The value of cherry-tree sitting: In defense of oral history

October 2023 in Munich, I followed Dr. August Leugers-Scherzberg of the university in Duisberg-Essen on the conference program. It was bad enough that the official literature said Leugers-Scherzberg was going to speak about the necessity of being a Christian to understand everything [man müsste viel mehr Christ sein, um das alles zu verstehen]. (Argh.) Worse that much of the pre-conference hype noted that Leugers-Scherzberg was “the first” to properly acknowledge Willi Graf’s role in White Rose resistance. (Double argh.) (If you've already read my work, you understand my frustration.)

That said, I thought I would be too nervous about my own speech to pay much attention to what Leugers-Scherzberg said. I knew going in that this would not be a friendly audience for me. I had nearly canceled when I received an email from one of the organizers asking what religion I was, adding conditions to my speech, and advising me what I needed to say. My friend and deeply-respected mentor Harold Marcuse told me, Go. Just speak the truth. Ignore expectations.

I did in fact listen to Leugers-Scherzberg’s speech, even taking notes! Three things bothered me.

First, despite that pre-conference hype, there was not one single new bit of information in his speech about Willi Graf. No, he had not plagiarized my histories. His approximately 24-page, 10,000 word article about Willi Graf (“Willi Graf und sein Entschluss zum aktiven Widerstand gegen den Nationalsozialismus im Lichte seines Nachlasses”) was based on his reading of the newly-released complete archives. Following Anneliese Knoop-Graf’s death, all of her brother’s papers were donated to the Bavarian archives in Munich. Leugers-Scherzberg wrote his very-short piece based on those papers.

Which made me feel good, actually. There was not one single new word in his October 2023 speech or in his 2022 article. Anneliese Knoop-Graf had kept her word when she told me she had given me all unpublished documents related to her brother. She had truly done so. Even Willi Graf’s report card!

So no, Leugers-Scherzberg was not the first person to write comprehensively about Willi Graf’s role in White Rose resistance. His work merely duplicated my own from 2002-2003, but (from where I sit) from an unreasonably biased standpoint.

Second, Leugers-Scherzberg overemphasized the role of religion in Willi Graf’s resistance efforts, while simultaneously falsely elevating Hans Scholl’s influence on Willi Graf. Yes, Willi Graf’s Catholic faith was important to his personal principles, to the ethical way he lived his life. He was not resisting on behalf of the Catholic church.

Of course, Leugers-Scherzberg’s “Catholic” thesis aligned with that October 2023 conference, which was Step One in the beatification process for Willi Graf. Just because the archdiocese of Munich-Freising wishes it to be so, does not make it true. Willi Graf resisted because he believed the fundamental faith system of Catholic theology, while at the same time, resisting that same church because of its failure to hew to that same theology. He died as a Catholic man who was willing to stand up for truth and justice, not as a Catholic martyr.

No one, much less Leugers-Scherzberg, pointed to Willi Graf’s celebrating the end of 1942 with friends at a Catholic church that the Vatican detested. On December 30, 1942, Willi and his close friends trekked to St. Agatha’s in Merchingen. The Vatican’s official publication L’Osservatore Romano said the works on display inside the church were “pictorial blasphemy,” ridiculing the church as the “Scheune Gottes” or God’s Barn. It was in that place, a church structure with art that Rome despised and belittled, that Willi Graf made progress with his recruiting efforts on behalf of White Rose.

But Leugers-Scherzberg and others assembled in Munich did not mention St. Agatha’s.

The third note I made during Leugers-Scherzberg’s speech concerned an opinion that I still find baffling years later (and during the Q&A, others expressed their disapproval of this opinion as well). Leugers-Scherzberg said he had not incorporated Anneliese Knoop-Graf’s speeches or conversations into his work, because he did not trust oral history.

July 2013, our small band of diligent and serious White Rose researchers joined together with Shoah Foundation scholars in a lively, raucous, and fun debate. I had already written Evolution of Memory, regarding the improvements in Jürgen Wittenstein’s “memory” as scholarship surrounding White Rose resistance expanded. Base line for his faulty memory: The 1997 Shoah Foundation “testimony” of Wittenstein, as interviewed by Carol Stulberg.

