Breaking glass, silenced

November 9, 1938 - December 31, 1938,

Among all the young adults who were to become the White Rose, Susanne Hirzel was the only one who recorded the emotions or fear she felt that awful November 9, 1938… That day, that week, that month. The next Scholl letter we are allowed to see is dated November 21, and it is a tiny fragment of trivial comments.

It’s surprising that it is so, since this omission would be the same as reading letters from an American to her pen pal that revealed nothing of the emotions experienced at the 9/11 destruction of the Twin Towers. How is it possible that there was no reaction to an incident this bloody, this wretched?

Initially, I planned to leave my comments about the Scholl family to the minimal narrative contained in chapter 13 of White Rose History, Volume I. Until I received an email from Armin Ziegler.

You can prioritize the ‘aversion of eyes’ of the Scholl children properly only when you know that they were still the only Aryan family in that house located at Adolf-Hitler-Ring 131 – with three Jewish families. There’s always talk about a Jewish classmate of Sophie whose fate she [Sophie] bemoaned. At least that’s what they say. But there is not one word recorded about the fate of these three families!!! They saw them up close and in person (hautnah) every day!! At least Sophie, Werner, Elisabeth, and Inge. Why did you leave this out?

So I pulled out the Zeugnisse book one more time and changed the opening to Chapter 14 of White Rose History, Volume I.

I cannot seem to escape the great silences that follow the sound of breaking glass. How is it possible that Susanne Hirzel could be the only person who uttered any comment to the November pogrom, either then or now? Why is the next heartbeat from the Scholl household not heard till November 21, 1938, two weeks after their own neighbors were so drastically affected by the new world order?

For the Scholls, contact with Ulmer Jews came constant. That house on Adolf Hitler Ring knew the seven Scholls as non-Jewish tenants in a house filled with German Jews. Robert Scholl had not minded the address when his accounting office saw Jakob Guggenheimer’s rope and cable business as a potential client. Another neighbor family claimed Albert Einstein as cousin, certainly not a bad thing when Jews were Germans too.

On the night of November 9, 1938 when nearly every Jewish male in Ulm was dragged from his residence in the middle of the night and sent to Dachau, where were the Scholls? What was their reaction to so much misery in the building where they lived?

Andrew Einstein, born and raised in the United States, repeated his family’s assertion that Robert Scholl was a “decent” German. That declaration likely rested more on the basis that after the war, Robert Scholl helped the Einstein family regain the house they had owned on Olga Straβe, also known as Adolf Hitler Ring, than on any actual aid rendered in those dark years.

There are no letters, no diary entries that speak of concern for what would become of their neighbors. Not even anything after the fact.

Instead, all we get is another Scholl legend that claims that after Kristallnacht, Robert Scholl looked up his landlord Jakob Guggenheimer, who had been relegated to cramped quarters in a “Jewish section” of the city. The legend says that when Robert Scholl knocked on the door, Guggenheimer feared it was the Gestapo and querulously asked who it was. To which Robert Scholl supposedly replied, “Ein Mensch,” a play on words meaning “a person” and the Yiddish word for a decent human being.

The legend rings false when you know that Jakob Guggenheimer had died of natural causes five months earlier. And that his heirs had been forced to sell the house on Adolf Hitler Ring to an Aryan for a pittance.

Andrew Einstein recalled that his grandfather sarcastically asked the Nazi buyer, “Are you the Jew or am I?” when offered such an insulting sum for the asset. Therefore, not only was Jakob Guggenheimer not alive, rendering the encounter impossible, but the Scholls had been paying rent to a Nazi for a couple of months already.

I am not trying to bash the Scholls in particular by pointing this out. But it is necessary to understand what happened in November 1938, how quickly things changed and how average German citizens allowed it to. Even if arson and vandalism were limited to radical rowdies of the Nazi sect, Germans did not help their German Jewish neighbors rebuild and repair. Like the Scholls, they pretended nothing had happened.

Until now, Jewish Germans had been able to work around restrictions placed on them. Medical doctors could not call themselves medical doctors, but they were able to keep practicing medicine under the title ‘Jewish health care provider.’ Jewish CPAs may have had to call themselves bookkeepers, an insult to their professionalism, but they could keep dispensing financial advice.

