Thanks, Alex. And thank you very much indeed for coming along this lunchtime to learn more
or to learn something about the White Rose Resistance movement or divisive.
Also, as Alex said, I teach German here in Oxford in the faculty of medieval languages.
And for the past year I have been running the White Rose Project, which is a research and outreach initiative,
telling the story of the White Rose beyond Germany and in the UK.
And so a couple of our outputs so far have been indeed this new publication,
and there are shamelessly some flyers available for you to take away in case you'd like to order a copy.
And this includes the students translators, Oxford Student Translators, new translation of the White Rose leaflets.
And I'll talk a little bit more about that towards the end of my talk.
And please, if you haven't already, do go and see the exhibition in the audience.
Prosecco, and it was a labour of love, but I think it speaks very movingly to this story now.
The White Rose is a household name in Germany, but it is much less well known in the UK.
It's a very complex story involving a wide network of individuals and many examples of courage in the face of grave danger.
The story in its briefest form goes like this.
In 1943, five students and a professor at the University of Munich were arrested, interrogated, tried and executed.
They were members of the White Rose, the White Rose Resistance,
a clandestine group that wrote and distributed leaflets calling on the Germans to resist Hitler.
What I like to do in this talk today is to focus in particular on the leaflets, the fluke letter that were produced by the White Rose.
And to answer really three questions.
First, what was the white rose? Second, how did they use the written word to inspire resistance?
And third, what can we learn from them about writing and resistance more broadly?
So what was the white rose? Or rather more accurately, who were the members of the White Rose?
Well, the white rose resistance stretched far beyond Munich, but at its heart was six individuals Hans and Sophie Scholl, who were brother and sister.
Christoph pulled out Alexandra for morale and very good.
Of all of them were students at the University of Munich and Professor Kurt Huber, a professor of philosophy and musicology.
These were individuals from middle class backgrounds who were well-educated,
interested in literature, philosophy, music, and had a Christian humanist outlook.
It's perhaps surprising that two of them, Hanson, Sophie Scholl, had been enthusiastic members of the Hitler Youth.
Though we can see from anecdotes and from their own writings how their attitudes shifted over time.
I'll give you two examples. The sister in who wrote the first post-war account of the white race.
It's a wonderful book. I commend it to you. And she recounts the letter sewed from Hansen's days in the Hitler Youth.
He was reading a volume by his then favourite author, Stefan Zweig, an Austrian Jew who left Austria following Hitler's rise to power.
Hans's Hitler Youth Leader saw what Hans was reading a collection of historical
miniatures about events that changed history called The Tide of Fortune,
and reacted as follows. And I quote One of the leaders snatched out of his hands a book by his favourite author, Stefan Zweig.
It was banned, he was told. But why? There was no answer.
The contents of the text was, of course, unimportant. Only the identity of its author mattered.
For Hans, this was one of a number of encountered encounters with the so-called enemies of Germany,
which revealed to him how false the doctrine of Nazism really was.
Another story is told about Sophie Scholl and one of her favourite writers,
the 19th century poet Heinrich China, whose works had been banned by the Nazis because he was Jewish.
In 1936, when Sophie was active in the Hitler is an important leader of the female wing of the Hitler Youth.
The League of German Girls visited the local group in Auburn, where the Scholls lived.
At this meeting, Sophie reportedly suggested that they read and discuss poems by Heinrich Heine of The Leader.
Obviously appalled by the idea, reminded them that Heiner was in fact Jewish and a writer whose works had been banned and burned.
Sophie is said to have replied boldly. Anyone who doesn't know Heiner doesn't know German literature.
I think this anecdote tells you a lot about Sophie Scholl.
So reading the White Rose Members Letters and Diaries, we get a sense of how thoughtful and serious they were.
They were astonishingly well read and tremendously courageous.
At the same time, they were quite ordinary people.
They were also not without a sense of humour. For example, Hans, in a letter to his parents and sister in March 1942,
wondered whether they had received his last letter because the post was rather irregular, and, he adds, with more than a hint of mischief.
I really sympathise with the Gestapo having to decipher all those different handwriting, some of which are highly illegible.
But that's what they're paid to do. And after all, duty is duty, gentlemen, isn't it?
So how then did these young people and their professor use the written word to inspire resistance?
Well, between 1942 and 1943, the group wrote and disseminated six fluke letter, which we would translate as pamphlets or leaflets.
And I use those interchangeably here. And these fluke letters were intended to call on the German people to resist Nazis.
Alex and Hans wrote the first four leaflets between the 27th of June and the 12th of July, 1942.
Later that month, Hans, Alex and Willy left Munich for a three month tour of duty at the Russian front.
