Don’t wash the teapot!

It wasn’t one of those posts designed to sell a service. Nor was it political. Or even deeply philosophical. No, it was a typical “Daryl” post on LinkedIn. A quiet observation from a quiet Brit. Daryl provides consulting services for an ERP software called Epicor. He doesn’t much hype his services.

But he does write about minutiae that make life interesting. Trash blown by the wind into cul-de-sac ends. The standardization of fish and chips. Whether headlice is less prevalent in Taiwan, his wife’s home country.

He brooks no incivility. The discussions are therefore generally wide-ranging and quite fun.

This weekend, he noted that he brews tea in his French press, a “manual” coffee maker. And observed how stained it had become.

Which makes me think of the various experiments we see, showing the surprising and sometimes horrifying effects various things we eat or drink have on everyday items. And by implication, apparently proving that those substances are damaging us.

What this tells me is that we should always be suspicious of “proof” that comes from a different environment than what is being proved, because it may be misleading. I’m pretty sure that what tea does to metal is not what it’s doing to me.

The comments, as usual, spanned a wide range of viewpoints. From a pun, “So no plans to admonish people to go tea-total?”—to an explanation of the tannins that make up that brown stain, to the similarities between that stain and patina. Someone recommended soaking it in Coca-Cola, while yet another joked that Daryl can forgo iron supplements.

I mentioned Alexander Schmorell’s admonition to Lilo Ramdohr never to wash a teapot.

Teatime was always special when Alex came around. He tried to bring Lilo little gifts: Books, drawings, a new joke he had heard, or when possible, special blends of real tea that he would then brew for her. ‘Never wash tea pots or coffee pots,’ he warned her. He claimed it detracted from the flavor, asserting it was a vice peculiar to German housewives. Lilo smiles when she remembers that he told her about a former girlfriend who had had the effrontery to give him a single piece of chocolate. He said he’d rather she spare him the misery. Either all of the chocolate, or none of it!—White Rose History, Volume I, page 518.

That single thread turned into a delightful discussion about White Rose friendships. I stated that until she died, Lilo thought about Alex every time she used an unwashed teapot. Daryl queried me about that assertion. I related how Lilo had saved the scraps of her 1940s life, anything that reminded her of Schurik. The broom closet where she stored extra leaflets. The piano where Alex pounded Beethoven when he was anxious or angry. Their sketches of one another and of Alois Pitzinger. And the habit of never washing a teapot.

And of course, every letter, every postcard, every note.

I briefly described how those White Rose friends stuck together, not only in 1942/43, but until the end of their lives. The families stayed close, stayed together.

A SysOps guy in British Columbia (hi, Boris!) commented: I call those “medieval” friends. Think perjury and tampering with evidence. There was a lot of this during the dark times. Relationships that required absolute trust. Choosing poorly was not survivable.

Me: That is such a good summary! Another astute Lilo observation: She said they were drawn together less by politics, and more because they all came from dysfunctional families where their sense of justice wasn’t shared. They needed one another. They bonded on such a deep level.

Boris: They call that “found family” now, I think. (Incidental families aren’t what they used to be.)

I’ve thought about this trifling-but-not-trivial exchange ever since. It made me wish I could let every one of you who cares about German resistance, about the White Rose friends, comprehend with everything in you how profound these friendships were. It’s not for nothing that Erich Schmorell always recommended Lilo’s book above all others. She captured who they were and why that mattered.

I’ll try to paint this portrait for you. If you can visualize the Venn diagram of White Rose friendships, you will “get it”—why certain families stuck together after the war, why others did not.

The foundational friendship: Christoph Probst and Alexander Schmorell

These two young men met in the Neues Gymnasium in Munich at a pivotal time in their respective lives. In 1934, Alex had severed ties with Jung Stahlhelm, transferring his membership to Hitler Youth and the SA’s Reiterkorps (cavalry). Christoph Probst likewise joined Hitler Youth in 1934, for love of HY outdoor excursions. By 1935 when both Christl and Alex attended Gymnasium together, they had begun to question National Socialism. A year or two later, they had moved to discussions of injustice.

