White Rose: The Germans who tried to topple Hitler
By Lucy Burns BBC World Service
Seventy years ago today, three German
students were executed in Munich for leading a resistance movement against
Hitler. Since then, the members of the White Rose group have become German
national heroes - Lilo Furst-Ramdohr was one of them.
In 1943, World War II was at its height - but in Munich, the centre of Nazi
power, a group of students had started a campaign of passive resistance.
Liselotte Furst-Ramdohr, already a widow at the age of 29 following her
husband's death on the Russian front, was introduced to the White Rose group by
her friend, Alexander Schmorell.
"I can still see Alex today as he told me about it," says Furst-Ramdohr, now
a spry 99-year-old. "He never said the word 'resistance', he just said that the
war was dreadful, with the battles and so many people dying, and that Hitler was
a megalomaniac, and so they had to do something."
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What was the White Rose?
- Resistance group formed in 1942 by group of Munich University students and
their professor
- Horrified by Nazism, they wrote and distributed leaflets urging Germans to
oppose Hitler's regime
- Also painted anti-Nazi slogans on buildings around Munich
- Produced six leaflets before their arrest
Schmorell and his friends Christoph Probst and Hans
Scholl had started writing leaflets encouraging Germans to join them in
resisting the Nazi regime.
With the help of a small group of collaborators, they distributed the
leaflets to addresses selected at random from the phone book.
Furst-Ramdohr says the group couldn't understand how the German people had
been so easily led into supporting the Nazi Party and its ideology.
"They must have been able to tell how bad things were, it was ridiculous,"
she says.
The White Rose delivered the leaflets by hand to addresses in the Munich
area, and sent them to other cities through trusted couriers.
Furst-Ramdohr never delivered the leaflets herself but hid them in a broom
cupboard in her flat.
She also helped Schmorell make stencils in her flat saying "Down with
Hitler", and on the nights of 8 and 15 February, the White Rose graffitied the
slogan on walls across Munich.
Furst-Ramdohr remembers the activists - who were risking their lives for
their beliefs - as young and naive.
One of the best-known members of the group today is Hans Scholl's younger
sister Sophie, later the subject of an Oscar-nominated film, Sophie Scholl: The
Final Days. Furst-Ramdohr remembers that Sophie was so scared that she used to
sleep in her brother's bed.
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'Fight against the Party!'
The sixth leaflet produced by the White Rose was smuggled out of the
country and scattered over Germany by Allied planes.
The day of reckoning has come, the reckoning of German youth with the most
repellent tyranny our nation has ever seen...
For us there is only one slogan: Fight against the Party! Get out of the
party hierarchy, which wants to keep us silent!
The German name will be dishonoured forever if German youth does not rise up,
to revenge and atone at once, to destroy their tormentors and build up a new
spiritual Europe. Students! The German nation looks to us!
Translation: Lucy Burns
"Hans was very afraid too, but they wanted to keep going
for Germany - they loved their country," she says.
On 18 February, Hans and Sophie Scholl set off on their most daring
expedition yet. They planned to distribute copies of their sixth - and as it
would turn out, final - leaflet at the University of Munich, where students
would find them as they came out of lectures.
The siblings left piles of the leaflets around the central stairwell. But as
they reached the top of the stairs, Sophie still had a number of leaflets left
over - so she threw them over the balcony, to float down to the students
below.
She was seen by a caretaker, who called the Gestapo. Hans Scholl had a draft
for another leaflet in his pocket, which he attempted to swallow, but the
Gestapo were too quick.
The Scholl siblings were arrested and tried in front of an emergency session
of the People's Court. They were found guilty and executed by guillotine, along
with their friend and collaborator Christoph Probst, on 22 February 1943.
Hans Scholl's last words before he was executed were: "Long live
freedom!"
The Scholls were tried at the
People's Court of Law, now Munich's district court
The rest of the White Rose group was thrown into panic. Alexander Schmorell
went straight to Lilo Forst-Ramdohr's flat, where she helped him find new
clothes and a fake passport. Schmorell attempted to flee to Switzerland but was
forced to turn back by heavy snow.
Returning to Munich, he was captured after a former girlfriend recognised him
entering an air raid shelter during a bombing raid. He was arrested, and later
executed.
Lilo Furst-Ramdohr was herself arrested on 2 March. "Two Gestapo men came to
the flat and they turned everything upside down," she says.
"They went through my letters, and then one of them said 'I'm afraid you'll
have to come with us'.
"They took me to the Gestapo prison in the Wittelsbach Palais on the tram -
they stood behind my seat so I couldn't escape."
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Find out more
Lucy Burns interviewed Liselotte Furst-Ramdohr for the BBC World Service
programme Witness
Furst-Ramdohr spent a month in Gestapo custody. She was
regularly interrogated about her role in the White Rose, but eventually released
without charge - a stroke of luck she puts down to her status as a war widow,
and to the likelihood that the Gestapo was hoping she would lead them to other
co-conspirators. After her release she was followed by the secret police for
some time.
She then fled Munich for Aschersleben, near Leipzig, where she married again
and opened a puppet theatre.
The final White Rose leaflet was smuggled out of Germany and intercepted by
Allied forces, with the result that, in the autumn of 1943, millions of copies
were dropped over Germany by Allied aircraft.
Since the end of the war, the members of the White Rose have become
celebrated figures, as German society has searched for positive role models from
the Nazi period.
But Furst-Ramdohr doesn't like it. "At the time, they'd have had us all
executed," she says of the majority of her compatriots.
She now lives alone in a small town outside Munich, where she continued to
give dancing lessons up to the age of 86.
Her friend Alexander Schmorell was made a saint by the Russian Orthodox
church in 2012.
"He would have laughed out loud if he'd known," says Furst-Ramdohr. "He
wasn't a saint - he was just a normal person."
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