History's Youngest Heroes: Hans and Sophie Scholl and the White Rose

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Suffs, the new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

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Suffs, playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

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Hans Scholl and his sister Sophie awoke to a sunny morning in Munich, Germany.

They leave their flats.

They have a suitcase and a briefcase.

It was the 18th of February, 1943.

The Second World War had been raging in Europe for three and a half years.

Germany was at war with the Allies.

But inside Germany, there had been little resistance to Nazi rule.

Hans and Sophie walk the short route to the university.

Just before 11 in the morning, they pushed through the doors into the Lichtof.

This was a building, this is a 19th century building with a very large central atrium with three floors with balconies.

It was empty.

Hans and Sophie opened their cases and took out hundreds of pamphlets.

They've timed this so that they can distribute copies of the pamphlets while students are still in their lectures and classes.

They place the pamphlets in doorways, on windowsills, spreading them out against the vast stairwell.

The text called for German students to rise up.

The day of reckoning has come.

The reckoning of German youth with the most abominable tyrant our people has ever forced to endure.

Written by a friend of Hans and Sophie's, the pamphlet was a passionate diatribe against Adolf Hitler.

Being caught with these pamphlets would be treason.

Yet Hans and Sophie were remarkably calm.

Walking out, they realized they had a handful left over.

So they go back into the building, they go to the first floor, they go up to the second floor.

And with a final dramatic flourish, Sophie threw the last hundred pamphlets over the balustrade, watching as they fluttered down.

Dangerous, electrifying words, taking wing and flying free.

This is probably just before 11 o'clock.

It's just before the students are going to start pouring out of the lecture halls, which is going to be the cover for Hans and Sophie to escape.

They're going to just blend into the crowd.

As they went downstairs, they heard a noise.

It was the caretaker.

He sees these pieces of paper falling to the ground, rushes up the stairs, and he apprehends Hans and Sophie.

As the caretaker restrained them, the atrium filled with students.

The Gestapo were called.

Hans and Sophie were taken to be interrogated.

They could only hope their cover story would hold.

I'm Nicola Cochlin, and for BBC Radio 4, this is history's youngest heroes.

Rebellion, risk, and the radical power of youth.

Hans and Sophie Scholl and the White Rose.

I can't remember when I heard the name the first time.

Benedict Sepp is a historian at the University of Munich.

They are omnipresent here in Munich.

There are a lot of like memorial streets and squares named after them, so it's kind of impossible not to hear about them.

Hans Scholl was born as the First World War was ending in 1918.

Sophie arrived three years later.

They were middle children among six in total.

One of their siblings described Sophie as kind of a white child, a very active girl who refused the norms of femininity at that time.

Hans and Sophie grew up in Ulm in South Germany.

Their parents were middle class.

Life centered on the Lutheran church.

In their home, shelves struggled under the weight of books.

Their father, Robert Scholl, was an anti-Nazi politician, but Nazism worked hard to turn children like his against their parents.

As a boy, Hans was a member of a non-political youth group under the organization of Allied Youth.

This was not a Nazi organization.

Age 14, he became eligible to join the Nazi youth group, the Hitler Youth.

At first, Hans was enchanted by the Hitler Youth.

They did like a big trip to Scandinavia and they were like hunting, swimming, and hitchhiking.

They felt the sense of community, of camaraderie.

Sophie idolized Hans.

His tales of adventure inspired her to join the young women's version of Hitler youth, the League of German Girls.

So you're 16 and you've lived your whole life at home.

You could kind of leave your parents' house, leave your parents' values.

You're comrades and you do stuff together, dangerous stuff, go hunting or whatever, to form a strong bond with people.

After the Nazis came to power in 1933, they began to shut down other youth groups, such as those run by Allied youth, and encouraged more and more young people to join their own organizations.

Laws were passed in 1936 and 1939, which made it compulsory for German children to join Nazi groups, though Jewish children were banned.

Children aged 10 to 14 joined the German Youngsters, or Young Girls League.

Teenagers 14 to 18 joined the Hitler Youth and League of German Girls.