Wittenstein had sat for four hours with Stulberg, his confabulations and outright falsehoods growing worse by the minute. At one point during the interview, he bent down out of view of the camera and mumbled his response. When Stulberg pressed him (and his wife made him speak audibly), the answer he gave to that question was so much a lie that he appeared to be ashamed to give it on the record.

Over the next 12+ years, Wittenstein’s “memory” improved, especially once Dr. Armin Ziegler and I corresponded with him. Suddenly what we wrote was incorporated into later speeches and essays.

We therefore asked the Shoah Foundation staff whether they shouldn’t remove Wittenstein’s testimony or at least annotate the transcript that accompanied it. They responded that they deemed their video archives a “neutral” repository and that it was up to historians to treat oral history same as any other source, subject to historical process and strict comparison.

They also stated that there were at least fifteen “Jewish” testimonies in their archives, supposedly survivor accounts, that they had determined to be false. The individuals were neither Jewish nor survivors. They had wrestled with the same question regarding those fifteen and determined it was more important to leave them in. Their stance: The knotty problem of historical revisionism is as critical to Holocaust education as the factual testimonies.

The hardy band of White Rose researchers assembled for our 2013 conference argued vociferously that if a testimony were known to be false and if the fabrications were left unannotated in their archives, students using those same archives could be led astray should they rely on the “testimonies” for their research. We contended that at bare minimum, there should be an asterisk next to the linked video stating that that testimony was known to be false.

Again they replied that it was up to historians and students to apply historical process to research, not up to them to censor.

One of the Shoah Foundation people I had known for several years added: If every historian were as conscientious as Denise, this would not be an issue at all. There is no higher praise. And yes, I have that on tape!

It should be understood that especially with regards to German resistance during the Shoah, oral history can be problematic.

It’s not just Wittenstein with White Rose. Franz Josef Müller also has a “testimony” on file with Shoah Foundation. And it’s as full of lies as Wittenstein’s. Müller had a disgusting tell when he was about to spout a falsehood. He would rub his very large man-boobs before replying to the question. When I would see that, I knew a lie was forthcoming.

I still haven’t transcribed that interview. Hoping that voice recognition software has done so in the meantime. (Shoah Foundation noted that AI/voice recognition tends to be ineffective with their testimonies, because of the strong accents of most speakers.) Once that is done, I’ll write Evolution of Memory, Part II.

Like Wittenstein, Müller and Inge Aicher-Scholl gave many speeches and wrote many essays over the years. Their oral histories are nearly useless, except as examples of historical revisionism.

Just because The Big Three of White Rose legend-telling gave false oral histories, that does not mean we should ignore all oral histories.

It distresses me greatly, however, to see how many wannabe scholars accept oral history without stringent review of its authenticity. Leugers-Scherzberg may have been reacting to the significant problem in White Rose literature, where writers accept fairy tales perpetrated and perpetuated by Inge Aicher-Scholl, Franz Josef Müller, and Jürgen Wittenstein. If that’s the case, he should have said so, instead of hiding behind a blanket statement.

There seems to be little regard for historical process (alt. historical method) for “popular” subjects like White Rose. Even schools as “renowned” as Oxford place Inge Scholl’s oral history, aka her White Rose book, on their must-read list. Why the hell?! They are subjecting students to a false record of events, one that omits or marginalizes people like Traute Lafrenz and Wilhelm Geyer because they dared to stand up to Inge for her fake material. And in Wilhelm Geyer’s case, for Inge’s embezzlement of Hochschule (and McCloy) funds.

There’s no comparison of Inge’s fabrications to primary source documents or to the oral histories of others “who were there,” as her sister Elisabeth Hartnagel said. Merely tacit acceptance of lies, passing those lies on to yet another generation of students.

I can hardly wait for the expiration date of blockage of Scholl archives. There will be so many embarrassed wannabe scholars when that 90% of censored information is released. When we see what the ellipses hid.

In the meantime, PhD committees continue to permit graduate students to use the legend in dissertations. Without questioning. Without discussion of the problematic nature of those legends. Why? I seriously want to know: Why? Why aren’t PhD committees demanding good scholarship?

This post was inspired because the second edition of the Wittenstein Evolution of Memory book is a work in progress. You can purchase the first edition of Evolution of Memory here. Anyone who buys the existing version will receive the greatly-expanded second edition (digital version only) for free.