After Kristallnacht, when no one protested the harsh treatment of Jewish citizens in Germany, Nazis stopped feigning civility and cut off oxygen to the remaining Jewish Germans. To be perfectly blunt, this enabled accountants like Robert Scholl to expand their businesses and make more money than ever before. Keep your eye on this bouncing ball. It is not the last time you will see it.

Zeugnisse zur Geschichte der Juden in Ulm [Testimonies to the History of Jews in Ulm, published by Ulm’s Stadtarchiv or city archives] contains story after story of Jewish families who tried to make it work, only to have their solitary means of livelihood stripped from them in November and December 1938.

That is why it is almost an affront to have Inge Scholl refuse to include anything about this time in her family “histories.” The words of Hans Scholl’s November 21, 1938 letter that she incorporated into the book edited by Inge Jens leave you speechless with their sheer banality:

I am enjoying the hospital very much, already learning a few things. We have one or two nice doctors who are fulfilling their reserve duty here. I am trying to pick up all I can. Last week I substituted for a nurse who had gone on leave for a few days.

Not a word of “how did our neighbors fare?”

Indeed, you can look all you want for a small sign that the Scholls cared what happened to their Jewish neighbors, and you will not find it. They seemed to float along on a self-absorbed plane, worried about the sacrifices forced on them. If you have come to the White Rose story with an image of Hans and Sophie Scholl (and their family) as noble warriors for a just cause, you have to be bitterly disappointed in reality. Stick with me — the brother and sister do come around eventually — and be willing to embrace even the feet of clay.

For it worsened with Hans’ letters over the next couple of weeks. December 6 (Saint Nicholas Day) he wrote of looking forward to spending Christmas at home and patted himself on the back for having discovered that “tending the sick is a great and humanitarian occupation,” without wondering about Jewish doctors kept from doing just that. He presented himself in the best possible light, as having the “right mental frame of mind” for the demands of the medical profession, though he was at the bottom of the medical totem pole (you’d never know it from the self-aggrandizement when he wrote of working with patients and observing surgery).

Not only did his December 8 letter continue the silence about Kristallnacht and the upheavals it had caused among his family’s neighbors, but he took for granted the NSDAP prerequisites for studying at university. He asked his parents to send him his graduation diploma, Aryanpass (or certificate of Aryan descent), and Hitler Youth report.

If his silence does not bother you, then his December 18 letter should be at least a little unsettling. For among all the “I’ll be home for Christmas” prose, and with a paragraph devoted to his memories about what he had endured this time last year, he asked the flippant question, “Is it really true about Kammerer, Jewish lackey and all that? A friend told me.”

Inge Scholl explained away his question by noting that Annelies Kammerer’s father owned a photography shop in Ulm. Some of the townsfolk apparently decried and ostracized him as a “Jewish lackey” for defying Nazi propaganda and continuing to serve his Jewish customers.

Well finally! Concrete evidence of an Ulmer who was in fact a Mensch in the Yiddish sense of the word. Someone should erect a memorial to this man, this Mr. Kammerer, who had the backbone to stand up to the brown horde.

Which begs the question as to why Robert Scholl was not similarly branded a Jewish lackey. Or why his son would use the pejorative “Jewish lackey” if he meant something nicer by it.

Further, I searched the writings of both Hans and Sophie Scholl. Neither one mentioned Annelies Kammerer or her family after December 18, 1938. Sophie dropped Annelies Kammerer, replacing her with the decidedly pro-Nazi Erika Reiff. Annelies disappeared from view.

You can look all you want, and you will never find a letter or diary entry from Hans or Sophie Scholl, or from anyone in their family, that expressed the least concern about the Einsteins or Barths or Jakob Guggenheimer’s daughter Irene, who would still have been mourning her father’s death under Jewish custom.

Nor about the Barth’s daughter Lotte, who was 18 at the time. Odd that Sophie — almost exactly the same age as Lotte — never mentioned this girl once. Odd at least in view of Inge Scholl’s legend about the philosemitism her father and their family supposedly exhibited. Or did the Scholls in fact discuss their Jewish neighbors in the letters we are not allowed to read? Inge Scholl’s heavy-handed censorship takes on new meaning in light of Kristallnacht.