Hitler believed these groups to be powerful machines for indoctrination.

You know, it's not just going camping, right?

There is a sinister ideological force behind this.

Alexandra Lloyd is a lecturer of German studies at the University of Oxford.

She is the author of Defying Hitler.

Nazism really had as one of its central goals the control of youth.

So they essentially attempt to eliminate any kind of individuality, any kind kind of youth dissent.

Members of these organizations were encouraged to bond as a group through hearty activities.

They had to sing Nazi songs in unison and wear military-style uniforms.

As Hans and Sophie were drawn into this Nazi lifestyle, their anti-Nazi parents could feel their children slipping away.

There were a lot of arguments in the Scholl household.

Hans actually had a picture of Hitler in his bedroom and he would put it up and Robert Scholl would come home from work and put it down and Hans would put it up again.

Nazi indoctrination was powerful, but it was not the only force working on the Scholl children.

Over the next few months, Hans and Sophie's enthusiasm for Nazism began to drop away.

I think what seems to inspire people about Hans and Sophie Scholl is the idea that they were participating in the regime and managed to reach a point where they came out the other side of that.

So that these were people who were the object object of Nazi indoctrination, who managed

to get themselves out of it.

Their parents continued to speak out against Hitler and encouraged their children to read and think for themselves.

The Nazis banned books on subjects they disapproved of, such as pacifism, Marxism, sex education and sexuality.

They also banned all books by Jewish people.

Both Hans and Sophie, being confronted with the fact that authors they loved were banned because they were Jewish.

That was unthinkable because it's totally unintellectual because it makes no sense.

Then, one afternoon in 1937, there was a knock on their door.

The Scholl children are arrested, and Hans Scholl was put on trial for his involvement in a banned youth organization.

The Nazis brought up the fact that Hans had been in a youth group run by by Allied youth.

Furthermore, they alleged that Hans had sexual relations with other young men in his group.

He had to stay in prison for, I think, two weeks, and the Gestapo would raid his house.

They would also interrogate Sophie.

So that was, I guess, one of the many, many turning points where their

fascination with the Nazi organizations kind of started to cool off.

They go from being essentially acceptable to the regime to suddenly being cast under suspicion.

After Germany annexed Austria in 1938, there was an amnesty, and Hans Scholl was acquitted.

He went on to complete basic military training.

In April 1939, he was accepted as a medical student at the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich.

It was an exciting place to be.

They were studying and going to concerts and reading and drinking with France.

But Hitler was raising the tension in Europe.

On the first day of September, Germany invaded Poland.

Two days later, Britain and France declared war on Germany.

Sophie was horrified.

Sophie was opposed to the war right from the outbreak because it was futile.

She tried to focus on her school exams as Germany invaded Denmark, then Holland and Belgium.

The following spring, Hans was deployed with his student company on the Western Front in France.

He witnessed that German soldiers were like stealing stuff from the French population.

And he said, I'm not a thief, but we behave like thieves and murderers here.

Arriving back in Munich that autumn to continue his studies, Hans noticed the university had changed.

The curriculum had been revised.

Police were everywhere.

He developed a burning desire to fight back against Nazism.

Then he befriended another medical student, Alexander Schmarel.

Shmorel's father was German, his mother Russian.

So he spoke Russian fluently, a very particular position to be in in Nazi Germany with anti-Soviet propaganda.

By day, Hans and Shmorel were interns at the hospital.

In the evenings, they met up with other intellectuals.

And this sort of small group of friends started to form.

They would be invited to reading evenings with these older mentors.

Private social gatherings, nights filled with discussion and wine and music with people who were somewhat critical of the Nazis somewhat opposition-minded, where he could discuss matters a bit more freely.

In June 1942, Hans sat alone at the Schmerel family home.

In front of him was a blank sheet of paper and pen.

Channeling his anger into words, he wrote a pamphlet, exhorting Germans to rise up against Hitler.

There's a real sense of urgency in them, that resistance has to be mounted, it has to be mounted now.

Over the next few days, Hans Lesbarel worked on a second pamphlet.

