In short, everyone was questioned and a cloud of suspicion hung over his career.
In the fighter pilot’s case, it seemed to be a routine investigation by bureaucrats and his brother’s death in a flying mishap brought the investigation to a early close.

For those who want to read more there is “Sophie Scholl and the White Rose” by Annette Dumbach and Jud Newborn ISBN 1-85168-474-3 One World Oxford 2006. (First published in Germany 1986)

You make your points well but it is a frightening picture of, essentially, willing collusion with the evils of the state (while claiming innocence of any knowledge of atrocities) until the point where the natural wish for defending oneself (and the regime) from the surrounding enemies takes over.

I cannot claim that I’d have behaved any differently that the average German under similar circumstances…

…a warning for us all!

What does this say about attitudes within Nazi Germany? Without wishing in any way to undermine the courage of this group was this the greatest act of civil resistance against the Nazi regime; a few students printing and distributing pamphlets?[/QUOTE]

The Nazi regime was voted into power in 1933, its first concentration camps were established in 1934. The development of Goring’s Prussian police force into the national Gestapo occurred in 1933. Resistance to National Socialism started with street battles with Communists in the 1920’s and was formalized with state coordinated extermination of ‘enemies of the state’ from 1933 onwards. There is a photograph of the times which shows a deceased young man who has forced half his way under a prison gate when the prison, filled with political prisoners, was burnt, by the state, to the ground. The destruction of the Nazi SA before the war showed what even happened to fellow travellers.

So, after six years of harnessing the total power of a state to eliminate individual or coordinated opposition those who might form the nucleus of a Hollywood recognized resistance were already dead by 1939.

I see the Nazi regime as an organism of seduction and terror. For the majority, the seduction to right the wrongs of the Versailles Treaty, to have food on the table and to become a great nation would resonate with any pre-war reasonable mind. An old German bricklayer, former Wermacht, told me many years ago : if you were registered as Aryan, you received from the state a free house, a free car (volks-wagen), and free wireless. Today, if my government did this for me, I would be pretty happy with it. Resist ? Are you joking ? Once this government drew me into a just war, and the war resulted in a bomb landing on my friend or family, arcane, distant politics would transform into a personal story of resistance against a personal enemy. By 1939, that enemy was the encircling octopus of Poland, France and Britain, in the language of the Reichstag.

In the midst of this, in 1943, at a military draft age, in the shrill urgency of military and national survival, to coordinate the printing and public distribution of treasonous pamphlets, was an act of breathtaking bravery. I could imagine myself, in Nivenesque moustache, hiding in some shrubbery and activating a charge under a bridge as Tiger tanks rolled over, I don’t know if I would have the courage to do what the students did.

Any genuine enquiry into history must harness empathy to develop understanding. It is best to put German resistance, or aquiescence, in context of atmospherics we might have navigated as individuals today. In the invasion of Iraq, on the wings of revulsion at what happened at the twin towers, with the calm assurance of Colin Powell that we were serving the need of self preservation from weapons of self destruction, with the printing of photos of Baathist secret police filling the shirt pocket of a young man with high explosive, who, in nations equipped with every agency of free self expression, resisted the idea of the invasion ? I think it was a girl band of country and western singers who demonstrated what modern resistance, in the spirit of democracy, might be.

In the spirit of violence, there was a bomb plot against Hitler. It was just that the Nazi’s were better at violence than anyone else.*

* until 1944 when the massed bombing, superior armaments, preponderance of trained personnel and superior raw material supplies of the Allies blew the Nazis to Hades.

Wow, I am amazed at their bravery. This was a society in which conformity was demanded at the pain of death.

There may well have been, and you read about, dissenting views. But in the circumstances the holders of those views took great care what they said and to whom.

You have to allow for the ruthlessness of the regime in questioning the degree of civil resistance.

According to Wikipedia:

“…a copy of the sixth leaflet was smuggled out of Germany through Scandinavia to the UK by German jurist Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, where it was used by the Allied Forces. In mid-1943, they dropped over Germany millions of propaganda copies of the tract, now re-titled, The Manifesto of the Students of Munich.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Scholl

It is interesting to hear of this movement because, apart from the well-known attempt to assassinate Hitler in the bomb-plot of July 1944 (and a previous bomb-plot), it is the only actual ‘resistance group’ that I’ve ever heard of operating within Nazi Germany; and it would seem that this is the most well-known group.

What does this say about attitudes within Nazi Germany? Without wishing in any way to undermine the courage of this group was this the greatest act of civil resistance against the Nazi regime; a few students printing and distributing pamphlets?