Troubled waters

August 1938 – November 12, 1938.

In 1938, as August sun bore down on Germany’s contented citizenry, we would have been hard pressed to find anyone who would have believed that troops would be deployed anywhere soon. Hitler concentrated on domestic legislation. The national exaltation was complete.

Something, however, was amiss with Sophie Scholl. Both Inge Scholl and Thomas Hartnagel withheld Sophie’s letters and diary entries between May 23 and August 15, 1938.

Part of her silence could indeed be attributed to visiting Inge in Lesum. Part of, but not all. When Sophie, Werner, Annelies, and Lisa returned from that trip, Sophie headed to Leonberg, where she stayed with the Remppis family and clearly struggled with her emotions.

On August 15, 1938, Sophie wrote Fritz what can only be described as a disturbing letter. Considered alone, it could be interpreted as cold feet, as a seventeen-year-old girl a little afraid of committing to a soldier four years her senior. But the August 15 letter became a regular, even predictable occurrence in Sophie Scholl’s life. Similar letters were penned whenever people started getting close to her.

She began by acknowledging her long silence. “You will have been surprised that I hardly wrote you,” she said, “but I was on a trip and I simply could not write you.”

The rest of the letter must be quoted in its entirety, so there is no danger of taking things out of context.

The Leonberg letter.

But now I will pull myself together and be completely honest with you, because I owe you that much. I cannot continue in the relationship I have with you. I realized this from one day to the next. The reason? I am simply too young, please don’t laugh, but it’s to the point that it is getting me down. Before this trip, I was happy, but now everything depresses me. I have not grown up yet, please don’t be mad, but I cannot. That is the only reason, the real reason. I am writing this to you because I could not bear being unfaithful to you in any manner. Please don’t be mad. I have you to thank for so much. Please write me soon, I won’t have any peace until you do. I myself have had no peace.

In spite of this, you should come visit me and I you.

And you’ve got to keep on helping me a little. And please don’t think poorly of me.

Sofie.

Please write immediately! I am waiting.

Address: S. Scholl, Leonberg, Ad. Hitler Str. 16, c/o the Remppis family.

Sophie followed up this negative letter with a joint one from her and Annelies Kammerer (not published), as well as a chatty, happy letter telling Fritz all about her July vacation to Lesum. Annelies had made a copy of the group photograph, so Fritz could envision them in that environment.

Fritz replied post haste to the chatty letter, not having received the Leonberg letter. He had no idea that Sophie’s feelings for him had changed, so he wrote as if everything were the same as it was when she had been “happiness personified” in the car earlier that summer.

He rambled on about trivialities, and he spoke about how much Werner Scholl’s visit meant to him. He loved the photograph that Annelies had given Sophie to pass on to him! “For hours on end, I worked at ‘character studies’ using it. I found that each of you is sitting there in a typical pose.”

Yet, those dog days of summer saw activity on the German home front. Since many Jewish Germans were indistinguishable from their Aryan neighbors — they looked the same, dressed the same, often ate the same foods (even if they kept kosher), and blast it all, they had the same family names! — Jews were now required to differentiate themselves so Nazis could tell who was who.

On August 17, 1938, Hitler issued an executive order carrying the weight of law. Effective January 1, 1939, Jewish women had to add “Sarah” as a second or middle name, and men “Israel.” Therefore, good German citizens who wanted to please the Führer could continue to have their suits made by tailors named Franz Maier. However, they would not set foot in a shop owned by Franz Israel Maier.

In a move designed to ensure ever more tranquility on the home front, Nazis cracked down on crime. Domestic security became their number one priority. “Asocials” were eradicated off city streets and carted to concentration camps. For now, asocials were defined as slackers, like vagrants, beggars, pimps, and bothersome “gypsies.” Who would argue that these people belonged in an orderly society?, said Nazi leaders. And the newspapers that published as they were instructed.

Those who paid attention to the news may have wondered that in a time of such great domestic bliss, National Socialists were expending so much effort on restructuring their military. The role of the SS was expanded, with the organization taking on the form of a special forces unit.

In Ulm, peace and quiet still reigned, at least for the moment. Ernst Reden was unexpectedly released from the concentration camp and returned to active duty in the army, though not stationed in Ulm. Sophie Scholl regularly slept till noon, snuggled under the covers, cocooned away from news that could possibly be bad. She eagerly anticipated the beginning of school and all that learning that motivated her to get out of bed in the morning.

But… when Sophie still had not heard from Fritz a month after having written him the Leonberg letter, she worried that it was still in transit. She could not bear the suspense.