Lotte Barth survived the war. She emigrated to the United States when she was 18, after Kristallnacht, sailing to New York on the ship Washington. Her father Heinrich was among those dragged from his bed on November 9, along with her uncle Julius Barth. Julius was beaten to death in Dachau in November or December 1938. Her father returned to Ulm from Dachau, but Lotte did not get to see him, as she was on her way to America.

To comprehend why the Scholl silence — and the silence of Germans in general — is such a big deal, here is Lotte Greenwood nee Barth telling about her trip to the United States.

I can still see my dear mother at the train station in Ulm. It’s a good thing I was young and stupid, because today I understand what that look in her eyes meant.

It was not easy to set off into the world completely alone at eighteen, knowing that I would never return to my parents, relatives, friends, and hometown. I had grown up [in Ulm] and I loved that city. I had never lived anywhere other than Ulm on the Danube.

The journey was very stormy and New York was “confusing.” That first year, I worked with children. Then I became quite ill. I met my dear husband in the autumn of 1939, and we married on October 13, 1940, even though he too was a “refugee” and we had very little in comparison to today. But we were young and healthy and worked hard…

Julius Barth was not the lone family member to die at the hand of the Nazis. Her father, mother, sister Suse (eight years younger), and cousin were all shot in the woods near Riga a few years later.

So while Hans Scholl got all sad and teary-eyed recalling the horrible injustice perpetrated on him the previous year, and while the Scholl children planned their annual New Year’s ski trip (Hans to Werner: Scrape the old dirt off the skis and get them freshly tarred, but leave the waxing to Inge, because she does it best), the Barths sat shiva in their home, a home right there “hautnah” to the Scholls’ own home, mourning the death of a brother and uncle, worrying about a daughter off to a strange land — and safety.

Jewish Germans who remained also faced the ruinous specifics of Hitler’s legislation that fined them one billion Reichmarks for the damage “they” inflicted on Germany the night of November 9. In mid-November, it had been an obliquely worded mandate. No longer. Deprived of a means to earn a living, Jewish Germans had to cope with a new tax — not on income, but on assets both liquid and fixed.

White Rose History, Volume I includes Armin Ziegler’s work on Jenny Grimminger’s sister, Senta Meyer, and how this “fine” affected her and her family. Should you read that Appendix C, try to put yourself in that family’s shoes. And be aware that that family had direct connection with Eugen and Jenny Grimminger, who financed so much of White Rose work.

Susanne Hirzel looked back on those days with the wisdom that comes with adulthood and remarked that Germans were willing to tolerate a large dose of illogic. “A little undisguised barbarism could not dampen the enthusiasm of the masses for the Führer,” she wrote. “Everywhere you heard, ‘If only the Führer knew.’ Though it did not seem to occur to anyone how great the contradiction when at public events, the Party would say, ‘Führer, we thank you.’”

By mid-December 1938, Sophie Scholl still had had no reply from Fritz Hartnagel to the letters she had written, begging him for clarity in their relationship. She only had his letter dated October 21, in which he expressed profound hurt at her “Leonberg” letter.

So sometime during the week “before the last Sunday before Christmas,” Sophie sat down to pen another missive to her soldier. She recognized that just as she wished for him to respond to her pleas for a clean break-up or redefinition, he probably was waiting for her to answer his October 21 letter. And she had never done so.

“Could I postpone that for a little while yet?” she wrote. “Perhaps you will find the answer yourself.”

She wondered if he were coming home on the last Sunday before Christmas, but she did not ask him to visit her. She told him she had been ill and had stayed home from school. And that if she had her way, she would drop out of school completely and become a painter, nothing more. “I have such an aversion to school, because I have the feeling that I am not getting anything done. And that’s because I’m not.”

A week passed, and Fritz still had not written her. He must have communicated with her in some fashion, however, because when she wrote him on December 22, she asked him to let her know as soon as possible if they were still going skiing at Schindelberg — she needed to let Lisa Remppis know what their plans were.

She sent him Christmas candles, since he had to stay on base in Augsburg over Christmas. He should light them and enjoy the fragrance. “It makes a difference, doesn’t it?”

