The inconvenience of war.

October 1, 1939 - December 31, 1939.

Classes resumed in Ulm. High school students once more combined considerations of Plato’s philosophy with contemplations of the social aspects of the most recent documentary on …

Who am I trying to kid? High school students once more chatted up the latest movie or showed off a new dance step. In between, they begrudgingly declined verbs and did homework on Plato’s dialogs.

Susanne Hirzel recalled that the one topic of conversation that was noticeable by its absence was the war. They didn’t pretend it was not happening. It merely failed to evoke a great emotional reaction. No one particularly wanted war, but no one would say they thought this war was bad either.

Those days, even with young Germans “volunteering” to bring in the harvest, German farmers had a shortage of field hands. The NSDAP therefore created an incentive to entice young women out of the classroom and onto the farm: If girls voluntarily signed up for Reich Labor Service—then, in October 1939, not later—they would automatically receive a passing grade on their final exams. “But I am not interested in that,” Sophie wrote Fritz on October 2, 1939.

Sophie admitted she had caught a lucky break. As much as she loved biology, that’s how much she hated mathematics and physics. The math and physics teacher had just left the school (most likely drafted into the military) and the school had no intention of replacing him. So she would not have to take those dreaded subjects!

And as to Fritz’s bicycle, yes that was Hans’ address in Munich, but they would send the bicycle to him.

Finally, Sophie told Fritz that the Scholls agreed with his French prisoners. Another three to four years of war…

While the war may not have intruded much on the lives of most Germans—the battles were being fought well off German soil, after all—it did show up in little ways. On October 6, Sophie explained to Fritz that it was taking longer than usual to get back the photographs she was planning to send him, because photographers were engaged with war work.

That meant less to Sophie than her mother’s irritating insistence on reminding her how much she disapproved of that wonderful summer vacation with Fritz.

Sophie told Fritz she wrote him often and received but few replies from him. It is clear she cared deeply for him. Yet her indecision about this dark-haired soldier with thick eyebrows had deepened. Part of the uncertainty was inexorably linked to his military service. But not all.

Sophie’s “growing up” included a yearning for independence, coupled with a wish to be uncoupled. She wanted the two of them to take another vacation where they could rent a private room, so as not to be disturbed. But she did not want that vacation to last more than a few days, because (she told Fritz) she knew she would get tired of his company. She would be afraid that he would “exert too great an influence” on her should they be together for too long.

Sophie sounded irritable, short-tempered, despite the onset of autumn vacation at school. Fritz’s letter about his assignment in a prison cell had triggered another of Sophie’s dreams, this time a nightmare. I dreamed I sat in a prison cell myself, jailed for the rest of the war. I had a heavy iron ring around my neck, and that was the nastiest part of the dream.

As soon as Fritz learned that Sophie was out of school on autumn break, he managed to obtain leave to spend several days with her in Ulm. What they did, what they talked about, was not preserved in any correspondence we are allowed to read. We merely know the visit occurred.

Then for two weeks, there is no correspondence at all. Not from Fritz, telling her about his assignment and duties. Not even from Sophie, complaining about things at home or happy about glorious autumn weather. Simply silence.

Sophie broke down first and wrote Fritz on October 29, acknowledging the long gap in her letters. She explained that she had tried to jot down notes to him several times, “but when one is not in the mood to write and in addition does not have any time to do so, it’s also not so easy.” She hoped there was not a reason for his silence. “Things with you are always in turmoil.”

She described the ways in which her family was “colossally privileged” during war-time, the raisin bread and jam they enjoyed with tea. But at the heart of things, Sophie was unhappy. She wanted to get away, break free from everyone and everything. She would like to spend time with Fritz, she said, renting rooms “which for those several days would belong to us alone.” They would decorate with flowers and she would cook.

But only for several days, she emphasized, because she would get tired of him after that. “As soon as someone starts making demands, I become (I believe) very touchy.” She thought that if she spent too much time with just one person, that person would exert too much influence over her.