Christl and Alex’s friendship formed the basis for all others in the White Rose. Yet even as others joined the circle, the two of them trusted one another with their lives. Alex introduced Hans Scholl, Traute Lafrenz, and Lilo Ramdohr to Christl, as well as prominent writers and thinkers. Christl brought along Harald Dohrn, Heinrich Ellermann, and most likely Willi Graf (the two of them fenced at the same school).

After the executions in 1943, and especially after the war, the Schmorell and Probst families remained extraordinarily close. Witnessing them talk about one another, I wondered at the unbreakable bond they enjoyed. Both had been burned by “researchers” who took their words out of context. The Probsts would not agree to an interview with me until Erich said I was all right. They relied on one another’s judgment decades after war’s end.

Similarly, those introduced to the circle by Alex and Christl retained their closeness with those families (and reciprocated). Lilo is a prime example. Not only did Erich recommend her memoir. So did Herta Probst. And both were livid during the year that the Weiβe-Rose-Stiftung banned Lilo’s book from their library.

Anneliese Graf and Angelika Probst

These two women shared an unusual friendship. Both were imprisoned at Wittelsbacher Palace (the Gestapo jail) under suspicion of treason. They were so close to their respective brothers that the Gestapo’s assumption seemed logical: If Willi Graf and Christoph Probst were traitors, Anneliese and Angelika must be as well. Nothing to do with Sippenhaft. Just the closeness of Anneliese and Angelika to the circle of friends.

Angelika had married Bernhard Knoop, a teacher at one of the boarding schools she and Christl had attended. But when Alex accompanied Christl on his trips to Marienau to visit Angelika, a strong romance ensued. Correspondence between Alex and Angelika revealed a passionate love that was doomed in 1940s Germany.

After a few weeks, somehow the Gestapo placed Anneliese and Angelika in the same cell.

They became such close friends, these strangers whose brothers would die. In fact, one day as Anneliese and Angelika whiled away the hours talking about family, about dreams and wishes, Anneliese confessed that she really wished she could find a husband. To which Angelika replied, “Well, I’ve got a perfectly good husband you can have once we get out of here.”

Angelika told Anneliese about her deep love for Alex—Schurik!—and they surely grieved the death they knew would come. They would never escape their anguish for brothers and lovers who would die at the hands of Nazis.

After the war, Anneliese would indeed marry Angelika’s ex-husband, Bernhard Knoop. And the two women remained forever friends. The Knoops maintained a suite in their home for Angelika—the separate entrance still bore her name when we visited Anneliese, decades after Angelika’s death.

A Möbius-band connection: As the White Rose friends splintered, going their own ways, Willi Graf and Alexander Schmorell seem to have grown close. They had no way of knowing that after the war, Willi’s sister and Alex’s paramour and Christl’s brother-in-law would connect!

Traute Lafrenz and Katharina (“Käthe”) Schüddekopf

Traute brought a history of informed dissent to the White Rose circle. While growing up in Hamburg, she associated with radicals around a physician named Rudolf Degkwitz, an erstwhile member of Hitler’s inner circle who broke with the NSDAP once Degkwitz landed in Hamburg. Both of Traute’s parents were ardent disciples of National Socialism and Adolf Hitler.

Käthe was raised in a split family: Father was diehard Nazi, mother was anti-Nazi Catholic who would not so much as donate to charities sponsored by the NSDAP. After spending years unsuccessfully trying to please both parents, Käthe put her considerable intellect into antifascist work. Kurt Huber was her Doktorvater. Apparently she provided the introduction to that man.

As Hans Scholl became publicly abusive towards Traute, Käthe and Alex were the friends who told him off, advised him to treat their friend better. And at the farewell party on July 22, 1942, that infamous sendoff for the soldier students headed to the Russian front, it was Käthe who privately talked with Hans Scholl about the White Rose flyers that had been distributed. That quiet conversation followed a heated public debate about the efficacy of a leaflet campaign, with some arguing that leaflets were Communist methodology and should be avoided.

