Hans Scholl

Hans Fritz Scholl was a medical student in Munich, a Wehrmacht medical orderly and – together with his friend Alexander Schmorell – the founder of the White Rose, the best-known German resistance group to emerge from the student world. As a teenager he joined the Nazi youth organisation with enthusiasm, only to travel within a few years to a complete rejection of National Socialism. In the summer of 1942 he and Schmorell wrote and distributed the first four leaflets calling on Germans to resist the regime, and in the winter of 1942–1943 he led an enlarged group which, after the defeat at Stalingrad, called on students to rise openly against the Party. On 18 February 1943 he was arrested at the university with his sister Sophie; four days later he was sentenced to death and executed the same day. He was 24 years old.

Childhood and the Hitler Youth

He was born on 22 September 1918 in Ingersheim an der Jagst in Württemberg (today part of the town of Crailsheim), the second of six children of Robert Scholl and Magdalena, née Müller, a former deaconess. His father, a liberal and a pacifist, was then the head of the local municipality, and from 1919 mayor of Forchtenberg on the Kocher. Hans’s siblings were his elder sister Inge and the younger Elisabeth, Sophie, Werner and Thilde, who died in infancy. The children were brought up in a Protestant and liberal spirit. In 1930 the family moved to Ludwigsburg, and in 1932 to Ulm, where Hans attended the Kepler secondary school (Oberrealschule).

On 15 April 1933, against his father’s express wishes, he joined the Hitler Youth – out of conviction, since the new movement promised young people community, adventure and the sense of taking part in the rebirth of their country. He rose quickly in the Jungvolk, the organisation for boys aged 10 to 14; in May 1935 he became a Fähnleinführer, the leader of a unit several dozen strong. In September 1935 he went as one of three standard-bearers from Ulm to the Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, the “Rally of Freedom”, at which the Nuremberg Laws were proclaimed. It was then that his disillusionment began: he was irritated by the fanaticism and unconditional submission demanded of members, while the ever tighter rules of the Hitler Youth as a state organisation left no room for independence.

The Bündische Jugend and his first arrest

The Ulm Jungvolk, however, had its own character. Its founder came from the Deutsche Jungenschaft vom 1.11.1929 (dj.1.11), a youth league founded by Eberhard Koebel which cultivated a style of its own: expeditions into the unknown, Lapp tents (Kohten), Russian songs, poetry and freedom from drill. Scholl adopted these models. Within the unit he led he formed an informal group in the spirit of dj.1.11; in the summer of 1936 he took part in a boys’ expedition to Lapland, and in 1937, after he had left school, his boys were still meeting – although all independent youth leagues were banned in the Third Reich.

After passing his school-leaving examinations on 16 March 1937, he spent six months in the Reich Labour Service and in the autumn joined the 18th Cavalry Regiment at Bad Cannstatt near Stuttgart. In December 1937 the Gestapo struck at the circles of the former bündische Jugend. Inge, Sophie and Werner Scholl were also briefly arrested, and Hans was detained in his barracks on 14 December. Besides “league activity”, he was charged with offences under Paragraph 175, which criminalised homosexual relations, in connection with a relationship with another boy from his unit. He was released after two weeks, and in June 1938 the Special Court in Stuttgart dropped the proceedings under the amnesty law of 30 April 1938, issued after the annexation of Austria. An older friend of Hans, Ernst Reden, received a prison sentence. For Scholl it was a turning point: he had learned at first hand what a police state was.

Student and soldier

In the spring of 1939 he was released from the army so that he could begin his medical studies at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Medical students were at the same time soldiers in student companies and did front-line placements during their vacations. In 1940 Scholl went through the French campaign as a medical NCO, working in field hospitals. What he saw strengthened his aversion to the war and to those in power. In the spring of 1941 he again served as a medical orderly, and then returned to his studies in Munich.

The road to resistance

Munich opened up a new world for Scholl. He met the Catholic writer Carl Muth, publisher of the monthly Hochland, banned in 1941, and the cultural philosopher Theodor Haecker; both became mentors to him and introduced him to a circle of Christian thought critical of totalitarianism. He read Augustine, Pascal and the Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, who wrote of the state as an idol devouring man. Copies of the sermons of Bishop Clemens August von Galen, who in the summer of 1941 denounced from the pulpit as murder the killing of the mentally ill in Aktion T4, reached the Scholl family. Hans and Alexander Schmorell, the son of a Munich doctor and a Russian mother, also listened on the BBC to the broadcasts of Thomas Mann, who urged the Germans to throw off the Nazi yoke. In a letter to Muth in December 1941 Scholl wrote of the spiritual turning point he had gone through in recent months.

From February 1942 he organised reading evenings for a carefully chosen circle of students. On 13 June, at one of them, he met Willi Graf, a medical student from the Catholic youth movement. The meeting of 17 June 1942 was attended by Kurt Huber, professor of philosophy and musicology, who, in a discussion of how to resist the destruction of values, is said to have exclaimed: “Something must be done, and done today.”

The White Rose leaflets

Hans and Schmorell did it themselves. In sixteen days between 27 June and 12 July 1942 they wrote, duplicated and sent out four leaflets entitled “Leaflets of the White Rose”. Each ran to about a hundred copies; they took the addresses mostly from telephone directories, choosing doctors, professors, booksellers and innkeepers – people who, they believed, could think for themselves and persuade others. Where the name came from is still unknown; under interrogation Hans gave various explanations.