“You know as well that there are hours of aloneness that compensate for all the days during which one longed for a person,” she said. “Then that which is ruthless (don’t misunderstand that word!) appears to be that which is true and compassion appears to be weakness.”

For some reason, Sophie had begun to believe that emotions were a sign of weakness. This theme resurfaces again and again, reflecting unrest within the young woman. The source of the unrest and factors contributing to her mental state remain obscured.

Perhaps fearing she had said too much, Sophie abruptly changed the subject. After all, while she did not want Fritz around all the time, she did enjoy being pampered for a few days at a time. Better not to jeopardize everything.

Things had improved on the home front a couple of days before, when her mother went away. “That’s when I usually get along best with Inge.” With Magdalena Scholl out of the picture, her children were able to plan the kind of Sunday they enjoyed. This particular Sunday had been even nicer, because Otl Aicher had joined them.

“Otl pretty much outclasses Werner,” Sophie told Fritz. “He is extraordinarily odd and reticent, a pleasant characteristic.” She was glad that Werner chose to associate with Otl more than with his other friends from dancing class.

But Fritz’s silence puzzled her, she said, returning to the topic that had opened the letter. “Maybe I will receive a letter from you soon? Otherwise I must imagine that you are prevented from writing me for some extraordinary reason.”

Fritz wrote her on October 30, not in response to her October 29 letter—he had not received it yet—but because, like Sophie, he felt guilty about having gone two weeks without writing. He blamed his silence on the busy-ness of his days. “Here, where every five minutes the telephone rings, where one rotates with another asking questions and making announcements, where the entire day is bustled away,” this was not an atmosphere conducive to writing letters. He envied her the peace and quiet of the apartment on Münsterplatz. “There, where there is not a loud noise to be heard, no commotion, where everything appears to be timeless…”

He confessed that he often fantasized about spending time with her. Leaving his “typing pool”—slang for the military office where he worked—he would imagine that they were walking together, and he was holding her in his arms.

A week later, having just received Sophie’s October 29 letter, Fritz responded to her most puzzling and self-contradictory words. He agreed with her, he said, about the hours of aloneness compensating for hours of togetherness. “But not always,” he added. “There are also hours of thinking back over things past, things experienced, things that clarify. In contrast there is Experience, which moves one forward and provides new stimuli, but mainly only when one is together with others. Unless one can draw upon himself for everything.”

Fritz assured Sophie that he understood her desire to be completely free. “That is why, dear Sofie, I hope that you do not also feel like you are bound to me in any way. Do you understand what I mean? I mean that you should be ruthless, since we would otherwise perhaps take more than we give. We always want to be mutually candid.”

Not being “bound” to another, being utterly ruthless when dealing with the other—that is not at all what Fritz wanted, and conversely, it was precisely what Sophie wanted. Their mutually hurtful and often frustrating war of words had only begun.

Without having received Fritz’s most recent letter, on November 7 Sophie confided to him that she worried about her brother Hans “for no reason at all.” She said he was still in Munich, in no real danger. She compared his wellbeing to Fritz’s, saying that she was not worried about Fritz. But Inge excised that portion of Sophie’s letter, preventing us from learning what was going on with Hans Scholl those days.

We do know that security had been heightened early in November, specifically around Ulm and Munich. A Swabian carpenter named Georg Elser tried to assassinate Hitler at his annual speech at a beer hall in Munich. Every year, Adolf Hitler made a pilgrimage to the place where the failed putsch had originated in 1923. He paid homage to fallen comrades and generally incited the inebriated crowd to bigger and better things on behalf of National Socialism.

Elser—born and raised only twenty miles from Ulm—had scoped out the beer hall and rigged a complex bomb to go off in the middle of Hitler’s speech. The explosives were implanted in the pillars beneath the platform where Hitler always stood, set to detonate about halfway through the discourse. Since Elser was a carpenter by trade, he completed his work without anyone suspecting that the pillars had been tampered with.

