V-E Day in Europe: May 8, 1995

When my mom and I planned our 3-1/2 month research trip to Germany in December 1994, we scheduled our flights based on budget. We didn’t discuss what it would mean to be in Germany on the fiftieth anniversary of V-E Day. That’s simply what our budget could handle.

Our schedule would not be carved in stone until we were there and could determine who would even consent to an interview with us. Interview schedule was supposed to be drafted on February 22, 1995 at the Weiβe-Rose-Stiftung’s commemoration in Munich. But Franz Josef Müller reneged on introducing us to the families gathered for that event. He reinforced his refusal to help us with interviews when I visited him in person in March.

Had it not been for Erich and Hertha Schmorell, we’d have had a 3-1/2 month vacation in Germany instead of a research trip.

On May 1, 1995, we headed for Blumberg (photo) where Sophie Scholl had fulfilled her war auxiliary service as a kindergarten teacher. In 1995, we believed she had taught the children of the forced laborers who toiled in that mining town. We therefore thought our time in Blumberg would reinforce the notion of Sophie as defender of human rights.

Our week in Blumberg took a strange turn from the first day. We stopped at the town’s information center to inquire about Ferienwohnungen in Blumberg. There were none, so the tourist center booked a place for us in nearby Achdorf. They also warned us to be careful if it rained, because the road between Blumberg and Achdorf had a tendency to slide down the mountain during storms. Indeed, the road had only re-opened the day before our arrival, having glided down the mountain during a recent downpour.

When we arrived at the residence where we’d rented the basement apartment, no one was home. Someone pointed us to the municipal park. “It’s May Day, no one will be home today!” Sure enough, a May Day festival was in full swing. Since Achdorf is a tiny hamlet — no stores in 1995 — we were welcomed as if we were locals. Turned out to be a fun way to start a most serious week of study.

The city archives in Blumberg quickly dispelled our belief that Sophie Scholl had defended and aided the children of forced laborers. Her work as kindergarten teacher saw her tending to the children of the Nazi bosses in that desperately poor mining town.

We learned that Blumberg’s population had numbered 800 prior to Hitler’s rise to power. Once the Imperial Mines closed, there had been nothing to hold residents in Blumberg. It reverted from a bustling village to an idyllic, poor farming community.

Once the NSDAP ruled Germany, Hitler geared up for war almost immediately. With France’s iron ore still off limits, he ordered all mines reopened so Germany’s steel industry could support his war machine. Blumberg’s Doggererz mine had reopened in 1931, halfheartedly, with minimal production. Hitler ordered it fully reopened. Profits didn’t matter. Steel mills needed iron ore, every ounce in German soil. Now!

But a population of 800 would not be able to handle increased production. Robert Ley therefore designated Blumberg as a Siedlung or settlement, the official name for planned communities designed to get Germans out of urban areas and into the countryside. Usually with ulterior motives, such as manning mines or supervising factories.

Because no way were good Aryans going to work in those mines! No. Aryans would supervise POWs and forced labor, brought in from then-Yugoslavia, Poland, and Czechoslovakia — primarily Yugoslavia. Ley’s Siedlung, which was to consist of 950 homes for German managers, promised nice housing in a beautiful environment, a promise necessary to tempt executives and supervisors to relocate from the Saarland or the Ruhr to humble Blumberg.

Blumberg’s city archives bear witness to the emptiness of the promise. When Ley appeared in Blumberg in person for a photo op, the houses behind him in the photograph were unfinished. Not only unfinished at the time of the photo op — most were not completed until after the war. Out of the 950 pledged houses, only 440 had been finished by the time Sophie Scholl arrived in Blumberg.

Noteworthy that POWs and forced laborers lived in the equivalent of concentration camps — not extermination camps, but concentration camps, large barracks filled with bunkbeds crammed close together. Workers were given little food. It really didn’t matter whether they lived or died. They were replaceable.

And, families of those forced laborers had not come with them. Sophie’s work therefore centered solely on the children of Aryan executives and supervisors who lived in single-family homes, half- or otherwise-finished.

Sleepy, pretty little Blumberg had been destroyed, converted into a fine mess. Huge and shoddily-constructed warehouses had been built to store iron ore. New, unfinished homes faced onto unpaved roads, rutted and muddy. The town — Ley’s Siedlung that was anything but beautiful — was a shadow of its former self.

Safety was of no concern to the NSDAP. In the four short years the mines in Blumberg were open, 1,874 mining accidents were reported, with 21 dead and 244 critically injured. The few desperate Germans who worked the mine earned a total of RM 218 ($1744) annually for their efforts. Keep in mind that soldiers were paid RM 250 ($2000) monthly. No data on where German miners were housed.

Yet in the letters and diary entries from Sophie that Inge allowed us to read, there is no sense whatever of the suffering all around her. Instead, we hear Sophie complaining. I am so tired … I feel so homesick (November 1, 1941). My time isn’t my own (undated 1941 letter to Carl Muth). She repeated those complaints in other diary entries and letters.

We know from Otl Aicher that he and Sophie had had a heartfelt conversation in Ulm shortly before she left for Blumberg. Sophie told Otl about her suicidal ideations, her depression, how she hated her family. She began her six months in Blumberg on a low note, and her mental health never improved.