Käthe and Traute also became friends with Wilhelm Geyer once he settled into Manfred Eickemeyer’s studio in January 1943. In addition to the better-known “readings” with Theodor Haecker, Wilhelm Geyer welcomed Käthe and Traute and a few of their friends to discuss French literature in that studio—without the Scholls.

As protective as Käthe was of Traute, Traute was equally protective of Käthe. Käthe suffered from diplegia (a form of cerebral palsy where muscle growth is delayed and leg muscles are short), which had prevented her from joining Jungmädel and BDM. She was at risk of being deemed a useless eater.

After the arrests and hurried executions in February 1943, Traute and Käthe understood that they would be next. The two women worked out alibis and cover stories in case they were interrogated by the Gestapo. And indeed, their interrogations are a work of art as they played on the NSDAP view of women as suited solely for Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church).

Until Käthe slipped up and forgot which leaflet she was supposed to admit to having seen. The Gestapo pounced on the contradiction. Without Käthe’s blunder, the women may have gotten away with their “treason.”

As a result, the Gestapo correctly deemed Traute one of the most dangerous White Rose friends and planned an entire trial around her alone. Luckily the prosecutor for the second White Rose trial pulled the trigger too fast and sent Traute and Käthe—both unindicted—to court on April 19, while Traute’s incriminating files were en route to Berlin.

I asked Traute point blank if she held any ill will towards Käthe for messing up in her interrogation. Her answer came quick. No! Absolutely not! Käthe was a dear friend who died way too young.

Traute avoided White Rose events. My interview with her in October 1996 was the first one she granted. When I learned that she had not kept a copy of the six-page document she provided Inge Scholl in February 1946—a document that Inge Scholl completely ignored—I sent her a copy of my copy.

Another Möbius-band connection: After the war, Regine Renner—a close friend of Willi Graf (see below) married a relative of Rudolf Degkwitz, Traute’s first mentor.

Willi Graf, Adalbert Grundel, and Hubert Furtwängler

Willi Graf mostly lived an isolated life, at least through April 30, 1942. He did not like it that way. He treasured friendship.

Of all the friends in the White Rose circle, he had the worst luck. While Hans and Alex and Christl (and others) studied medicine in Munich, he was relegated to service as a medic, following the German army from the Black Forest to the Western Front, to Yugoslavia, to Poland, and ultimately to the front lines near Moscow the winter of 1941/42.

Willi made two friendships during his tour of duty in the Black Forest that would change his life: Adalbert Grundel and Hubert Furtwängler. The three young medics quickly bonded over their common anti-Nazi sentiments. Bertl—nicknamed The Revolutionary—would become Willi’s closest friend, with Hubert a close second.

Willi Graf had had closer friends. He had surely thought the boys around their leader Fritz Leist in New Germany, as well as his early college friends in Bonn, were BFFs. After all, both ‘groups’ had talked a good talk about the evils of National Socialism, usually in starkly Catholic terms.

Once Willi wished to transform words into action, living by his mantra ‘Be ye Doers of the Word and not Hearers only,’ he was dismayed to find that his New Germany and Bonn friends stopped short of “doing.” They wanted to pray Hitler away. Willi knew that was impractical.

May 1942, Willi tried once again to reconnect with those old friends, thinking that if he could tell them what he had witnessed firsthand on the Russian front, what he had seen of German bestiality, surely they would change. But no. Instead, Fritz Leist threatened everyone else in the group with shunning if they joined Willi’s resistance efforts.

It was quite a different story with Bertl and Hubert. They too were in Munich that summer of 1942. Like Raimund Samüller, they would not participate in “White Rose” resistance because of Hans Scholl’s unreliability.