As they were all medical students conscripted into military service.
When they returned, they resumed the leaflet campaign with Kurt Huber now taking an active role.
Who edited the fifth pamphlets in January 1943 based on the draft by Hans and the sixth pamphlet was written by Huber in February 1943,
following the German Army's disastrous defeat at Stalingrad.
The group used a second hand duplicating machine, a mimeograph and despite wartime shortages, obtained paper envelopes, stencils and stamps.
They distributed the leaflets at great personal risk, first in the hundreds, and then it is estimated in the thousands.
On the 18th of February 1943. HANSEN Sophie took copies of the sixth leaflet to the University of Munich and
deposited them around the atrium at the entrance of the main university building,
which you can see here. The little they were spotted by a university caretaker and detained.
The rest followed. And just four days later, on the 22nd of February, 1943, Hans and Sophie, along with Christoph Probst,
was sentenced to death and executed by guillotine just hours after the conclusion of their trial.
Alexandra Floral Court Hubert Graff was subsequently arrested, tried and sentenced to death on the 19th April that year.
Shmuel and Huber were executed three months later on the 30th of July,
and Graf was kept alive in solitary confinement and executed on the 12th of October, 1943.
So you see from from February to October that very, very rapid turnaround, further trials and prison sentences followed over the next two years.
And one of the student, Hans Lippert, was executed. So I have her example to show you of one of the six printed leaflets.
So you can see this is pretty much two sides of roughly A4 paper typed very closely.
And we have at the beginning of each of the leaflets a title here, fruit letter device and also dry leaflets of the white nose number three.
So this is the third leaflet and then an instruction right at the bottom of the right
hand page bits of Have you decided to invite a given with three exclamation marks?
Please spread these. Pass them on. You can also see at the bottom of the right hand page a quotation.
This is from Aristotle's politics.
And many of the leaflets contain extensive quotations from other works of literature or other works, significant cultural works.
Another thing that's interesting to note is the use of something called fastest, which is because there's no italics.
This is a way of putting things really in emphasis.
So we have a few examples of this.
Also, every time the words sabotage, sabotage is used in this leaflet, it's in fact that is spaced out so that it really packs a punch.
So that's what they look like now in this table. I've put together something which I think is very useful, just the same as a glance,
the way that the leaflets developed, the way that things changed over the course of these six leaflets,
because of course, they were produced over a period of about 18 months, but the first four were produced in about four weeks.
And then there was quite a long delay before five and six.
So you can see that leaflets, 1 to 4 all began with the same construction leaflets of the white rose and then the corresponding number.
And what this indicates is, of course, that right from the beginning, right from leaflet one, this was intended to be a series of leaflets.
This was not going to be an isolated event. This was going to be a series that they were producing.
Leaflet five Then obviously change is the pattern here.
Rather than evoking this image of a white rose, which in itself is very interesting.
We have something that's much, much more general.
So leaflets of the resistance movement in Germany, an appeal to all Germans Leaflet six is addressed simply to fellow students,
which is again interesting, given that this is the only one that was written solely by a professor, not by the students themselves.
And in the German here, it's very interesting that the fellow students have rendered melatonin and melatonin so literally female students,
male students, putting the female students first and also calling really emphasising the call to everyone.
If you look also at how each of the leaflets ends. We have in the first five leaflets and exhortation to copy these leaflets,
to spread them to to try and get a kind of as broad a readership as possible for them.
We urge you to transcribe this leaflet, make as many copies as you can, and distribute them.
Please copy this document, distribute it as widely as possible.
Please reproduce this and pass it on. Please duplicate and redistribute support the resistance movement.
Distribute the leaflets that again corresponding to the beginning.
This is much more general an appeal and leaflet six dispenses with this form of address entirely and simply ends with the very moving and inspiring.
All people are on the verge of breaking free from National Socialism's enslavement of Europe in this new spiritual dawn of freedom and honour.
So that's the overall picture of what the leaflets, how the leaflets began, how the leaflets and what they were roughly do.
But but what had the white rose written that meant that they had to die and that really they had to die very quickly?
Well, the leaflets urge their readers to open their eyes to the atrocities being committed in the name of the regime.
They draw on a range of philosophical ideas and influences.
And as I said, they include quotations from German writers such as Groucho Schiller,
the violence, as well as Aristotle's political philosophy, the Old Testament,
the Chinese philosopher to see the leaflets were designed to stir up the people,
to confront them with truths which the group believed that they were deliberately ignoring through fear or through obstinacy.
From the very beginning, their language is forceful and I think even quite shocking.