But in 1939, Hitler was distracted by impending war in the west. He almost cancelled his appearance and sent Rudolf Hess in his stead. At the last minute, he changed his mind and used the evening as a stage for serious political announcements, not raving propaganda as usual. Hence, the speech was short and concise. At the usual halfway mark, Hitler had long since left the hall to prepare for the return trip to Berlin. Elser’s bomb went off on schedule, only when the platform and podium disintegrated and were converted to ash, Hitler was not there. The bomb missed its intended target by a mere thirteen minutes. (See photo.)

The police nabbed Elser a few days later. Surprisingly, he was not immediately executed, only sentenced to isolation in a concentration camp. He was executed in 1945.

Sophie’s concern for Hans had nothing to do with Elser’s assassination attempt, as that event was still one day in the future. Hans appeared to be studying and playing hard during this period. It’s more to be expected that Sophie’s apprehension centered on Hans’ self-destructive tendencies.

Two days later, Sophie responded to Fritz’s next-to-last letter, mostly babbling on about nothingness: Sophie’s wish that Fritz could write more often, her love of poetry, the Heym illustrations for Hanspeter Nägele, her happiness that Hans was still in Munich and not on the battlefield.

Sophie explained to Fritz that she couldn’t count on that. “One must simply have the courage to believe only that which is good. By that I mean that one should not believe in illusions. Rather I mean that one should only do that which is true and good, and to assume the best of other people, like one can never do with one’s own understanding. (That means: Always be undiplomatic.) But one cares too much about life to be that way.”

She closed by telling Fritz about the little Rennicke boy who lived in their building and brought her such joy. Sophie had begun to figure out his new attempts at speech. “I apple,” she had learned, meant he wanted an apple. “It’s an indescribably nice feeling, when one holds his warm little hand in one’s own.” Clearly, feelings were all right, as long as they did not lead to relationships. She even believed that perhaps she should be a kindergarten teacher and not merely learn the trade to have a vocation to fall back on.

Fritz’s time in the field finally caused their letter-writing to get back on track. Sophie wrote him only once between her November 9 letter and his November 26 reply (her letter has not been published). When he returned to his “typing pool,” he answered both at the same time. She had cut back on writing letters and had sent him one box after another containing little presents: A book of Mörike poetry, a chocolate bar, a photo album.

In the meantime, he had also been transferred from Calw to Düsseldorf. Her presents had made Fritz realize that the worst thing about the war—and war had not yet come to western Germany!—was that it had stolen their youth. “I can only hope that after the war, we can lie so happy and unencumbered in the grass and tell fairy tales.”

His friend Lt. Pfeiffer had convinced him to visit friends in Cologne over the weekend. Fritz was awkward among strangers, and most of the day had made him uncomfortable. But when some pretty girls ended the evening with dancing and “mocha,” he was happy. He quickly assured Sophie that their beauty was no match for her, as everything about them reeked of superficiality. They reminded him how “a pot plant—when it is left outside in storm and rain—becomes ghastly in appearance.”

Fritz then assumed the role of Sophie’s procurement officer, a role she valued him for. He was able to obtain a ration coupon for the wool she needed (and could not get). She only had to tell him what she wanted, and he would use his connections to ensure she had it as soon as possible.

He hoped to join them for their annual New Year’s ski trip. “Would you be happy about that?” He needed something to look forward to, he said.

Advent and winter chill brought genuine harmony to the Scholl home in Ulm. Rarely have we seen Sophie so completely at peace with herself and those around her. She retreated into the comfort of ritual, with candle-lighting and carol singing soothing her spirits. Werner impressed her with improved violin skills. Music in the parlor, calling up hymns and melodies that gladdened dreary evenings, became a highlight of her life.

As November 1939 drew to a close, Sophie reached out to Fritz, extending to him a whiff of the things that made her happy. She fashioned a special Advent wreath for him, complete with little red candles and a brief reminder about when and how to light them. Her Christmas package included apples that the Scholls as a family had polished for him, chocolates, and a precious, rationed beeswax candle. We have to laugh at the image of Werner Scholl eating beeswax candles and Mrs. Scholl imploring him not to, now that the candles were hard to come by.