The first leaflet opened with the words: “Nothing is more unworthy of a civilised nation than to allow itself to be ‘governed’ without resistance by an irresponsible clique of rulers given over to dark instincts.” The texts were full of quotations from the Bible, Aristotle, Lao Tzu, Goethe, Schiller and Novalis, but they did not shy away from specifics. The second leaflet spoke of the murder of 300,000 Jews in Poland as “the most terrible crime against human dignity”, the third called for passive resistance and sabotage in the armaments industry, and the fourth ended with the words: “We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace!”

On the Eastern Front

On 23 July 1942 the student company in which Hans, Schmorell and Graf served set off for the Eastern Front. Passing through Warsaw, Scholl saw how the Germans treated the inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto – this was during the Great Deportation to Treblinka. For more than ten weeks they worked as orderlies in field hospitals near Gzhatsk, west of Moscow. In a letter of 17 August Hans wrote that the misery he saw had “made a very decided impression on everyone”. The students met Russian peasants, sang and drank with them, and their experience of the war in the east confirmed their conviction that they had to carry on.

Winter 1942–1943

At the beginning of November 1942 the students returned to Munich and the circle grew. Hans and Schmorell were joined by Willi Graf; Sophie Scholl, who had been studying biology and philosophy in Munich since May 1942; Schmorell’s friend Christoph Probst, a medical student serving in Innsbruck; and Professor Huber. Hans sought contacts with other opposition circles – in Hamburg, in the Saar and in Berlin, where an attempt was made through Falk Harnack to establish links with the circle of Harro Schulze-Boysen and Arvid Harnack – and raised money for paper, envelopes and a second duplicating machine. The Scholls’ school friends in Ulm distributed leaflets in their own town.

The fifth leaflet, “Appeal to All Germans!”, written by Hans and revised by Huber, was produced at the end of January 1943. It no longer bore the name of the White Rose but the signature “Resistance Movement in Germany”, and it was aimed at a wide readership: it foretold Germany’s defeat, called for a break with National Socialism and sketched a picture of a future federal Germany in a united Europe. Several thousand copies were printed, which members of the group delivered by hand or posted to cities in southern Germany and Austria. After the defeat at Stalingrad, Hans, Schmorell and Graf went out on three night-time expeditions (3–4, 8 and 15 February 1943) and painted the slogans “Down with Hitler” and “Freedom”, along with crossed-out swastikas, on walls in the streets of Munich, including near the university. The sixth leaflet, written by Huber and opening with the words “Fellow students!”, called on academic youth to settle accounts with the Party in the name of “freedom and honour”.

Arrest and death

On the morning of 18 February 1943 – the very day on which Joseph Goebbels delivered his total war speech in the Berlin Sportpalast – Hans and Sophie brought a suitcase of leaflets to the university and laid them outside the doors of the lecture halls. Sophie pushed the rest off the second-floor gallery into the atrium. The caretaker, Jakob Schmid, detained the brother and sister and handed them over to the Gestapo. Hans was carrying a handwritten draft of a further leaflet by Probst; he tried to destroy it, but the officers reconstructed the text and identified its author. Probst was arrested in Innsbruck on 20 February. During the interrogations Hans tried to take the blame on himself and to protect his friends.

On 22 February 1943 the People’s Court, which had come from Berlin for the case under the presidency of Roland Freisler, sentenced Hans, Sophie and Probst to death after a trial lasting a few hours, for high treason, undermining the nation’s defensive strength and aiding the enemy. That same afternoon the executioner Johann Reichhart beheaded them on the guillotine at Stadelheim Prison. Hans had earlier received communion from the Protestant prison chaplain; according to witnesses, before his death he cried out: “Long live freedom!” The brother and sister and Probst were buried in the Perlacher Forst cemetery in Munich. Hans’s parents and sisters were arrested under collective liability; his father was later sentenced to prison for listening to foreign radio.

Legacy

The deaths of the Scholls and Probst did not close the case. At a second trial, on 19 April 1943, the People’s Court sentenced Schmorell, Huber and Graf to death; the first two were executed on 13 July and Graf on 12 October 1943, while more than a dozen associates from Munich, Ulm and Hamburg were sent to prison. Meanwhile the sixth leaflet, smuggled through Scandinavia to Britain – Helmuth James Graf von Moltke was among those involved in passing it on – fell on Germany in the summer of 1943 in hundreds of thousands of copies dropped by the RAF as “The Manifesto of the Munich Students”.

Hans Scholl could not change the course of the war, nor did he intend to overthrow the regime by force. His significance lies elsewhere: he showed that in a state which demanded silence and obedience from its citizens, a young man who had himself been brought up in the Hitler Youth could call crimes by their name – including the crimes against Jews and Poles – and pay for it with his life. After the war his sister Inge Aicher-Scholl told the story of her brother and sister in the book The White Rose (1952), and the square in front of Munich University was named after the Scholl siblings. In Germany Hans and Sophie became a symbol of the “other Germany”, and hundreds of schools and streets bear their name.