Explore Sophie Scholl And The White Rose Portrayed By Annette Dumbach Classified In Readable Copy

well my heart is lying in a hundred bleeding pieces on the floor, In a good way.



Why have I never heard of these people I mean, I had heard of Sophie Scholl and Hans, but why hadn't I heard MORE about them And why hadn't I ever heard of the rest of them Willi and Christoph and Professor Huber and SHURIK And CHRISTOPH And SHURIK

sobs Shuuuuuuuriiiiiiiiiiiiiik.


Obviously I do not have very coherent thoughts at the moment, Except that I love these people, A lot. Also: man, did they DIE WELL,



Ow, My son introduced me to this part of history when he started a coffeehouse called The White Roseyears ago, I said I was surprised he would gravitate towards that period of history because the true stories from that time broke my heart, too, When I was, I had read The Diary of Anne Frank and it always haunted me, This little known chapter in the German resistance movement during Hitler's hold over Germany is about this cruel dictator and the determination of these brave young people I read it all in one sitting.
It was so riveting , I ordered the DVD from the library, A mustread. Watch the DVD too. This is an updated version of "The Shattering of the German Night," recommended to me by Dr, George Wittenstein, a personal friend of the Scholls,

The story is a moving one, no matter who writes it, but this new edition was more carefully researched yet maintains an extremely compelling narrative, was slow in the beginning and focused a lot on histories of germany that dragged on and that i didnt think were entirely necessary to the story, but it definitely picked up later on More a textbook than a novel/biography but still a fascinating and terrifying insight into this terrible time in history and these incredibly brave young people.
Strange title as if the book has a central character, it is Sophie's brother Hans, Possibly the title is a publisher's decision to follow on the success of the Sophie Scholl film,
Much is conjecture particular conversations, scnes and so forth but robust imaginative insight is crucial to good history, The book charts not only the history of the White Rose resistance movement but the whole network of interior resistance within Nazi Germany, There are also succinct interpretations of German nationalism from the time of Napoleon, and philosophical movements, Overall, this is an uplifting story of courage and sacrifice with the universal dimension which promises that even in the midst of evil, amongst indifference and cowardice and selfinterest, ther are good people who do good things.

I have yet to look at the appendices which contain the seven leaflets of the White Rose which the group managed to distribute across Germany, court judgments, and New York Times reports.
It bothered me from the outset that on the front cover this book is described as having an animated narrative that reads like a suspense novel,
I hope not, I thought, I don't want a novel,
Yes, there were some tense moments, in which members of the WR risked life and limb by mailing large quantities of antiNazi leaflets around Germany, whilst the dreaded Gestapo loitered everywhere.
And in parts it did have novel qualities, that had me thinking of Hans Fallada's Brilliant 'Alone in Berlin', but on the whole this detailed account of the White Rose felt more like a history lesson, a return to the classroom, that it did a gripping novel.
Which was what I'd hoped,

My knowledge of the White Rose and their activities had previously been pretty slim a group of students are sentenced to death for spreading their hatred for the Third Reich.
And this book did a great job of filling in the many blanks, How did it all start who were its founders How did many of them get caught, before being charged with treason I now

feel bloated with WR data, and definitely got my moneys worth.
Annette Dumbach clearly goes about her research with much passion, and even includes at the back of the book all the leaflets which turned out to be far longer than I thought written by the White Rose and the Resistance, photos/mugshots of those charged, including the defiant looking brother amp sister Hans and Sophie Scholl at the time of their arrest February,, chillingly, the actual guillotine used for execution, and the Munich courtroom where the defendants were tried which surprised me as to how small it was.
I also learned to my great joy that the good old RAF reprinted one of the leaflets, and airdropped millions of copies over Germany in July,

For all the fascination I found with this book, it is still, ultimately so tragic, I actually started to think that all these events, and all the terror, all the deaths, and all the carnage of WWsimply didn't really happen, how could it But it did.
The white Rose students played just a small role in the battle against such evil, but they did make a difference, And all these years that have passed, they still have the power to ignite and inspire people to speak out against injustice,

An extract from the forth printed White Rose leaflet

"Who has counted the dead Hitler or Goebbels Neither of them! In Russia thousands are lost daily.
It is the time of the harvest, and the reaper cuts into the ripe grain with wide strokes, Mourning enters the country cottages, and there is no one to dry the tears of the mothers, Yet Hitler feeds lies to those people whose most precious belongings he has stolen and whom he has driven to a meaningless death, Every word out of Hitler's mouth is a lie, When he says peace, he means war, and when he blasphemously uses the name of the Almighty, he means the power of evil, the fallen angel, Satan, His mouth is the foulsmelling maw of hell, and his might is at bottom accursed, True, we must conduct the struggle against the National Socialist terrorist state with rational means, but whoever today still doubts the real existence of demonic powers has completely failed to understand the metaphysical background of this war.
Behind the concrete, visible events, behind all objective, rational considerations, we find the irrational element: the struggle against the devil, against the servants of the Antichrist!" My impression of the Scholls and the White Rose movement too strong / organisation barely that / gang from when I first learnt of then around the age of seventeen or eighteen was that they were sweet, but silly.
After reading this book my first impression hasn't shifted much if at at all,

The Scholls formed a small group of Munich students, they wrote and distributed six antiNazi leaflets from Juneishuntilth Februarywhen they were caught, Then they were executed.

That was the Scholls, briefly, now the book, It seemed to me to be pitched at people who had heard of the Scholls or the White Rose but didn't know much about Germany, Reading the book the questions in my mind were who wrote the leaflets, when, how did they manage the practical side, and why did they even start these questions didn't interest the author, the question of why was only obliquely addressed with the curious suggestion that they might have been motivated by Heidegger well his writings, not in person which given his association with the Nazi regime would have been odd.