We understand that for a soldier who knew he was about to face battle, her little stories about things like brothers who ate beeswax candles and where they hung their Advent wreath that year were priceless gems. Sophie wrapped Fritz up in the physical presence of people who cared for him. This tenderness was a Christmas present unparalleled, and Sophie’s gift of sensing another’s needs valuable beyond words.

As Sophie’s physical beauty faded and she lost the perky prettiness of her teen years, she retained this tough softness that always made her appealing. She was hardly perfect, and you will understand her flaws in time.

But from the deepest core of her being, Sophie could feel another’s pain, could experience another’s agony, and instinctively knew how to caress the wound and bandage the hurt. No navel-gazing here. Sophie’s eyes were generally fixed on the person across from her.

The Advent package had not arrived on Sunday, December 3 when Fritz sat down to write Sophie a long letter. He had to work. Hitler’s army, indeed German society in general, had ceased making a distinction between Sunday and the rest of the week. But he knew that in the Scholl household, they would be sitting down to “Sunday tea” even as he penned his words.

Despite having ration coupon in hand, he was having difficulty getting the wool she wanted. The timing had been bad. “Of all things, on the day before a decree was published in the newspaper stating that the army no longer may issue ration coupons.” He had therefore sent a corporal from his unit to “more than ten stores” looking for Sophie’s wool, and the resourceful man had been able to persuade a single store to part with one pound of wool. He hoped that would be enough.

It took about a week for Fritz’s package to arrive. Sophie had not written Fritz since she mailed the Advent package on November 28, but when she received his letter with the coveted pound of wool, she immediately thanked him for it. “We are cutting it damned close with the rations,” she said. “Hans used almost his entire annual rations for material for a suit. But we are not freezing to death yet.”

She blamed her two-week gap in letters on “frequent headaches and much work.” She could not concentrate on anything, much less writing letters. Sophie said she would start to write him a letter, and then not be able to remember what it was she wanted to tell him in the first place. “All my thoughts dry up.”

To his question about joining them on their annual ski trip over New Years, she responded that she would prefer if he came in February. She explained it away by saying that she would have her final exams behind her in February and would have no commitments to worry about.

But it’s clear that something had happened to make Hans Scholl avoid Fritz. Perhaps Fritz knew too much about the bündische trial and everything it entailed? Hans had studiously steered clear of Fritz Hartnagel during the six months Fritz was stationed in Munich. Sophie’s suggestion that Fritz plan his ski trip for February, instead of New Years with the Scholl clan, represented the first of several occasions where she consciously tried to spend time with either Hans or Fritz, and not both of them together.

She hoped he had received her Advent package by now. The apples would have been missing, she said, because the package was too heavy, and she had to remove them at the post office.

Sophie let him know she was putting the finishing touches on his Christmas present—a painting of the toad princess from a Grimm brothers’ fairy tale. “You can see how the little princess jumps through the ring for her stupid prince.”

By December 14, Fritz had not received any mail from Sophie for nearly a month, the last communication being the mid-November letter with the chocolate bar. With her yo-yo approach to their relationship, he rightly feared that something was amiss.

He was in a horrid mood, he confessed. He couldn’t get anything worthwhile done, so he had a guilty conscience for “frittering away my time.” That made him angry. If he couldn’t be happy, then he felt like “taking up arms against anyone, just so I could do something with all my heart. Sometimes I feel so empty.”

But he was having fun planning his unit’s Christmas party. The local “Faith and Beauty” club (Hitler Youth for young adult women) had volunteered to help the men celebrate Christmas. As if he suddenly realized how that would sound to Sophie, he told her he wanted to spend “alone” time with her, with Sophie.

A week passed, and Fritz still had not received any mail from Sophie. On December 20, his words sounded almost despairing. Was something wrong? He had already figured out that he was not invited to go skiing with them in December. He told her that if they could not get away to the mountains in December, he would simply postpone his furlough.