Therefore on September 15, Sophie wrote him again. She told him that she and Annelies had adopted the habit of studying together every Tuesday after school from 5—7. Best intentions notwithstanding, their self-imposed study hall tended to degenerate into yet another party. At the last such session, her brother Werner and friend Oskar showed up. Instead of studying, they smoked and danced.

The day before — which was a Wednesday and therefore a school day that Sophie obviously ditched — she and Elisabeth bicycled out to Blaubeuren, 20 km (12 miles) one way. The weather was perfect, and the turquoise spring, source of the Blau River, must have been exquisite too.

As an added bonus, the sisters were surprised by the serendipitous fly-over of the LZ 130, a sister ship of the Zeppelin airship the Hindenburg. Details about that Zeppelin would have meant nothing to Sophie. All that mattered was the graceful flight of the airship.

The pleasantness of the late September day playing hooky came to an abrupt halt as the two girls returned to the city. The normally peaceful countryside, sometimes so peacefully quiet as to be eerie, erupted into endless convoys of trucks carrying soldiers. It was evening when they reached Ulm. Policemen stopped them to say the city was under blackout. Sophie immediately worried that war had started.

One policeman allowed them to continue riding their bikes without lights, but the next forced them to dismount and walk the rest of the way home. “Very nice during a blackout,” Sophie told Fritz.

They only learned later that it had been a “practice blackout.” Real war would not come for another year, but Hitler was preparing his populace already.

Sophie finally got around to the real reason she was writing Fritz on that particular day. Had he received her letter from Leonberg? “Please answer it,” she requested, almost curtly.

Still having no reply from Fritz to her Leonberg letter, she wrote him again on September 24, acknowledging his letter from the first of September. Her restraint — she did not mention the Leonberg letter — is almost painful to observe.

When she received Fritz’s letter dated September 25, her curiosity was not satisfied. Fritz was still confined to bed rest, enjoying a life of near-luxury. Hoping to build up Fritz’s strength, the army had showered him with an abundance of foods the man on the street had long ago sacrificed. He was even permitted to rent a radio, so he could keep up with the news.

Though still confined to bed, the doctors had allowed him to get up for the first time the day before. Fritz told Sophie he had felt weak, “drunk” even, and his knees gave out. “But today, I believe I could even dance,” he said. Except that he had grown used to bed rest, enjoyed the time alone when he could think, and wasn’t so sure he was looking forward to being up and about.

However, there were two things that motivated him to follow doctor’s orders and leave his nice, warm bed. First, the thought of being outdoors in the Swabian Alb he loved so dearly.

The second reason was more important than the first. Once he could get out of bed, the army was going to grant him a three-week convalescent leave. The political situation made him wonder if three whole weeks were a good idea, but he was looking forward to being in Ulm. So he could see Sophie, of course.

Sophie received his letter four days later and promptly replied. She was glad he could come on Saturday, she said. And she was happy about all the good things he enjoyed. But she was in a hurry, on her way out the door to a BDM meeting, to her “duty,” as she called it. “I am taking along a book to read, because last time it was so dull.” She may have found BDM meetings dull, but Sophie was still firmly implanted in BDM life and had not broken with National Socialism.

It was without the slightest bit of irony that Sophie concluded her brief September 29 letter to Fritz with the words, “Best wishes! With a German greeting (of course I’m on duty), Sofie.”

Apparently Fritz’s trip to Ulm was postponed to October 9, and he stayed for eight days. It was not the most pleasant experience he had ever had. He compared it to “the feeling when one leaves a warm room and exits to the cold.”

The unpleasantness began that very first night, a Sunday, when he arrived at his parents’ home. Surely they had known when he was coming, but no one was there. “I ate supper alone, accompanied by the ticking of the clock and the clattering of the fork. I went through all the rooms as if I was looking for someone, then I played around a bit on the piano, but its strings startled the stillness and me — so I left.”

He obviously saw Sophie at least once while he was in Ulm. For some reason they avoided the topic of her Leonberg letter, although he had received it by then. Sophie acted like nothing was wrong, so much so that she later felt guilty for having led him on. Fritz was not fooled by her pretense.

Those eight days in Ulm had become a nightmare for Fritz, something that felt to him like he experienced it through someone else’s eyes.

The daze did not end when he was back in his quarters. The familiar things he had brought from his room in Ulm to make army life more bearable, now surprised him by their very normalcy. A print of The Young Woman (a Kolbe sculpture), his books, two sabers and a black flag, the mask of Nietzsche, even his bed — it was as if he had never left. “Everything on my desk was in disarray as it usually is.”