And she had just returned from a Christmas party at the kindergarten where Elisabeth Scholl was doing an internship. “The pastor was telling a story about a little boy who wrote a letter to the Christ child, and the boy was named Peter,” she wrote Fritz. “One of the little boys yelled out, ‘That’s me [des bin i’]!’ He accompanied the rest of the story with the happiest exclamations.”

Even as Sophie narrated the event for Fritz, her mood changed and she visibly relaxed. Thinking about the children and their unfeigned joy put her in better spirits, renewed her perspective. Christmas was only three days off, and she finally felt like she could celebrate.

And then the push-pull, the veritable emotional yo-yo to which Sophie would subject Fritz for the next 4-1/2 years. “I wish I could be there when you read it [the Hausmann book she had given him]. In general I would like to be alone with you a little. There is still so much that needs to be resolved.”

Here's one more of those niggling questions that will not let me go. In 1938, Christmas and Chanukah overlapped nearly perfectly, with Chanukah beginning on December 18 and ending December 25. At Chanukah, it is customary to display a chanukiah or Chanukah menorah in a window facing the street as a public witness to the miracle of the oil. Similar to Passover, at Chanukah the celebration focuses on freedom from oppression.

I have wondered whether the Jewish community in Ulm continued that tradition in the middle of such darkness. No one documented it either way, in either Jewish or non-Jewish literature of the day. I would like to think that children still lit one candle more each night, until on Christmas and the last day of Chanukah, there was one last moment of shared light. But it may be too late now to know for sure.

Light. Freedom from oppression.

As a concluding note:

This series focuses on Sophie Scholl. However, it’s worth noting that archives of others among the circle of White Rose friends similarly censor correspondence and diary entries from November 8, 1938 through sometime in January 1939.

In October 2023, a Catholic scholar revealed that around one-third of the businesses (and therefore homes) in and around Johannishof in Saarbrücken were Jewish. One-third! What did Willi Graf witness and how did he react? We do not know. Anneliese Knoop-Graf released no letters from those dates.

Jürgen Wittenstein, when asked directly about his memories of Kristallnacht, gave variations of the story, including “where he lived.” From the timeline I have been able to reconstruct for his life, he was likely in Grafenwöhr, a military city known for antisemitism and violence. Hard to believe he saw nothing.

In Christiane Moll’s otherwise-excellent edition of correspondence to/from Alexander Schmorell and Christoph Probst, she too skipped over anything related to Kristallnacht.

And Fritz Hartnagel — he was in Augsburg on November 9/10, 1938. I’ve met survivors from Augsburg. Ruth Schwager nee Teutsch was the last bride in the Augsburger synagogue. Her son Pete’s bris in 1938 (!) was the last bris in that shul. Their memories are horrific. Although like Ulm, Augsburg has done a good job of making atonement, inviting Jewish citizens to return. Pete and his mom started going back to Augsburg in the mid-1960s — hardest for Ruth, who could still envision those dark scenes.

Where are those scenes in Fritz’s letters? Oh, that’s right. We don’t get to read Fritz’s or Sophie’s letters from that period. Must be among the 88 letters Thomas Hartnagel held back.

It’s important to understand that we have NO letters or diary entries or "memories" from anyone related to White Rose resistance, except for Susanne Hirzel. And Susanne recanted almost all her strong words as she moved far-right politically.

If you have not grasped this so far, I hope it is beginning to sink in:

This story matters. Oh, how it matters!

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Image credits: Top photograph--Chanukiah in window. Photo © 2023 by Denise Elaine Heap. Please contact us for permission to use. Middle photograph--Synagogue in Munich, burning during and after Kristallnacht. Public domain. Bottom photograph--Old synagogue in Ulm, before Kristallnacht. Public domain.

The above information is fully footnoted in our White Rose histories. Please purchase them for access to that material! To order digital version of White Rose History, Volume I: Coming Together (January 1933-April 30, 1942), click here. To order digital version of White Rose History, Volume II, click here. WRH1 is © 2002, 2003, 2007 by Denise Elaine Heap. WRH2 is © 2002, 2007 by Denise Elaine Heap.

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