This one further, criticising Hitler's political manifesto, Mein Kampf, saying it's written in the worst German that they've ever read.

You know, Mein Kampf is a book that is supposed to be venerated in Nazi Germany.

The final solution, the mass murder of Jews, had begun months before.

The The concentration camp at Auschwitz was designated a death camp in spring 1942.

Hans described the murder of 300,000 Jews in Poland, calling it a crime unparalleled in all of human history.

They make very clear that being a human being is not compatible with being a Nazi.

And there's just no doubt about that.

Over a period of just 16 days, Hans and Schmarel wrote four such pamphlets.

The last pamphlet closes with, We Are Your Bad Conscience.

Hans gave the group its name, the White Rose.

He wrote, The White Rose will never leave you in peace.

They acquired a second-hand duplicating machine, but needed paper, envelopes, and stamps.

Owing to wartime shortages, it was difficult to get these things.

The Gestapo made it even harder.

You know, you couldn't walk into a post office in Nazi Germany and ask for 100 stamps.

That would certainly raise some eyebrows.

Hans and Schmarel split up, buying small quantities from different post offices.

Once they had enough for 100 copies, they turned the handle on the duplicator and printed pages.

They addressed envelopes to booksellers, restaurateurs, academics, doctors, and grocers.

Munich awoke to the words of the White Rose.

You know, it must have been just outrageous to get these pieces of writing.

They must have been shocking.

They invited their stunned readers to spread the word.

They always call on the reader to make further copies of the pamphlet, pass it on, keep this resistance movement going.

Sucks!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs, playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at Broadway SF.com.

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In May 1942, Sophie had arrived in Munich to study biology and philosophy, living with her brother, mixing with his friends.

But Hans kept his publishing activities secret.

Hans didn't tell her that he was the author of the pamphlets that were circulating within the students.

But Sophie soon found out and wanted to join her brother in the resistance.

She wanted to be a part of it and she wanted to be like a full member of this group.

Sophie was central to the production of the next three pamphlets.

She had a very important part in getting paper, getting stamps, getting envelopes.

Maybe she even distributed pamphlets at the university.

Hundreds of leaflets appeared around the city.

It happened so fast.

Hans and Sophie hardly thought about the risk.

I mean, there's some power in being young and maybe not thinking so much about what your actions could mean, actually, to your family, for example.

Yet that risk was great.

Half of the people who got it just took it to the police.

June 1942.

At Gestapo headquarters in Munich, senior officer Robert Moore was given a new assignment.

Pamphlets were popping up all over the town.

Who could be behind the white rose?

They had a description of a person buying a lot of stamps.

The woman apparently had shoulder-length brown hair, brown eyes.

She was in her early 20s.

But apart from that, they didn't have any clues.

Moore was dismissive.

A young woman wasn't doing all this by herself.

It's not necessarily clear to the Gestapo that actually this is just a bunch of students doing this in mum and dad's flat.

It makes them look like there's a lot more of them.

The pamphlets weren't an easy read.

They were dense and intellectual, full of literary illusions.

But what if the ideas caught on?

It's something that has the potential to grow into a much greater movement and a much greater threat.

More would take no chances.

The people behind the white rose had to be found, and they had to be stopped.

On the 23rd of July, Hans and Sophie joined the crowds at Munich railway station.

Hans greeted his old friend Alexander Schmorel and a newer friend, Willy Graf.

The men were wearing military uniform.

They were bound for the Eastern Front to fight the Soviet Union.

They were part of Student Company, it was like a combination of being a soldier and being a medicine student.

So there were paramedics and medics at the front line.

On its way to Russia, Hans's train stopped at Warsaw.

He witnessed German troops bringing starving, terrified Jewish men, women, and children to the station.

They were being transported to Auschwitz, where most would be killed.

They even saw the Warsaw ghetto.

They experienced the treatment of Jews there.

After he arrived at the front, Hans wrote to Sophie from a candle-lit bunker.

He didn't dwell on the horrors he'd seen, but looked ahead to his evening escapes with his friends, sometimes sharing a drink with local Soviet citizens.