If every one of us waits for someone else to start,
then the heralds of avenging nemesis will draw ever closer until the last sacrificial victim is vainly thrown into the jaws of a demon.
That will never be seated. They're not messing around here.
This is this is very bold rhetoric. And this is this is leaflet one.
It's going to get more intense from here. So the first leaflet really appeals to a common German cultural heritage,
quoting from two German works, one by Johann Wolfgang from Ghouta and the other by Philippe Schiller.
Both were writers whom the Nazis had co-opted, but who could speak to another time and another way of being good has play upon the need.
As Awakes was written for the celebrations in Berlin of Napoleon's defeats in 1815,
and in the excerpt quoted at the end of the first leaflet, The figure of hope speaks.
They stutter, stammer on and on that fair and taunting word freedom till all our temporal steps and use are useful and so unfamiliar.
We call its name a joyful clamour with conviction, loud freedom.
It's significant. But the final word of this excerpt quoted is,
is the word freedom's I hate when Sophie was taken to the court from her cell on the morning of the 22nd of February 1943.
Her soul mate noted that she had left behind the court's indictment on which she had written the single word Fight Freedom.
Sophie was executed that same day at 5 p.m. and minutes later as her brother Hans was led to the guillotine.
He cried out as labour, despite long live freedom.
Freedom is a word which recurs again and again in these leaflets and which was of huge significance to the white rose.
The first leaflet also quotes Socialist 1789 essay the law giving us of Lycurgus and
so long in which he contrasts the oligarchic and Republican forms of government.
It was actually this text that first made Sophie suspect that Hans was involved in the White Rose campaign.
He'd been at university for about six weeks. She saw a copy of this leaflet and then, by chance, while waiting, enhances rumours.
One day she happened to flick through his books and found a copy of the
Schiller text and found that the passage quoted in the leaflet had been marked.
And of course, this was the same passage.
It immediately struck her, and she's reported to have confronted her brother at this point and asked him about the white rose.
And reportedly, it's at this moment that Sophie also becomes involved in the white race.
In the second leaflet, the White Rose explicitly denounces the persecution of European Jews.
Writing We want only to point out briefly by way of example, the fact that since the conquest of Poland,
300,000 Jews have been murdered in that country in the most bestial manner.
Here we see the most horrific crime against human dignity, a crime unparalleled in all human history.
They attempted to show how their fellow Germans have been taken in by Nazis and urged
readers to open their eyes to these atrocities being committed in the name of the regime.
They go on until the outbreak of the war. The vast majority of the German people were blinded.
The National Socialists did not show their true face. But now, since they have been seen for what they are, the highest and only duty,
the most sacred duty, even of every German, must be to destroy these beasts.
So in addition to this very serious, very hard hitting rhetoric, there's also some humour elsewhere.
They openly mock the Nazis, poking fun at Hitler's Mein Kampf.
They write that this is a book which, despite having been written in the most appalling German that I've ever read,
has been elevated to biblical status by this nation of poets and philosophers.
Now, the German lumps that they put on Denker nation of poets and philosophers is an almost proverbial phrase applied to the Germans by themselves,
that they have thus embraced.
This worthless book of Hitler suggests either that they are not so gifted as that, or that they need specifically to recover their critical faculties.
And this is indeed, I think, what the White Rose was urging people to do.
The leaflets called on readers to engage in passive resistance to bring down national socialism,
but not with violence and to bring an end to the war, which despite the fact that four of them were conscripted medics,
which they viewed as unjust, they also advocate sabotage of factories,
national socialist events, universities, cultural events, the arts and the media.
They even warned against giving to Charity Street Collections because this will only continue to benefit and support the state.
And what, according to the White Rose did that states that Nazi government looked like?
They expressed this in the following terms. All current states, in inverted commas, is the dictatorship of evil.
We know that already. I hear you object and we don't need you to approach us for it yet again.
But I ask you if you know that, then why don't you act?
Why do you tolerate these rulers gradually robbing you in public and in private of one race after another until one day?
Nothing, absolutely nothing, remains but the machinery of the state under the command of criminals and trumpets.
We deserve to be scattered across the world like dust before the wind.
If we do not prepare ourselves for action now at the 11th hour and finally muster the courage
which we have thus far lacked to not conceal your cowardice under the cloak of expediency.
So the apathy is the apathy which they discern among the people around them that they
take issue with and that they're trying to expose with this extremely powerful rhetoric,
there's an unwillingness to see things which are in plain sight, which the white rose again and again try to get their readers to see.
I've said that the leaflets include several quotations,
and I think these were clearly intended to appeal to a particular audience of a particularly educated, intellectual audience.