As I’m doing this, I am reminded all over again why Wittenstein was so dangerous. It’s not just his membership in the NSDAP. It’s not even his appointment as an NS-Führungsoffizier and what that meant about him. (The latter is part of the update.)

It’s the way he figured out how to work the postwar system, befriending an OSS guy, reinventing himself with the aid and assistance of our US government. As a member of the NSDAP, he should never have been allowed a visa to the USA, much less citizenship.

Unsurprisingly, I am STILL fighting to get his OSS-CIA files released. I’ve been working on my FOIA requests for over twelve years. If anyone is in DC and can help me with this, please let me know. Like the censorship associated with the Scholl Archives, lack of insight into Wittenstein’s files with the OSS and CIA is critical to understanding what he was doing from 1933-1945.

Keep in mind, the things he has admitted to – his assignment to Grafenwöhr, his silver braid as sharpshooter, his privileged post at a field hospital sixty miles from the Russian front, his access behind the wall of either the Warsaw or the Łódź ghetto, all of it supports Traute’s insistence that Wittenstein was not part of White Rose because they did not trust him. Because he wore his gold party pin in public.

And yet Oregon State University and Boston College continue to honor Wittenstein as White Rose resistance. John Michalczyk of Boston College included both Wittenstein and Müller in his 2004 book about German resistance! So much for historical process. Why?

On a positive note: Siena College did remove its Wittenstein speech from their Web site. Go Siena!

As much as I care about “my” White Rose families, I still treated their oral histories as subject to historical process, historical methodology. Their statements went into my database same as all other primary source materials. When there were contradictions, those are noted and footnoted.

Susanne Hirzel’s memoir – a written form of oral history – is among the most challenging. As much as I enjoyed her memoir Vom Ja Zum Nein, she could sometimes be less than honest. She would cite her interrogations, allegedly from her transcripts, but her cite would not match the actual document.

I noted these discrepancies in my White Rose histories. I also noted where she subsequently disavowed her own memoir. For example, in her memoir she wrote of the irony of Germans saying that Hitler did not know what was going on, while simultaneously thanking Hitler (“Führer, wir danken Dir!”) for the things he supposedly did not know were going on. I liked that observation and included it with attribution in my history.

Hirzel responded angrily that Hitler did NOT know what was going on, and that I had misquoted her. Sorry. It was right there in black and white. In her book. I added that to an update to the histories, citing her letter.

So yeah – especially with White Rose, but with Holocaust topics in general, it’s necessary to thoroughly vet the veracity of oral histories!

Perhaps that’s the reason I like Lilo Ramdohr so much. When I added her memoir to my database, I contacted her to let her know I had found discrepancies – almost entirely dates, not facts – between her book and primary source documents. She quickly responded that I should go with what was right.

Lilo explained that her memoir was based on notes she made in 1947 and 1948, not on a daily diary kept during the war. She had wanted to cement what she could remember while it was still relatively fresh. But since it was not wholly contemporaneous, she wasn’t surprised that some of the dates were wrong.

I appreciated her honesty and openness.

It’s people like Lilo, and Traute, and Anneliese, and Wilhelm Geyer’s family, and the Schmorells, and the Probsts, and even Gisela Schertling, who make oral histories central and pivotal to our understanding of what those friends did so long ago. It’s the stories about Limburger cheese and riding bikes while bombs were falling and family hikes to Blaubeuren and giggly children picking berries and brothers sitting in cherry trees and hot chocolate on Christmas that flesh out the more serious parts of the story.

These memories treat us to the sheer humanity of those who risked everything for liberty and justice. Some of whom gave their lives, others who lost their freedom. All of whom point the way to doing what is right. While sitting in that cherry tree or toting Limburger cheese.

NOTE

Anneliese Knoop-Graf was especially generous in sharing stories about life with her brother Willi when they were young. Wishing he had two stomachs like cows do, so he could eat twice as many cherries. Gnawing on cherry pits while he studied. "Allowing" her to pick up and throw away pieces of paper he'd wadded up.

If any of her memories and stories are ever contradicted by other primary source materials, we'll have to take a second look at them. But so far, they ring true.

Cherries indeed seem to have been Willi Graf's favorite. His friends often sent him boxes of that delicacy when he was in the military.

Postscript: In case you are interested in my “purpose, preparation, and methodology…”

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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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