Through his knowledge of the language, through his love for the literature and the culture, it allows Hans Schroll and Willy Graf to see Russia in this very different light.

It was clear to Hans that the Soviets were not the inferior people the Nazis rallied against.

He and his friends, Alexander Schmarel and Villy Graf, felt ever more strongly opposed to the Nazi regime they were technically fighting for.

As the summer dragged on, both Hans and Sophie Scholl separately decided that they needed to fight the Nazis from the inside.

In November 1942, Hans and Sophie reunited in Munich for the next academic term.

They immediately began work again for the White Rose.

They were wondering how their work could have more impact.

In December, Hans spoke to a professor called Kurt Huber.

Huber taught musicology, psychology, and philosophy.

Hans had met him at the university, where his lectures were unusually popular with students.

So there was a rumor going on that this was a place where you maybe could not speak freely, but there was at least some kind of some feeling of camaraderie that you didn't have to be a Nazi to be there.

And also he invited students to his home to have discussions.

He formed sponsors with the students, and he was part of discussion events or social gatherings where the Scholls were also part of.

Benedict Sepp has a personal stake in Huber's story.

I'm the great-grandson of Kotuber.

My grandmother was telling stories about the White Rose my whole childhood.

On that day, in December 1942, Hans Scholl visited him and told him that they were doing this work, they were authoring these pamphlets, and asked him if he wanted to be part of that group.

Kurt Huber said that really something should be done.

Huber agreed to edit the pamphlets that the young men were writing.

For his next pamphlet, Hans wanted to reflect on what he had seen in Poland and the Soviet Union.

Germans, do you and your children want to suffer the same fate that befell the

Do you want to be judged by the same standards as your seducers?

Are we to be a nation which is hated and rejected by all mankind forever?

No.

When it came to distributing this pamphlet, the White Rose made thousands of copies.

Sophie packed some of the pamphlets into a backpack.

She went to the station, rehearsing her cover story.

At Gestapo headquarters, the officer Robert Moore was feeling the heat.

By now, these pamphlets had become a real problem.

Thousands turned up in bars, restaurants and park benches across southern Germany, even as far as Austria.

They tried to do a linguistic analysis of the language of the pamphlets.

The linguist wrote a profile of the author and described him as a very formally educated man working in the humanities, which was an apt description of my great-grandfather and also Hans Scholl.

The Gestapo were still failing to crack the white rose.

Meanwhile, Hans felt the defeat of Hitler was becoming more urgent.

On the night of the 3rd of February, news arrived that the German army had finally been defeated at Stalingrad.

For the first time, Hitler's armed forces had surrendered.

Feeling reckless, Hans went out into Munich to paint walls and buildings with anti-war slogans.

Down with Hitler, stuff like that, which was extremely dangerous.

A few days later, Hans and Schmorel asked Professor Huber to write a sixth pamphlet.

Huber addressed it directly to young people.

It starts with lamenting the 330,000 dead German soldiers in Stalingrad, and it actually calls for revenge from the Nazis.

It is the duty of each and every one of us to fight for our future, our freedom and honour.

Meanwhile, their friend and fellow White Rose member, Christoph Probst, drafted a seventh pamphlet about the Nazi defeat at Stalingrad.

Once again, Sophie took tremendous risks to distribute these pamphlets.

Leaving them in phone boxes on parked cars, kind of surreptitiously dropping them.

Outrageously dangerous.

Hans and Sophie discussed what to do with the 1,000 remaining copies.

They settled on their most daring act yet.

Wednesday, the 17th of February, 1943, Sophie wrote to a friend,

I'm just listening to the trout quintet on the gramophone.

I would rather like to be a trout myself.

She talks about her longing for spring.

It's a really moving piece of writing when you know what's going to happen next.

The next morning, Gestapo officer Robert Moore received a call from the university.

A caretaker had apprehended two students distributing leaflets.

You can see their mugshots from when they were booked in, and they look remarkably composed

and

focused.

Moore interrogated Sophie himself.

