Sophie Scholl and the White Rose was first published as Shattering the German Night (1986). This revised and expanded edition includes appendices which reprint the incendiary leaflets distributed by the White Rose, as well as the charges in the trial indictments of these heroic German students who opposed the Hitler regime. All told, there were five trials between February 22, 1943 and October 13, 1944 which led to mostly death sentences for the twenty- nine defendants.
Dumbach and Newborn have written a comprehensive history of the students at the University of Munich who, along with a few faculty, issued pamphlets that called on the German people to defy a regime that was bogged down fighting a losing battle at Stalingrad, an event that was the turning point in the history of the German war effort. The authors place the White Rose within the context of the “other Germany,” the over one million Germans who opposed Hitler and passed through the concentration camps and prisons for their political opposition to the Third Reich. This opposition reached its climax in 1944 with the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler by political and military personalities in the upper echelon of the Third Reich.
Led by Hans Scholl, his sister Sophie, and Christoph Probst, the White Rose group consisted of idealistic students and faculty who operated in a clandestine manner to distribute anti-Nazi leaflets which attacked the policies of the Third Reich. Within a matter of months, however, from November 1942 to early January 1943, the White Rose operation had expanded into a network that was spread through southwest Germany, up to the Saarland, and was making inroads into the north, including Berlin, when the Gestapo arrested its leaders and broke up the organization. The Scholls were both sentenced to death and subsequently guillotined.
Hans Scholl, among others in the White Rose who interned as medical students on the Russian front, viewed the horrors of the war. Aware of the atrocities committed against the Jews, and other Nazi victims, they conveyed their outrage at the policies of their government in the dissemination of leaflets which decried the evils of the Hitler Germany.
“Today, Germany is completely encircled just as Stalingrad was. Will all Germans be sacrificed to the forces of hatred and destruction? Sacrificed to the man who persecuted the Jews, who eradicated half the Poles, and who wanted to annihilate Russia? Sacrificed to the man who took away your freedom, peace, domestic happiness, hope and joy…this must not happen! Hitler must fall so that Germany may live…”
The persecution of the Jews was one of the many grievances that led the White Rose to openly defy their government, a courageous act at any time in a dictatorship, but especially heroic during wartime. The price they paid was death and for a while they were shunned as traitors to Germany. Today, the White Rose holds a special place in the new Germany. This wellwritten and informative history of the group brings them back to life.