But things were not as they usually were. Still, in this letter, Fritz could not bring himself to express his hurt to Sophie. He chose to ignore it.

Instead, he told her how the next day, he went to one of Augsburg’s suburbs to drink coffee at a pub, went back to the city for supper, wandered aimlessly through town until he decided to take in a movie. The film bored him, so he left halfway through it, evidently landing in a bar somewhere or the other.

The army sent Fritz on a two-day cross-country trip the very next day. The short trip renewed Fritz’s commitment to the military. One hundred and fifty new recruits would be showing up in a few days, and the prospect made him happy to be a soldier. “Only the soldier is a free man,” he said, quoting Schiller. Fritz could no longer ignore the elephant in the room.

“But you must allow me to say a few things,” he wrote Sophie, his courage drawn up to his chin. “You know, when I think back on the last eight days I spent in Ulm, I am overcome by a peculiar uneasiness. There is this letter sitting before me, the one you wrote me several weeks ago, and I cannot comprehend any of it. I am weighed down by so many reproaches, so much guilt, so just call me a scoundrel and a criminal, despise me — hate me! Please! You would help me a lot. Fritz.”

In the middle of Sophie’s personal crisis, the world experienced the Sudetenland crisis. When I read archived copies of Ulm’s newspapers, I could not help but believe that if I had lived then, I would have supported military intervention in the Sudetenland.

Reports of children denied exit visas, just because they were Sudeten Germans. Reports of children who could not receive medical care that the International Red Cross tried to provide, just because they were Sudeten Germans. Reports of children in dire straits — living in impoverished conditions witnessed by Hitler Youth groups from Germany — just because they were Sudeten Germans. (See NSDAP propaganda postcard showing German relief efforts in the Sudetenland.)

And those reports, ten of them in all, were gleaned from only three months of old Ulmer Sturm newspapers dated 1937. Like everything he did, Hitler gave the German people plenty of time to absorb the actions he was about to undertake.

For now, these last precious days of final peace, things went on as normal, as normal as life can be when you know you’re walking on eggshells.

Hans Scholl came home the weekend after his September 22 birthday, without Lisa Remppis. Annelies Kammerer invited them to her house to spend the evening, a prospect that delighted Sophie since Annelies reported that her mother had brought wine and Swabian Moscht (hard apple cider — though in September it would be more apple juice than cider) up from the cellar. That hardly meant that all was well between Sophie and Annelies. She wrote Fritz that she wished she could go away on a trip instead of going to Annelies’ house.

For a fleeting second, for one shining moment, Germany stood at a momentous crossroads. Nothing that had been done could not be undone. On September 24, as Sophie awaited an evening of revelry at the Kammerers’ home, political prisoners could have been freed. On September 24, Jewish Germans could have gone back to being plain old Franz Maier, once more allowed to fully participate in German democracy. On September 24, nothing was irreversible.

But on Monday, September 26, 1938 — Rosh Ha-Shanah, first day of the Jewish year 5699 — Adolf Hitler stood in the Sports Palace in Berlin and demanded, “The surrender of the Sudetenland is the last revision of the Treaty of Versailles that we demand.”

On September 30, the leaders of France, England, Italy, and Germany gathered to sign the German-British Non-Aggression Pact. Hitler and Chamberlain shook hands and promised never to wage war against one another. Hitler solemnly swore that the Sudetenland would be his last territorial claim, that if everyone would agree to let him have that small corner of Czechoslovakia, his appetite would be sated. Neville Chamberlain left Munich proclaiming Peace for Our Time, a headline echoed around the world.

When Hitler sent German troops into Czechoslovakia, taking charge of the Sudetenland, Carl Goerdeler — mayor of Leipzig known for his anti-Hitler views — vented his frustration in correspondence with an American friend. He insisted that Germans on the whole did not want war, and that if only British and French military had listened to their warnings, Germany would already be free of its dictator.

Sadly, to quote an old Kentucky saying, If wishes and buts were candies and nuts, oh what a merry Christmas we’d all have. Goerdeler’s wishes and buts could not alter the history that was about to be made.

Goerdeler likely underestimated sentiments among the German populace. Hans Scholl’s letter to Inge on October 21 underscores how hard it was to know what true patriotism looked like in those days. Thinking Germans must have felt like they were afflicted with political schizophrenia, as witnessed by these words from Hans.

On the one hand, he admitted that he had never been such a patriot as he had been those early October weeks. Yet on the other hand, he had to wonder whether the Fatherland meant as much as it always had, “…when one has lost all faith in banners and speeches because prevailing ideas have become trite and worthless.”