There are, however, other examples of how writers and thinkers known to the White Rose members influence them.
And a very prominent example is a gentleman called Tito Hecker, an authority on Kirkegaard and translator of John Henry, Cardinal Newman.
Under the Nazis, Hitler had been banned from speaking publicly or publishing, and he kept a secret journal, a fascinating journal,
documenting his internal resistance to the regime which his teenage daughter,
in fact, had to smuggle out of their flat when it was searched by the Gestapo.
She puts it in her music case.
Hector's influence is discernible in the fourth leaflet, especially, which draws on theology and metaphysics presenting Hitler as the Antichrist.
Every word that comes out of Hitler's mouth is a lie.
When he says peace, he means war. And when he blasphemous invokes the name of the Almighty, he means the power of the evil.
One of the fallen angel of Satan. His mouth is the stinking more of [INAUDIBLE], and his power is, in its very essence, corrupt.
And I hope you can hear also some very biblical,
perhaps also some very Lutheran preaching resonances in some of the language that they are using here.
The white rose here again in this false leaflet point to the future and emphasise
individuals responsibility for bringing the criminals to justice after the war ends.
But always looking forward to the future,
to a point when the war will inevitably have ended and when Germany will have to account for what has gone on.
There is no punishment on this earth that would do justice to the crimes of Hitler and his inner circle.
But out of love for the coming generations.
An example must be set after the end of the war so that no one will ever feel even the slightest inclination to commit such acts again.
Do not forget the petty villains of this regime. Remember their names so that not a single one goes free.
The fourth least that ends with an assurance that the white rose is not in the power of a foreign power before boldly declaring,
We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience.
The white rose will never leave you in peace. It's quite a threat.
And the fact that we're still talking about this 75 years later, I think indicates quite easily that indeed they were somehow never silent.
Hence, Alex and Lily were appalled at what they witnessed on the eastern front in the summer of 1942 and returned to Munich,
determined to write more leaflets and to distribute them across Germany and into Austria in leaflet five.
Written by Hans and edited by Huber and distributed six months after leaflet four had been.
There's an even greater sense of urgency. Hitler cannot win the war.
He can only prolong it. His guilt and the guilt of his followers continually exceeds all boundaries.
Just punishment is nigh. Also striking is the focus again on what's going to happen after the war ends,
how Germany's going to be seen by the rest of the world and by the rest of Europe in the years to come.
And I think this comes across really as very as almost prophetic, given the post-war history of Germany,
and particularly post-war discussions in West Germany of collective guilt and collective responsibility.
Germans, shall we be forever hated and shunned by the whole world?
No. So separate yourself from the subhuman nature of National Socialism Act.
Prove that you think differently. A new fight for liberation is at hand.
And again, what's interesting about the white rose is use of language here is that they take this pejorative
word that the Nazis use to refer to Jews and other persecuted groups and to the Russian enemy,
wouldn't to mention subhumans. And they turn it right back around on the Nazis themselves.
In the sixth leaflet who believes the blame for the German defeat at Stalingrad in early February 43 squarely hit the store?
It also dispenses with this closing piece and make more copies.
It's simply interested, I think, in this powerful rhetoric, and it addresses specifically student readers this time.
For us, there is only one slogan Fight against the party.
Get out of the lecture halls of the states and senior leaders and party sycophants.
There is no threat that can deter us. Not even the closure of our universities.
It is the duty of each and every one of us to fight for our future,
our freedom and honour in a political system conscious of its own moral responsibility.
And that, again, is that word, freedom. In addition to the leaflet campaign over the course of two nights in February 1943.
Hence, Alex and Willie went out and used Kauri green and black coal tar dyes to write graffiti on the walls of several Munich buildings.
They came up with slogans such as Down with Hitler, Freedom and Hitler, Mass Murderer.
And these were intended to awaken again the German people's fierce resistance.
But now, in a much more condensed form, when Hans and Sophie were arrested in February 1943,
Hans had the rough version of what would have been his seventh leaflet in his pocket.
This had been drafted by Christoph Post. Hans tried to destroy this incriminating piece of paper, but he was unable to do so and it was discovered.
The six pamphlets, however, was smuggled out of Germany, and in the summer of 1943, millions of copies of this were dropped by the RAF over Germany.
The text for a new title manifesto of the Munich Student's Manifesto mentioned a student and the same year as this.
Thomas Mann, the exiled German novelist, dedicated one of his regular BBC broadcasts on the BBC's German service to the White Rose,
declaring good, splendid young people, you shall not have died in vain.
You shall not be forgotten. A new faith in freedom and honour is dawning, and the war would roll on for another two years.
