Political violence: How do we respond?

Wednesday afternoon, I sat with two new Gettysburg friends over coffee at Waldo’s. There’s something about a place dedicated to art, to justice, to creativity that lends itself to serious discussion. I still wonder about that indefinable connection between “art” of all sorts, and empathy for those who are subject to injustice. That post remains on my to-do list. It’s always at the back of my mind.

As I sat with Jenny and Pam, we brainstormed ways to spread the message of informed dissent in our current era. If I have heard it once, I have heard it a million times. It’s not about protesting against a political party. It’s rallying FOR justice. That is the all-consuming message in this little south central Pennsylvania town that bleeds red, and yet.

They have been at this longer than I. I was their fresh eyes in a hard political reality. Here in Adams County, we are dealing with a sheriff who thought it was funny to post a meme advocating violence against protesters. Oh great. Gettysburg town square is small and vulnerable enough as it is. Now we have to worry about the possibility of Muller-provoked violence?

But this is Center for White Rose Studies. Here, I am not political, not partisan. Adams County, Pennsylvania, and national political discussions are reserved for Our Common Table and Policies, Not Politics. So why this lead-in?

Because — our White Rose students and adults faced the same issue. They were confronted with jackbooted thugs on their streets. For at least five years, several of them were involved in the giving end of political violence. Hans Scholl led the charge against the St. George Catholic youth group in Ulm, hitting preteen boys over the head with a swastika’d flag. Sophie Scholl sent the Ulm police to have one of her Jungmädel girls arrested for missing a meeting. Even Alexander Schmorell participated in Jung Stahlhelm as a boy, to please his stepmother’s very-Nazi brothers.

Once they had found their way to one another in Munich over April and May 1942, they were on the receiving end of political violence. As Manfred Eickemeyer told them horrific tales of German atrocities in Poland — against Jews and Polish nobility — and as Willi Graf joined them in June 1942 with his own stories of German bestiality on the Russian front, evil he had seen with his own eyes, they knew they could not keep silent.

It is oh-so critical to understand that not one of these young people and the adults they associated with was in danger. They all lived quite privileged lives. Their Aryanpässe were in order. They had no Jewish relatives. Only Alexander Schmorell lived on the fringe of danger, as he was half-Russian. But if he kept his head down, his stepmother’s well-connected brothers more than compensated for that ‘deficiency.’

The adults in the circle also feared nothing if they kept quiet. Although Wilhelm Geyer’s art had been banned early on (and he himself was suspect because he wouldn’t keep his mouth shut), he too could have lived out the rest of the war in relative peace. If he had only kept up with his work-for-hire, replacing damaged stained glass windows and drawing Catholic icons, he’d have been fine. Manfred Eickemeyer too. His troublesome relative had already emigrated to the USA. Eickemeyer could have kept designing replacement buildings and life would have been fine.

Harald Dohrn — his treasonous son lived in England. If he had only offered nice massages and physical therapy to rich patrons on Tegernsee, he’d have been well off. Josef Söhngen, he could have just closed down that room full of banned books and joined Humplmayr’s as textbook provider to the university. Theodor Haecker, he could have followed Werner Bergengruen’s example and written superficial novels for publication while hiding his diary, and he took would have stayed off the NSDAP’s radar.

But one by one, our students and these adults who had families and a great deal to lose? They chose to put it all on the line. To take a stand when they knew exactly what that could mean. Not one single person thought they would survive the war. They all assumed their resistance work would mean death.

The topic of political violence was not limited to what they knew or feared. It also colored their thoughts of resistance, of what it meant to resist, of what would be effective, of what could rid their cherished Germany of the poison of National Socialism.

This moral dilemma destroyed White Rose friendships. After the heated debate of February 9, 1943, they splintered into multiple factions, with Willi Graf and Alexander Schmorell joining Falk Harnack in the belief that active resistance was necessary, while others thought they could keep writing leaflets and eventually they would win. I wrote about this at length in an essay entitled Moral dilemmas – the hard topics, continued.

That post ended as follows:

I told you this is hard for us in 2024 to consider. On the one hand, we clap and cheer for the brave men of the July 20, 1944 resistance who tried to murder Hitler. My first German teacher was daughter of one of those men. After the war, his life and courage was celebrated in a documentary. Sitting here eighty years later, there’s little argument that they were on the right side of history.

Whether in a serious documentary or in a less-serious show like Hogan’s Heroes, we are happy every time an armaments factory goes up in flames, or a grenade lands on the seat next to a Nazi general. And explodes.

But this is now 2024. We’re a little over three years away from an attempted insurrection in our own nation’s capital, an insurrection when people used violence to challenge the results of a lawful election. Violence that was meant to intimidate elected officials. Violence that desecrated the People’s House, a building and an institution that Americans hold dear.

And those attempting to overthrow our laws, our democracy, cloaked themselves in “1776,” in the revolution that birthed our country. In a revolution that was steeped in informed dissent, knowledge of specific crimes, specific injustices that cried out for redress.