Meanwhile, Sophie and Fritz carried on with their awkward, hurtful dance.

In response to Fritz’s letter telling Sophie how his visit in Ulm had deeply wounded him, Sophie did little to clarify the situation. She assumed the blame for the breakdown in their relationship and apologized for her “relapse” — assuredly flirtatious behavior while he was in Ulm.

“Oh, I don’t know anything any more,” she said. “If you cannot stand to see me or hear me any more, if you wish to break free of me, I will understand. I will do whatever you want. But you cannot demand of me feelings I cannot awaken within myself. Let’s close the chapter that is behind us. Whatever the future holds is up to you.”

Sophie also chided Fritz for sending her a vest that cost 5 RM ($40) more than she had given him for that article of clothing. She insisted on paying him the full amount and asked whether she should send it to him, or would he come and collect the money in person? “Please write and let me know. I would be happy to help you however I can.”

Fritz did not reply.

Despite Hans Scholl’s letter in late October, wondering whether the Fatherland meant as much as it always had, he completed his application for officer status and sat for the reserve officer’s exam, all the while calculating how long it would be until his medical studies started.

When Hans’ basic military service ended on November 1, 1938, he was assigned to the base hospital in Tübingen, a necessary step to qualify for permission to study medicine.

He had not been there a week when he was confronted with the most difficult task he had ever been given: Assisting in the autopsy of a good friend from Ulm who was also stationed in Tübingen. Hans never wrote about the cause of death, nor how he learned of it. Only that everything went black before my eyes. He had difficulty separating his personal feelings for this friend from the gruesome (yet interesting) medical procedure he witnessed.

Even harder — figuring out what he would say to the friend’s sister. The incident deeply affected Hans, rattled his implacable composure. He became preoccupied with thoughts of death.

As Hans Scholl grappled with intense emotions in a November 6 letter to family in Ulm, the world at large kept right on. That is a phenomenon that strikes us hardest the first time we are faced with the death of someone dear. We cannot imagine that everyone does not stop laughing and playing and making love in honor of our grief. No matter how magnificent the life extinguished, children are born, birthdays are celebrated, life persists. Politics goes on as usual. While we stand over a casket, debates rage and big words are uttered.

Two weeks earlier at the end of October, 17,000 Polish Jews residing in Germany had been deported to Poland. Only Poland — historically among the most antisemitic countries in the world — refused the deported Jews entry to the country. These 17,000 people had already lost everything they owned, as their possessions were confiscated upon their arrest. Now they had no place to live but “relocation camps” in a no-man’s-land on the Polish border.

Zindel Grynszpan was among these 17,000 Polish Jews, among those who lost everything they owned as they were confined to that no-man’s-land on the Polish border. His son Herschel lived in Paris. Herschel Feibel Grynszpan (see arrest photo, left) erupted in anger at the treatment his father suffered and resolved to assassinate the German ambassador to France. On November 7, Grynszpan went to the German embassy in Paris to carry out his plot. When he learned the ambassador was out, he settled for shooting the Third Secretary, Ernst von Rath.

Grynszpan’s outrageous action may have been ill-advised and even wrong, but I dare say the most ardent Nazi block warden could not have guessed how Goebbels decided to “spin” this assassination attempt. Two days later, Hitler’s propaganda guru announced that Herschel Grynszpan had played a role in a conspiratorial attack by “International Jewry” against the Reich and by extension, against the Führer himself!

The anger of a seventeen-year-old boy now was linked to claims that Jewish bankers ran the world and that Jewish politicians pulled the strings in every ‘capitalist-pig’ state. Today, we may (or may not) find such propaganda ludicrous, but Jew-baiting had snowballed to the point that even as absurd a claim as this could be believable.

The night of November 9, 1938, orders went out to avenge Rath’s death. It is unclear whether the original intent of Gestapo orders included torching and looting synagogues. A November 9, 1938 telex published in 1968 purporting to be from Gestapo chief Müller specifically prohibited looting or arson.

I find this believable only because of research done for the short biography I penned about Adolf Eichmann (Rosen Publishers). Eichmann’s primary task revolved around raising funds to keep German war machinery solvent. The logistics of transporting Jews to extermination camps came much later, only after Nazi officials had stolen their belongings.

Therefore it is logical to believe that Nazis primarily wanted access to synagogue membership rolls and information about Jewish assets that may have been contained in synagogue files. Criminals generally want their victims alive while they are robbing them to ensure they find all the family jewels. They murder them after they feel confident they’ve got gramma’s rubies and the husband’s Rolex. This would have been the fundamental theory behind raids on Jewish houses of worship the night of November 9 and early November 10.