But they encouraged Willi Graf. It’s almost as if there was a subgroup in the White Rose, those soldier students who knew and tolerated Hans Scholl, who wanted to see Hitler overthrown, but who avoided the Work. That subgroup centered on Willi and Alex.

A large percentage of that subgroup sang in Munich’s Bach Chorale. In addition to Hubert, there was Otmar Hammerstein, Josef Gieles, Regine Renner, Wolf Jaeger, and Hans Leygraf. Oh!, how close these friends became! I witnessed their continuing friendship in action in October 2023 at the ‘Willi Graf conference,’ when I met Regine’s daughters and Wolf’s son. And we spoke of Otmar and Hubert, and how happy these friends made one another. And how none of them trusted Hans Scholl.

Where this Next Gen gathers, whether to sing or simply to reminisce, Willi Graf’s life remains vivid and whole.

(When Otmar was assigned to the Netherlands in 1943—by Captain Buhl, Hertha Schmorell’s father—he joined a resistance movement in that country.)

Where are Hans Scholl and Sophie Scholl in this post?

White Rose legend may focus on the Scholl siblings, but that says more about Inge Scholl’s control of the story than it does about their friendships.

Hans Scholl was quite good at drawing people into his orbit. He had a certain charisma associated with risky behavior. It was a chameleon-like charisma, an insecure desire to be liked by everyone. He could be pious around his mother and Carl Muth, and profane with his father and Nazi soldiers in the Second Student Company. He attracted and repelled like a good magnet.

After the war, Inge Scholl’s insistence on focusing the White Rose story solely on her siblings alienated the others. I will never forget the hurt in Lilo’s voice when she showed me Michael Verhoeven’s screenplay. It had originally featured her friendship with Schurik, including the funny, happy scene with the two of them riding their bicycles through the streets of Munich as bombs rained down. With Alex shouting up to the bombers, He’s over theeeere, in the direction of the Osteria where Adolf Hitler had been dining.

Inge Scholl forced Verhoeven to rewrite the script and put Sophie in every scene where Lilo had been. Her extortion? Use of photographs from the Scholl Archives as stills in the movie. (Ironically, she did not hold copyright to many of those photographs.)

As I've mentioned before, it was Inge’s denial of an interview and Schreibverbot against me that opened doors to White Rose families. Including Fritz and Elisabeth Hartnagel (nee Scholl). Anyone Inge bans must be good, was the logic.

It’s a shame, really. Although Hans and Sophie were not the center of the White Rose universe in real life, their friendships had meaning for some of the people whom Inge ignored or marginalized after the war.

I doubt Traute ever got an answer as to the reason Inge disregarded her 1946 report, but I also know that Traute loved Hans, warts and all, even understanding that she had been his beard.

Lilo would have had some truly funny stories for Inge’s little book if Inge had not similarly pretended that Lilo did not exist. I laughed out loud when Lilo showed me the book that Sophie Scholl had given Alex with an inscription that demonstrated her schoolgirl crush on a guy who was in love with a married woman. Alex in turn handed it off to Lilo.

And Wilhelm Geyer, so central to those weeks in January and February 1943, spending more time with Hans and Sophie than anyone else… If he had not called Inge out on her (alleged, for legal reasons) embezzlement from the design Hochschule in Ulm, he would be better known. She wrote him out of the story after he challenged her.

Isn’t the White Rose story so much more believable when those dynamics are celebrated? (Or my other favorite: Gerhard Feuerle’s diary entry where he wrote that he was going to attend the Varieté with Wilhelm Geyer and the Scholls that evening, and that Sophie was sure to ignore him as she always did. Broke his heart.)

As an aside, the Scholl siblings’ continued close friendships with known Nazis like Jürgen Wittenstein, Hellmut Hartert, Albert Riester, Erika Reiff, and Gisela Schertling scared many of the friends. Apparently Sophie maintained a happy and energetic correspondence with a fervent Nazi named Waldemar, almost until her arrest.

