Sam Spade and Sophie Scholl

Twenty years ago, my Thursday night “guilty pleasure” was the CBS show, Without a Trace. It had some of the best writing on TV. If they had made Sam Spade (Poppy Montgomery) less of a doormat, it could have won more Emmys.

But I had forgotten how gripping I found the Season 3 cliffhanger until I watched the resolution of that cliffhanger in the Season 4 opener. In case you don’t remember it, since it was almost twenty years ago, after all: A young woman — very reminiscent of Sophie Scholl — shot and killed a known genocidal general outside his consulate. She had always been a “good girl,” good grades, good reputation, good works.

Yet after she found out about the millions this man had slaughtered, and after she realized that the American government would do nothing to stop him — he was an ally, after all — she took matters into her own hands and shot him.

In May 2005 as in September, the script made me wonder what the difference was between that young woman, who was arrested for obviously breaking the law, and Sophie, Traute, Käthe, and the other young women of the White Rose. Sophie famously told Susanne Hirzel that if she had a gun and saw Hitler walking down the street, she would not hesitate to kill him.

We deem Sophie a heroine. If you believe the hype surrounding the ongoing Sophie Scholl mythos in Germany, German parents want their daughters to grow up to be Sophie.

But do we really? Do we really want our daughters to take on tyrants with a pistol, to sacrifice their lives for a just cause? Or is it merely hype? Hype that makes us feel better about “those” days without doing a damn thing about our days?

What constitutes the “ethics of resistance,” the ethics of treason? When is it right to break the law in the name of rightness and justice, and when is it not? Who gets to decide? Is history the final arbiter? Or can we know right here, right now that our actions — our illegal actions — answer to a higher law?

My musings in 2005 only intensified upon the death of Rosa Parks, another “Sophie” — and interestingly, about Sophie’s age in real time — who risked death by sitting at the front of a bus. Before she acted, others who acted had been murdered by policemen for doing the same thing. Ethics of treason, ethics of “criminal” acts to right wrongs...

I don’t have the answer to my own questions. But if we are to “get” the White Rose story and understand Sophie’s resistance, Willi’s backbone, Traute’s defiance, Schurik’s passion, Käthe’s courage, then we need to think about why we deem them heroes.

Whom do we wish today’s youth to emulate, and why?

COMMENT WORTH KEEPING

I know and love a young person today who harbors the same sentiments towards perpetrators of child sex trafficking. Where do I stand? Admire their courage, or advise against violence? Difficult.

--TD, March 21, 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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