Their Christmas party was to take place on Christmas evening. He had been personally responsible for shopping for presents for the five hundred men in his unit. It had been a stressful time, he admitted, and he would be happy when it was past. He especially was not looking forward to the “drunken singing of Christmas carols over beer and cigarette smoke.”

For Fritz, Christmas 1939 was a most dismal time. The party he had written her about was a smashing success in the eyes of his men, but he had been miserable. He had purchased a bottle of wine for every man in the room. And it had all been consumed in one sitting, with expected results. They had enjoyed the rolls, nuts, and apples, and the gift bags holding a knife, razor, stationery, and more, for everyone present. He had made sure that Saint Nicholas showed up to present gag gifts to the officers, a big hit with the enlisted men.

Saint Nick even distributed the mail. Fritz was among the few men who received absolutely nothing. He was crestfallen.

His unhappiness had been tempered slightly by a terrible experience a few days earlier that he had not been able to get out of his mind. The pre-Christmas party with the Faith and Beauty ‘young women’ had taken place. In addition to the girls who sat with the enlisted men, a few were placed at the officers’ table. He had gotten to know the girl sitting next to him and offered to walk her home when the festivities ended.

“When she opened the door to her home, her parents were already standing in the corridor,” he wrote Sophie. “Her mother was holding a whip over her back and immediately began to beat the girl while screaming at her. You can imagine, I was momentarily caught off guard so that I was not prepared to intervene. By the time I had realized what was going on, the door had already closed and I stood there like a little rogue.”

He continued, “I felt awfully sorry for the girl, not only because she was beaten, but because she likely felt intense shame whenever she considered that she had been beaten in front of me. For the first time ever, I fully realized what fabulous parents you (and I as well) have.” He said the experience had made him determined he would never hit his children. “Use of force only breeds opposition and destroys trust.”

Fritz closed his melancholy Christmas letter with happy memories from the year gone by. Their three trips together—with Sophie’s siblings in tow, of course—were the sum total of all things good that had happened to him. He remembered “how we slid down the mountain on our butts and then were too embarrassed to walk through the town because the backs of our pants were wet.” Fritz hoped that Sophie thought back on those times with as much happiness as he did.

Fritz’s Christmas letter reached Sophie almost overnight. On December 28, she was appalled to think that everything she had done for a month had not arrived intact in Düsseldorf. He had sent her two Christmas presents, and she chided him for his extravagance.

But above all, she was upset to think that he had not gotten the Advent wreath and candles, and the toad princess, and her few letters. She had also mailed him a Christmas card. “Hopefully you didn’t worry too much,” she said. “The worst thing for me is that you didn’t have anything for Christmas Eve. And in the happiest of all hours, you probably nurtured God only knows what kind of bitter feelings towards me. … I will never be able to put together something that nice again.”

Sophie encouraged Fritz to “be nice to your BDM (sic) girl whenever you can. Perhaps she needs it.” Except for confirming that she did in fact wish to go skiing with him in February, she did not answer any of his letters, letters she had continued to receive while he got nothing from her.

Fritz received a month’s worth of letters and packages from Sophie on December 29. He had almost given up, but now that he knew she had been thinking about him, he was happy once again. “I would most like to cuss out the bitch known as the Armed Forces Postal Service.” He had made a production out of opening the gifts while lying in bed at 3 o’clock in the morning. He especially liked the toad princess she had painted. “Only you could portray a princess like that, not dazzling and dainty with graceful bearing, but rather dark and passionate, natural and yet lovely.”

He hung it on his wall, and called it his “Gypsy princess.” In a way, it became his Sophie shrine, as he would look at it first thing in the morning and last thing before he went to bed. “Your Christmas package put me to shame,” he said, “because I cannot give you anything similar, and since I am such a bungler and a no-good person, at least when it comes to such things.”

They had had a New Year’s Eve party at the “casino” (dining hall) that night. He hastened to assure Sophie that he had not been in charge of planning or preparation for it! Someone had managed to round up a few girls “with great difficulty” to keep the men company.