These leaflets did not stop that, but the white rose would indeed not be forgotten.
What can we learn from the white rose about rising and resistance in a more general way?
Well,
the white rose used the written word specifically to call the German people to resist Marxism and to contribute in some way to an end to the war.
Through the leaflets, they tried to spread their ideas and to open people's eyes to what was going on around them.
They used specifically the medium of the flu plot, the leaflets, the flyer, the pamphlets.
This was the first medium of mass communication and in the history of the German speaking lands specifically has a very great importance.
And we find pamphlets and flyers used to disseminate ideas and information for the purposes of propaganda and control,
as well as provocation and of course, resistance.
Initially, flyers were sold rather than being distributed free of charge, so they had a slightly different understanding of those.
And it is estimated that in 1520, for example, a four page pamphlet would have cost publish a penny, which is the equivalent of a mug of beer.
Now, it is important, I think, to see the White Rose leaflets in the context of this tradition of pamphlets,
hearing of resistance rise and the fluke letter in Germany.
But there are increasingly much broader links that can be made not just within Germany or not just within the history of the Third Reich.
And it's one of the things that the White Rose Project will be pursuing in its future work.
And in order just to say a few words about this, I want to take us from 1943 to 2018, because in the summer of 2018 15,
undergraduate students from across this university were selected to work on Newt on the new translation of the White Rose leaflets.
Now, of course, there are many, many translations into English as the White Rose leaflets,
but it struck me that I was certainly not aware of three things.
First, the pamphlets published as a parallel text so that you could read the German and the English side by side.
Because of course, as journalists, we always want everybody to learn and read and understand German.
But we're also aware that sadly, not everyone does, which is, you know, something we hope to rectify.
But it would be we felt it would be a wonderful resource to be able to see the English next to the German.
The second thing was that I was not aware of a translation of the leaflets that had been collaborative.
And of course the leaflets themselves were a collaboration between students and then between students and their professor.
And third, I was not aware of a translation of the leaflets that had been done by students,
students who were the same age as the authors of most of these texts.
So they seemed to be a very productive way of going about things.
And these are indeed published and available now in the course of this project, working with 15 undergraduate students.
I was reminded, as I think Oxford teachers always are, that we're not really teaching so much as we're learning most of the time.
We learn from our students. And I want to quote a couple of the students now because they had these very fascinating
insights into the leaflets and specifically the leaflets as examples of resistance writing.
So the. That they are in fact.
Now made famous. Okay.
So the first students I want to quote is Adam Mazzariello, who's a fourth year student of German.
And he wrote During the Arab Spring, disabled, mobile and Internet networks and activists turned to leaflets as a means of highlighting
and railing against the current and historical abuses of dictatorial regimes.
In the Egyptian case, many of these leaflets were scanned and made available as part of a collection called the Tourism Documents.
Reading these leaflets now, eight years later, and with the white rose in mind,
it's impossible not to hear the echoes across time drawing, as the white rose did on cultural and religious heritage.
They saw themselves as defending against perversion and erasure.
The printed ephemera of the revolutions of 2011 are just as rich in satire, irony and anger.
In both cases, moreover, the words ring just as true for the leaflets contemporary readers as they do today.
I think this is a this is a fascinating link that I certainly wouldn't have made.
And I think there's also great resonance with the kind of eco activism that we've seen particularly recently and particularly among the young.
Another quotation from one of our student translations, Eve Mason.
She commented The White Rose members were individuals who wanted more than anything to provoke action to awaken their fellow Germans
and inspire their resistance to the regime in an age in which young people are constantly being accused of apolitical cynicism.
Imagine, I hope, our translation of these pamphlets can provide an example of the political action our
generation can achieve and of the true potential we have to make change in the world.
Now questions are often asked about the white rose and the extent to which it had any kind of impact.
Some have questioned how much concrete change they really achieved.
As a matter dumba and just newborn rice and less in the study of Sophie Scholl and the white rose.
They quote, I quote The impacts of the white rose cannot be measured in tyrants destroyed.
Regimes overthrown. Justice restored. A scale with another dimension is needed.
And then the significance is deeper. It goes even beyond the Third Reich, beyond Germany.
The White Rose didn't, I think, expect to bring down the Nazi state with six leaflets.
But it matters that those leaflets exist and their story gives us hope.
I think especially for those of us who work with young people, but for everyone,
it provides a moving and inspiring example of how conscience and moral courage and the written word can challenge injustice.
And after all, here we are 75 years later, talking and thinking about the white race.
So thank you very much. Thank you for your attention. Thank you for coming.
And I look forward to any questions you might have about the White Rose or about the White Rose Project.
Thank.