They initially denied any involvement, any knowledge of this

Moore was inclined to believe Sophie.

She seemed so innocent.

But things weren't going well for Hans.

The Gestapo had by this point searched the flat that they lived in.

Hans had the draft of Christoph Probst's Dalingrad pamphlet in his pocket.

He tried to get rid of it, but the Gestapo found it.

They searched his house.

and worked out the handwriting matched letters from Christoph Probst.

Probst was quickly arrested by the Gestapo.

Two days later, Probst along with Hans and Sophie Scholl were tried for treason.

The main judge Roland Freisler was probably the most famous judge in Germany at that time.

They called him Blood Judge.

At lunchtime, just as the judge was reading out the verdicts, Hans and Sophie's parents walked into the courtroom.

They heard the judge pronounce their children and Probst guilty and sentenced all three of them to death.

Sophie's mother had baked some biscuits, which she brought to give Sophie.

When Hans and Sophie's parents left the prison, they were expecting that they were going to see them again.

They were taken to their prison cells, and at four o'clock that afternoon, they were told that they would be executed at five.

They had been sentenced to death by hanging, but the Nazis feared this might create a spectacle, even some sympathy.

Instead, away from public eyes inside the prison, first Sophie and then Hans were led to a guillotine.

We know about Hans Scholl's last words.

He said, Long live freedom.

Sophie Scholl apparently went without any last words.

Hans Scholl was 24.

Sophie Scholl was 21.

Christoph Probst was guillotined after the Scholls.

He was 23 and a father of three very young children.

The triple execution took less than 10 minutes.

The Gestapo watched the burial of the Scholz, hoping to catch other members of the White Rose.

Five days later, Professor Kurt Huber was arrested.

He was guillotined in July, along with Alexander Schmarel.

Villy Graf was psychologically tortured by the Gestapo for six months.

Still, he refused to give up any other names of White Rose members.

In October, they executed him too.

Kuruber's last words actually were, shame on you.

My grandmother was his daughter and

she was there when he was arrested, so he was like probably the most important person in her life.

Since my grandmother was telling stories about the White Rose from my whole childhood, I heard about them quite early and they almost felt like, I don't know what...

don't want to say relatives, but like their story was part of the story of her too.

In summer 1943, the British Royal Air Force launched bombing raids over Germany.

Along with the bombs, they dropped copies of the White Rose's final published pamphlet.

A copy of that sixth pamphlet had been smuggled out of Germany, had made its way to the British Warfare Executive, who had transformed it into anti-Nazi propaganda.

It's estimated that about 5 million copies of it were dropped over the German Reich.

After Germany lost the war, Hans and Sophie Scholl were raised to the status of heroes in both East and West Germany.

Few in Germany had dared or cared to resist the Nazis.

The White Rose was exceptional.

This is very impressive what they did.

Like everyone can relate to these young, cool teenagers or students that did the right thing.

When Germany was reunified in 1991, the Scholls continued to be celebrated.

Roads and schools were named after them.

Prizes were established in their names.

They were voted among the greatest Germans of all time.

The White Rose didn't make the war stop, but

they made an attempt.

They used the written word and they tried to reach out to people to get them to do the same.

Next time, on history's youngest heroes.

Can 21-year-old Terry Fox, a cancer survivor with a prosthetic leg, run the length of Canada?

This fabulously healthy, beautiful young man, you know, became a carrier of our dreams and our hopes.

The best we could be.

Terry Fox's Marathon of Hope.

Hello, Russell Kane here.

I used to love British history.

Be proud of it.

Henry VIII, Queen Victoria, massive fan of stand-up comedians, obviously Bill Hicks, Richard Pryor.

That has become much more challenging.

For I am the host of BBC Radio 4's Evil Genius, the show where we take heroes and villains from history and try to work out whether they are evil or genius.

Do not catch up on BBC Sounds by searching Evil Genius if you don't want to see your heroes destroyed.

But if, like me, you quite enjoy it, have a little search.

Listen to Evil Genius with me, Russell Kane.

Go to BBC Sounds and have your world destroyed.

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