There is a clear historical line between the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the failed revolutions in Germany in 1848, the successful overthrow of German nobility in 1919, and White Rose resistance. In every case, there was informed dissent that was ignored by the ruling class, with no redress through normal political channels.

January 6, 2021 insurrectionists who try to claim this as their birthright, their raison d’état, clearly do not understand the nature of resistance. Their actions were not only illegal, but outside the boundaries of reason and logic.

I am grateful that we do not have to discuss this on a partisan level, that many from their own “party” have chosen to come down on the side of law. We need rational political debates in this country, not defecating in the halls of government. We need sound legislative initiatives, not people peeing on desks and paperwork to demonstrate contempt and little else. We need all hands on deck, not a hangman’s noose for the Vice President who defied his president’s orders.

For me, however, the violence of January 6, 2021 – and shortly before it, the violence associated with the Black Lives Matter movement – was a wakeup call.

When is violence justified? When is an insurrection not an insurrection, but rather a legitimate response to a despot? Who decides who is a despot, and who is merely a strong leader? What is informed dissent versus response to propaganda? Does it require the passage of time before we know what was propaganda and what is fact?

If you say that evil leaders should be assassinated, who gets to decide when a leader crosses that invisible line in the sand from simply atrocious and narcissistic, to evil? If you say no leader should ever be assassinated, what do you say to people living in Germany between 1933-1945 who saw crimes beyond comprehension committed in the name of their country, with no consequences to the Commander-in-Chief?

If you follow Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolent protest, how do you address the violence that has plagued India since, well, since forever, as Muslims and Hindus have relentlessly killed one another over religious beliefs and practices? Does nonviolence apply only against foreign powers, and not with regards to domestic disputes?

If you believe real change requires violence to succeed, where do you stand with regards to change through legislation, exhausting every means possible before arming?

I don’t have answers.

These questions come from facing up against the hard, hard lessons left for us by these White Rose students and the adults who joined their cause.

We cannot honor them if we don’t engage in the same debates, the same deliberations, as they did. If we “honor” them without engaging, we’ve created pedestals and haloes, nothing more.

Oh, this matters!

A little over a year later, and I still do not have answers. If anything, the question is more urgent than ever before. How do we respond to political violence? What would our peaceful Gettysburg friends do if the National Guard were dispatched to our quiet (but red) town to keep us from protesting? What is the best action if ICE shows up at Hollabaugh’s and drags away US citizens working the fields?

I am glad that we are still free enough to talk about nonviolence as reaction to political violence in a theoretical manner. Seriously. Because the last thing we need is senseless bloodshed, tit for tat when an un-American sheriff advocates running down protesters.

One of these days (and I hope that day never comes), we may be in the same position as those friends in Munich in 1942/1943.

Would we side with Willi Graf who thought that a visible sign such as blowing up Gestapo headquarters in Berlin was needed? Would we agree with Alexander Schmorell who wanted to support Russia and kill as many German soldiers as possible in Russia, ensuring that Germany would lose the war? Would we think like Falk Harnack who wanted to burrow from within the NSDAP and cause its collapse, and failing that, to join Greek partisans in Greece and fight those damn Nazis?

Would we act like Werner Scholl and Wilhelm Geyer, breaking up Nazi rallies, operating as disruptors to propaganda? Would we be like Traute Lafrenz, who rescued Jewish neighbors, plotted to blow up a bridge, and turned every conversation she participated in to the injustices of the regime? Would we behave as Käthe Schüddekopf, who was pulled between a very-Nazi and a very-anti-Nazi parent, finally coming down on the side of truth, turning her prodigious intellect into anti-propaganda? Would we live like Christl Probst, staving off clinical depression, knowing that resistance meant certain loss of life, but knowing too that doing nothing would shame him?

Or would we approve of the Scholls’ approach and keep writing leaflets decrying Nazi injustice? Or Josef Söhngen, with his room full of banned books and a store full of NSDAP publications, wishy-washy to the end? Or Kurt Huber, who wanted to protect his academic freedom at all cost, but the freedom of others, not so much?

They were all part of resistance. They all risked their lives. Who is more or less right? Again, I do not have answers.

That said, I know who I would want on my side if I were being dragged from my home by Storm Troopers.

If you are reading this and facing the same quandary, please share your thoughts, your internal (and external) debates. Where do you come down? What is your community doing? What are your moral dilemmas?

Let’s talk about these hard issues while we still may!

Postscript: Christoph Probst’s stepmother was Jewish. His resistance was informed by laws threatening her life. Eugen Grimminger’s wife Jenny nee Stern was Jewish. As long as she was married to Eugen and he stayed out of trouble, she was “safe.” Otherwise, the friends we call White Rose had no familial connection to Jewish life.

COMMENT WORTH KEEPING

There are some very important questions posed in your July 5, 2024 post. You also stated that you don’t have the answers. My personal belief is that none of us has all the answers, especially as applied to other people. Anyone claiming otherwise should be viewed with skepticism or outright suspicion. The best we can hope for is that more people seriously examine their conscience and then act out of the courage of their convictions.

--Gwen Miertschin, August 17, 2025.

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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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