Well outside the circle of friends—Inge Scholl, Franz Josef Müller, and Jürgen Wittenstein

All three of these individuals were hardcore Nazis during the war. Inge Scholl, Ringführerin in charge of teaching antisemitism and racial ideology to Jungmädel leaders in Ulm. Franz Josef Müller, wholeheartedly embracing National Socialism as a teenager and Hitler Youth member, because the Pope said so. Jürgen Wittenstein, appointed NS-Führungsoffizier soon after the White Rose arrests, with the right to shoot suspected traitors on sight without a trial.

In the twelve years I interviewed and then visited and telephoned and corresponded with White Rose families, not one had stayed close to any of these three. When Wittenstein offered to pay Traute’s way to Santa Barbara for my three-day onsite interview of him and his wife (so she could verify his stories), she declined. I asked why. “Because we didn’t trust him. He wore his Party pin in public.”

During small talk at the beginning of the interview with Susanne Hirzel, I mentioned that one of the Hartnagel sons had told me to tell her hello and to come visit him. That’s just like the Scholls, she said. You have to go to them.

Müller became a thorn in the side of everyone who was truly White Rose after his embezzlement of large sums of money from the Stiftung became public knowledge. Which Goethe Institut swept under the carpet. Which in turn deeply grieved the real White Rose families. If you ever watch his Shoah Foundation interview, Müller has a significant tell when he lies: He rubs his man boobs.

So why write 3000 words on this topic?

Because in our current era, friendship matters.

You may think you’re in a private group, airing your opinions in a silo. Think again. The Admin for one of Gettysburg’s progressive Facebook groups—a professor who is extremely careful not to write anything uncivil or incendiary—noted that trolls are so prevalent, perhaps Democrats should start trolling Republicans.

A lurker reported her to the local police department for harrassment (!). Note that the Adams County Sheriff’s Department is well-known for a post encouraging violence against protesters by last year’s sheriff. And the local police opened a full-fledged three-week investigation into her!

This could have destroyed her career. It certainly made everyone in that group leery of new members.

This is not a call for a binary approach to friendship. It is, however, a reminder that when fighting injustice, we must choose our companions carefully. I am reminded of the photograph of Abraham Joshua Heschel marching with Martin Luther King, Jr., and how Susannah Heschel and MLK’s children have remained close all these decades later. They still stand together on important matters. They chose wisely.

As the political landscape grows ever bleaker, as innocents are bullied and beaten, as our president threatens to start wars on multiple unwinnable fronts, as civil and human rights are eroded, as the zone that’s flooded is no longer limited to social media…

As trauma overwhelms us and we must worry whether a lurker will destroy us…

As we grow more serious about exit strategies…

Remember that trust matters. We’re not bound together by politics or theology or philosophy. We’re bound together by a common cry for liberty, for justice, for ethics that transcend the trivial pursuit of power.

We stand with those we trust implicitly. With “medieval friends.” With our found family.

Edited 9:45 p.m. to correct reporting to police department for harassment.—DEH.

Questions? Comments? Speak your mind below. Before doing so, please log in using the email address that corresponds to your orders or newsletter subscription. Note: MARKDOWN is the app's label for formatting shortcuts.

If you enjoyed this post and would like to leave me a tip, I would be grateful! Buy Me A Coffee!

Image credits: Top photograph--Shopify, public domain for platform users.

Bottom photograph--A photograph of a green paper Möbius strip. David Benbennick took this photograph on March 14, 2005. For scale, the strip of paper is 11 inches long, the long edge of a U.S. standard piece of "letter size" paper. The background is a piece of white paper. The strip is held together by a piece of clear duct tape, behind the top-right curve. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled GNU Free Documentation License.

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.

No part of this post, Web site, or translations contained herein may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the copyright holder, except for the “fair use” of quotations that are properly cited and credited, including identification of the translator if applicable. No part of this post, Web site, or translations contained herein may be included in any Large Language Model without proper licensing from the copyright holder, Denise Elaine Heap.