February 24, 2025

— Hans Scholl

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Long live freedom

Eighty-two years ago last week, a janitor at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich named Jakob Schmid heard a commotion, and confronted a man and a woman in their early 20s.

Brother and sister Hans and Sopie Scholl had sneaked into a university classroom building to distribute anti-Nazi pamphlets where they could be found by students -- while World War II raged and the German army had just suffered a massive defeat at Stalingrad.

Schmid took the Scholl siblings to the university's consul, who turned them over to the Gestapo; under torture, Hans Scholl supposedly gave up the name of a friend who had helped them named Christoph Probst, who was also arrested.

Within days, all three were given show trials and sentenced to death for their subversion -- all three died at the guillotine on February 22, 1943.

On the one hand, of course it might be hard to find optimism in the story of a handful of people who stood up to the Nazis and were promptly killed as a result.

But, I first read the story of the Scholls and the movement they were involved in, the White Rose nonviolent resistance group, in college. And, I remember being surprised that it hadn't ever been covered in any of the history classes I'd had earlier.

What struck me was that the Scholls and their fellow students in the movement recognized that they had very little chance of sparking a real uprising against the Nazis, and certainly knew what the result would be if they were caught.

But, they went ahead anyway.

Later in the war, the Allies got hold of some of the leaflets they'd attempted to distribute. While the Scholls and their fellow resistance members distributed about 15,000 total both via the German mail service and by handing them out manually, the Royal Air Force dropped millions of copies of one of them -- retitled The Manifesto of the Students of Munich, over German cities.

Before their deaths, some of both School siblings' last words were recorded:

• Sophie (as recorded by her prison cellmate, Else Gebel): "How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause?"
• Hans (just before his death): "Long live freedom!" ("Es lebe die Freiheit!")

Like a lot of people who were on the right side of history while all around them were evil, however, the quote I like most from their story is the ironic one that accompanied their death sentences.

It came from Nazi judge Roland Freisler, who was killed in an Allied bombing less than two years later:

I hope I'm never tested like this. But it's good to know that there's an example to follow if any of us ever need it.

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