Fritz had done as Sophie requested and postponed his application for furlough until February. He had heard rumors that they should still have peace at that time. But he was most concerned that Sophie had obtained her parents’ permission for them to go away together, alone, as he was planning.

Sophie’s best friend returned to Ulm for the holidays. No, not Fritz Hartnagel, but her brother Hans. From December 1939 on, it’s clear that Sophie felt closer to Hans than to any other person. He was her confidante, soul mate, and favorite companion. Hans did not return the sentiment. He remained loyal only to himself. But apparently he was fond of his little sister, even if he was incapable of offering her (or anyone) mutuality of friendship.

The brother and sister set out for long walks in snowy woods. The weather that Christmas had been harsh, severe cold covering Ulm’s cobbled streets with frost and dangerous black ice. Hans and Sophie ignored the inclement weather, forging trails where human tracks had not intruded. Perception was skewed by freezing mist, converting open farmland to invisible space and narrow forest breaks to vast plains.

I am intrigued by a passing remark Sophie made. “We tested the ice on the Iller backwater, which was frozen in many places. We even made it to the other bank without falling through the ice.”

In 1995, we walked the Iller path from Ulm all the way to Wiblingen (see photo). One goal of the hike was to determine where this scene could have taken place. I cannot envision it beyond Wiblingen, as a winter ramble much past that town and monastery would be impractical during extremely short winter days.

The Iller is not an insignificant river. It makes the Danube navigable. Without the Iller, the Danube is a lazy stream that would never amount to much. Additionally, the Iller flows rapid, in spring and summer a dangerous place to swim if you don’t know the river well. It’s never shyly narrow, never a river that would offer easy ice passage to the other bank.

Visualizing Hans and Sophie out on the ice floe, from her own description not a solid chunk of ice, cheering one another on to ever greater courage, the rapport these siblings enjoyed comes into sharp focus. One would not have undertaken such a perilous feat without the other. Together, they were daring and provocative risk-takers. Apart, Hans and Sophie were different people from the individuals they became when they were together. A moment of pure joy in a world at war.

Theodor Haecker, a Catholic theologian who was to become an important mentor for some in the White Rose, observed the happenings of that December and wrote in his diary, Germans want to be a nation like any other, but they are not succeeding. They are becoming far worse than other nations. They are becoming the abomination of the world. Prussian sourdough has made a complete fiasco of the nation. Its mission is a fake.

Though Haecker’s words ring true for us who look at those days with the perspective of decades, they would not have been so obviously accurate even for those Germans who would rather have had a different Chancellor in Berlin. We know that hundreds of Germans had been given death sentences for political offenses in 1939. That was not greatly publicized at the time. We know that the concentration camps—not yet extermination camps, “only” work camps—had claimed the lives of countless Jews, Germans, Roma, and Sinti since 1933. Newspapers in Germany did not carry that information.

Instead, most Germans were conscious only of the things that affected their daily routine. They were very much like 21st century Americans in that respect. As long as it’s happening to someone else, we tend not to notice evil or suffering around us. We become loyal supporters of the Cancer Society or Lupus Organization only when someone in our immediate circle is stricken with one of those diseases.

For the majority of Germans, life continued on as normal. The war imposed no hardships yet, only inconveniences. As long as they could live day to day, as long as they ignored the news, everything was all right.

The new year surely would bring peace.

Comment worth keeping

Great post, Denise! It really humanizes Sophie.

--Gwen Miertschin, December 23, 2025.

Excerpted from White Rose History, Volume I. See below for copyright information.  Please contact us for permission to quote.  

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Image credits: Top image--Advent candles. Shopify, public domain for platform users. Middle photo--The aftermath and cleanup of the Elser bombing, November 8, 1939, Bürgerbräukeller Munich. Photo is public domain. Bottom photo--Iller River as we walked it, April 1995. Photo © 1995 Denise Elaine Heap. Please contact us for permission to use.

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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