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The White Rose in Israel

 

An exhibition remembers the resistance group whose core members included the Scholl siblings.

 

In the seminar building of the Ghetto Fighters  House Museum, in the north of the country between Akko and Nahariya, a somewhat unusual exhibition as far as Israel is concerned has been on show since 15 November. It centres on the resistance of the members of the “White Rose”, the group of students who urged resistance to the Nazi dictatorship on the basis of their Christian and humanist values and were consequently sentenced to death and executed by the so-called People’s Court.

 

Alongside display panels with explanations, photographs and biographies there are also excerpts from their six famous leaflets, translated into Hebrew and Arabic. “The original versions are closely written A4 sheets in a language that is difficult to understand for young people today, littered with quotations from Goethe and Schiller. For this reason we just extracted quotations and put them in context,” explains Hildegard Kronawitter, Chairperson of the White Rose Foundation in Munich, who travelled to Israel to attend the opening on 15 November.

German resistance in the “Third Reich” is a complex topic – on both sides. It took a long time in the new Federal Republic for its heroes to lose the stigma of being considered traitors. Michael Verhoeven’s 1982 film “Die Weisse Rose” (The White Rose) was initially not allowed to be shown by the Goethe-Instituts abroad, because in the credits it refers to the fact that at this time the rulings of the People’s Court had still not been legally rescinded. It wasn’t until 25 January 1985 that the German Bundestag finally unanimously resolved that “the institution named the ‘People’s Court’ was no court of law in a constitutional sense, but an instrument of terror to enforce the Nazi tyranny.” Today there are numerous schools, squares and streets named after siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl, the best-known members of the “White Rose”. And the exhibition on their resistance, funded by the German Foreign Office, was shown in the USA, Poland, Russia, France, Brazil and Italy last year alone.

 

In Israel there was a different reason for the reservation towards the topic of resistance in the Third Reich. Indeed, generally speaking the persecution of the Jews posed “no grounds for action”, as literary scholar Rachel Salamander put it in a lecture commemorating the White Rose at Ludwig Maximilians Universität München in 2000. No organised opposition was established to the persecution and annihilation of the Jews and “as heterogeneous as the resistance was in terms of political values and consequently as diverse its plans for the post-War period regarding the so-called ‘Jewish question’, a uniform ‘inactivity’ prevailed”. The White Rose was an exception however, the only German resistance project to devote itself to the fate of the Jews.

 

In summer 1942 medical students Hans Scholl and Alexander Schmorell wrote and distributed the first four “leaflets of the White Rose” in Munich. In the second leaflet they decried the murder of the Jewish population in Poland: “Here we see the most frightful crime against human dignity, a crime that is unparalleled in the whole of history.” They were aghast at the Germans’ “apathetic” behaviour. In the fourth leaflet they threatened: “We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace!”

The fifth leaflet, “Appeal to all Germans!”, was published in January 1943 and was widely distributed with the aid of Sophie Scholl, Willi Graf and other allies in numerous other German and Austrian towns and cities, too. By way of political programme the resistance group called for “freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the protection of individual citizens from the arbitrary will of criminal regimes of violence – these will be the foundations of the new Europe”. At night Hans Scholl, Alexander Schmorell and Willi Graf wrote “Hitler mass murderer” or “Freedom” on building walls in Munich in tar dye.

 

In early February 1943 Kurt Huber wrote the sixth leaflet; it was an appeal to all students to rebel against the murderous government. Hans and Sophie Scholl distributed it on 18 February 1943 in the main building of Ludwig Maximilians Universität. They were found out by the university locksmith and handed over to the Gestapo. A handwritten draft leaflet they were unable to hide also led to the arrest of medical student Christoph Probst. The three students were sentenced to death as early as 22 February 1943 and murdered by guillotine in Munich’s Stadelheim prison.

Janina Altman is among the pioneers in Israel who occupied themselves with the topic years ago. She published a book in Hebrew on the White Rose and also collaborated on the design of the exhibition. Yet the fact that it is being shown at such a symbolic place as the Ghetto Fighters’ House illustrates a general shift according to Israeli historian Moshe Zimmermann. “Today Israelis are interested in the attitude of Germans in the Third Reich, including going beyond the Jewish question.” Curiosity plays a role here, he claims, wanting to understand what happened on the other side, as well as a tendency of wanting to find a counterweight to the perpetrators, which incidentally can also be seen in other countries. “The resistance fighters make it possible to have a normal relationship to the Germans and to get talking.”

 

Several workshops are now planned at the Ghetto Fighters’ House, which was co-founded in 1949 by survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto. In teaching about the Holocaust its education department takes a humanistic approach with a universalist view. As such, its director Yariv Lapid considers it only natural to include this topic in the programme. The White Rose, he says, was made up of “young people in an extreme situation who lose everything because they do what they consider to be right and in so doing swim against the tide.”

    

Ghetto Fighters  House Museum

White Rose Foundation

Gisela Dachs

Partner

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