To my mind, three ways present themselves as to how to approach on the Scholls a Gestapo view focusing on becoming aware of these leafleteers, attempts to find out more and to track them down down the advantage of this is that there is some documentary evidence a comparative view looking at them in the context of resistance movements in Germany as a whole they were typical in that they emerged relatively late, once allied victory looked to be somewhere between extremely likely and inevitable, they were also typical in that the ideological spectrum of those involved from semicommunist left to authoritarian militaristic right wing was quite broad or thirdly something focused on the details of the Scholls and their circle, this I gather reading between the lines would be the most difficult since reasonably enough they were quite secretive often a good idea when involved in clandestine resistance movements and mostly young, and not particularly exceptional on the face of it, the Scholls were Protestants from Swabia, the others Catholics, mostly students, a couple were in the army as medics, their access to amphetamines helped to fuel the operations of the group, perhaps contributing to their ultimate carelessness.


Dumbach and Newborn's approach is a bit novelistic, skipping backwards and forwards in time with sweeping digressions until pageofwhen the group start work on their fifth leaflet and there is then a continuous narrative until the end.
Before then things happen at random, not all the leaflets are discussed, we don't learn how the group came together or what motivated them to search for a method of resistance or why writing leaflets in particular, but we do learn of their efforts to reach out and make contact with other resistance movements via the younger brother of a man arrested for resistance activities which seems very ameteurish, but it seems the Gestapo were not watching who he was getting into contact with, not that any of them could have known that and a business man in a group discussing the postwar, postHitler ordering of Germany he is strongarmed by the Scholls into writing them a cheque forReichmark a fatal mistake for him since cash is harder to trace.


This retelling is quite novelistic, but not novel like enough to be exciting, neither analytical nor a close investigation to be interesting in an exciting way, Quite why Sophie Scholl gets her name on the front cover I don't know, she only dominates the story from the 'trial' onwards when she was a cool as a cucumber and demonstrated sang froid to the end, how the authors know that they don't say, I wondered if they wanted to write a martyr's life for her but the account isn't quite that, the martyr I believed oughtn't get caught quite so accidentally, but rather deliberately.


At the end of the account of the Scholls and their activities buying stamps, envelops and paper in small quantities so as not to create suspicions, staying up all night cracking out copies of their leaflets on a mimeograph, posting leaflets to addresses taken from the phone book are translations of their leaflets these are not rousing calls to arms, great careers in advertising did not await them had they not been guillotined by the Nazis.
One of their group did have an escape plan in case they were to be rounded up by the Nazis they involved laying low in a PoW camp for Russian prisoners and then heading across country to Switzerland, in the event he couldn't get into the camp and didn't have the clothing to get through the snow in February.


So my impression remains that the group was sweet but silly, writing leaflets was maybe as effective as painting graffiti, not everybody had supplies of conveniently available Jews or Trades Unionists to help hide or smuggle abroad.
It's not a bad book, though I didn't find it particularly clear, I do hope though that there are better books on the subject in print, Part history, part, biography, and part unabashed tribute, this book tells of a small, idealistic group of students at the University of Munich, calling themselves the White Rose, who actively resisted the Nazis duringand early, and paid for it with their lives.
They produced thousands of leaflets denouncing the Nazis, warning Germans that they would be morally culpable for the regimes actions, and calling for resistance, At great danger to themselves, they transported the pamphlets to various cities all over Germany, From these locations, they mailed the pamphlets to people in other cities throughout Germany and Austria, selected at random from directories,

We think of Munich as cradle of the Nazi movement, but it also was home to this daring, idealistic group which also came to include one of their professors.
These young people also risked their lives by painting antiNazi graffiti around the university and city, including just a few meters away from the heavily guarded monument that the Nazis put up to commemorate their origins.


Although the entire group was eventually caught and the central figures, including the siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl, were executed, their pamphlets made their way to the Allies, and who reproduced one and dropped it in large numbers over Germany.


It was inspiring to read about the decision the White Rose students took to move from disgust with the Nazis ideology and their perversion of German patriotism, their sacrifice of a whole generation of young Germans serving in the military, and the mass murder of Jews and others, to taking action, and to read that many Germans albeit a minority were unsympathetic to the Nazi cause and some did risk their lives by opposing them.


The book also fills in some blanks about what life was like for ordinary people living in Nazi Germany and how the reversals Germany started experiencing inand earlyaffected morale.
These included Allied bombing of German cities and disasters on the Russian front, notably, the surrender of two hundred thousand troops at Stalingrad,
Deeply moving and well written, The book expands beyond the title as it also covers Hans Scholl and the core of the White Rose members in Munich,

It is abundantly clear to us the grotesqueness they were fighting against so I found it interesting to discover they were fighting for and those individual experiences that guided them Hans Scholl's individual creativity, Sophie Scholl's intellectual curiosity, Kurt Hubers antiimperialism, Alexander Schmorrell's Russian background, Willi Graf's Catholic faith and Christoph Probst's Jewish family although these stories were by no means their sole reasons.
Nazi resistance was not monochromatic and ranged in cultural and political motivation,

Nazism didn't thrive solely on enthusiastic party members, it succeeded from quiet support and those who acquiesced, It hinged on those who saw the evil and wrongdoing but turned a blind eye or resigned themselves to what transpired, It is inspiring to read of the courage of the White Rose that they were not going to be counted with the masses that became complicit with the Nazi system.
Freedom is more important than selfpreservation, .