Whatever the principal aim may have been, when the night turned ugly, no Germans stopped the rampage. We read story after story of local fire departments pressed into duty — to protect neighboring Aryan businesses and Aryan homes so that flames from the synagogues were contained in those structures.

In Ulm, Rabbi Cohn was dragged from his bed into the dry creek in front of the shul. First Storm Troopers attacked him, then bystanders joined in the fracas. Other prominent members of the Jewish community in Ulm suffered similar fates.

One of the Hirzel children told the family that he had heard at school that the fire department had been called out before the synagogue was set on fire. Fire department stood guard over Müller & Feuchter, the paint store next to the shul. What puzzled the Hirzel family most were reports that it had been Storm Troopers from nearby Geislingen that had come to Ulm for the “party.” It seems that Storm Troopers in Ulm and Söflingen had passed on the opportunity.

Nationwide, the destruction was overwhelming. That night and the next day, people roamed the streets, bashing in plate glass windows and destroying Jewish homes and businesses. Goebbels contended that these were “spontaneous” outbursts of an enraged citizenry, the “Just Vengeance of Outraged Citizens,” as aligned newspapers trumpeted. Oy vay, eu weh, if anyone dared to disagree.

Nazi bosses faced another sticky matter: Most of those Jewish businesses had been properly insured. The shop keepers and tailors and jewelers would shortly be filing claims that could ostensibly bankrupt the German insurance industry. Besides, there wasn’t enough plate glass to be found in the whole country to replace what had been destroyed.

On November 12 then, the Nazi brain trust devised a means to cover “their” losses of November 9/10. They demanded that the Jewish community in Germany pay a one billion Mark fine (approximately $8 billion), and that all insurance proceeds from claims filed be paid to the government and not to Jewish businesses. This yielded another six million Marks, or $48 million.

Dr. August Nathan, erudite friend to both Scholl and Hirzel families, was on vacation at a health resort during the night of breaking glass. Nazis arrested him there and shipped him to Dachau. The Dannhausers simply disappeared from one day to the next, leaving a goodbye note in the Hirzels’ mailbox advising them they had gone to Eretz Yisroel.

Surprisingly, almost half of Germany’s Jews stayed in Germany, despite the pogrom, despite the ever-tightening noose. It had become crystal clear that their lives would be made a living hell, yet 250,000 stayed until November 1941, when the choice to leave was voided and the only option that remained was death.

Susanne Hirzel’s vulnerability as she wrote of those days endeared her to me long before I met her face to face. No holds barred, she admitted to anger, shame, oppression, as the dominant sensations she could not forget.

Anger that anyone could treat a house of worship with so much disrespect — Jews today, and us tomorrow?

Shame that her cowardice got the best of her and she was afraid to seek out the very Jewish friends she had treasured, to inquire how they had fared. She remembered how embarrassed she was, how great her fear at facing people she held dear (and she never quite got past her “lack of courage”).

Oppression, knowing that nothing could ever be the same, that Germany had crossed a line from which there was no retreat, that things would soon be worse than anyone could dream possible.

And all this could happen because we had a government we could not get rid of, that had no opposition. A government that refused entry to foreigners and the news they would bring with them. A government that developed its own propaganda. A government that bludgeoned and terrified its own people with terror, legal uncertainty, and suppression of freedom of speech. That even made its people indifferent, apathetic because they were unconscious.

She buried herself in music, refusing to read newspapers or do anything that would expose her to the horrors that seemed to mount with each new day. For her in that day, at that time, reality was more than she could bear.

Did you notice that I did not mention the Scholls in the above Kristallnacht narrative? For good reason! I covered them in Breaking glass, silenced.

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

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 photo--Shopify, public domain for platform users. Second photo--Kennkarte (ID card) for Ludwig Katz of Dieburg, Germany, with "Israel" added, along with prominent "J" to distinguish him as Jewish. Issued April 13, 1939. Ludwig Katz was murdered in Auschwitz on September 14, 1943.  Source: Zentralarchiv zur Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland. Public domain.

Third image--NSDAP propaganda postcard showing German aid to abandoned and mistreated Germans in the Sudetenland. Public domain. Fourth image--NSDAP propagand postcard thanking Hitler for saving the Sudetenland. Public domain. Fifth photo--Herschel Feibel Grynszpan's arrest photo in France, November 1938. Public domain.

Bottom image--NSDAP propaganda postcard showing a factory supposedly owned by ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland and allegedly destroyed by the Czech population. Public domain. NSDAP propaganda was relentless.

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.