Even the legend of Sophie and Fritz, perpetrated by Inge, was blown out of the water when Thomas Hartnagel published the correspondence between Sophie and his father. Instead of frequent visits with Fritz in Freiburg, Sophie and Fritz met up on only a couple of occasions. Those visits were fraught with fights over Fritz’s desire to have sex with Sophie. Sophie’s reactions were not rooted in reality. She became utterly irrational in her replies to Fritz’s letters of apology, letters in which he begged for her forgiveness for touching her. For touching her!

Outwardly, Sophie likely appeared to be carefree. She wrote Lisa Remppis of playing in the sandbox with the children entrusted to her care.

Sophie also enjoyed the best that Blumberg had to offer. She ate good hot meals at Gasthaus zum Kranz — which still exists! — on tables set with crisp white linens. Her host guarded Yugoslavian prisoners. Sophie mentioned that fact in a letter to Lisa Remppis, but never once expressed concern about the prisoners. She was simply “at home” with the family, and they made her feel safe.

Finally in February 1942, shortly before she completed her war auxiliary service and returned to Ulm, she noted in her diary that she was angry with herself for being so “arrogant” in relation to the downtrodden people around her. Either she never put pen to paper about those downtrodden people, or Inge censored her words. That is the only time that Sophie appeared to notice POWs and forced laborers who did not eat at tables with crisp white linens.

Sophie left Blumberg on April 4, 1942. On April 10, the NSDAP abruptly closed the mines in Blumberg.

Long before our 1995 research trip, I had read Sophie’s words about Blumberg. I truly thought our week there would shine a positive light on that young woman.

But day after day, as I worked in the city archives, talked to townspeople, read books they loaned me, walked the streets of the town, copied photographs in the archives, and explored as much as possible, I understood that if anything, it’s surprising that Sophie would find the courage to resist less than two months later. Her six months in Blumberg do not paint a pretty picture of who she was and what she could tolerate from Nazism. (Again, it is possible that Inge censored letters and diary entries that would show Sophie in a different light — one way or the other.)

Therefore on our last day in Blumberg, May 8, 1995, we were ready for lighter fare. During breakfast, we wished one another happy V-E Day, aware that we were in a place where the German surrender fifty years earlier would not have been met with joy.

Someone told us that there was a place near Blumberg almost directly on the Swiss border where German soldiers had continued fighting for a few days after May 8. My mom had decided that if we were going to have a fun day (in addition to experiencing V-E Day in Germany), then she wanted to buy a real Swiss cow bell. We combined the two and drove to the border crossing near the site of post-surrender fighting.

We’d gotten used to “no borders” after March 1995 and were shocked that we had to stop for inspection and questioning. Swiss border patrol apparently thought it strange that two Americans in a Ford Escort with German license plates wanted to buy Swiss cow bells. He told us, “You cannot buy them here.” But he let us pass.

We quite literally drove all the way to Liechtenstein in our quest for real Swiss cow bells. Struck by inspiration, we eventually stopped at a Swiss farmers’ coop where my mother purchased her unfancy, real Swiss cow bell. Buoyed by success, she decided she also wanted a collectors’ demitasse spoon from Switzerland. We headed to Rheinfall (Rhine Falls) and she made her purchase.

Now it was my turn. We searched out the Gasthaus near the falls that has the best Apfelstrudel bar none. I had found the restaurant on a trip to Stein am Rhein in 1979. It was still there.

Strolling the streets of Stein am Rhein and nearby Schaffhausen, I was reminded again how great an impact war and religious infighting have had on Germany and its neighbors. The (Catholic) Diocese of Constance to which Stein, Schaffhausen, and nearby towns belong was the seat of non-Lutheran reformation. Jan Hus was executed in Constance. Zwingli lived and worked in the area. Heinrich Bullinger took up Zwingli’s work in the late 1500s.

At the same time the reformation was taking hold in that corner of Switzerland, antisemitism wore its ugliest face. Massacres begun in the fourteenth century or at least began to be recorded then. In 1349, local Jews in Schaffhausen were falsely accused of poisoning the town’s well and thus spreading the Plague, and burned at the stake. Austrian dukes assumed ownership of Jewish assets.

Twenty years later, German-speaking Jews slowly returned to Schaffhausen. Only to be accused of “blood libel” (killing Christian children to use their blood to make matzoh for Passover). The good people of Schaffhausen rounded up every Jew in their town and burned them at the stake in 1401. This time, however, the city elders passed a law stating that the property of those Jews should pass to their descendants — they thought that would stop future unwarranted persecution of Jews in their town.

No wonder then that so many Jews — and Hussites and Anabaptists and Huguenots — left Spain, France, and Switzerland for Ulm, where the city had gathered every year since 1397, swearing that “rich and poor, we are all commoners, in the same, common, and honest matters, unconditionally.” That included Jews, Hussites, Anabaptists, Huguenots, Catholics, Seventh Day Adventists, Methodists, and more.

On a continent where the killing and persecution of religious opponents never stopped, Ulm felt like safe haven. There the reformers persecuted one another, banned one another’s writing, mocked their religious opponents. But they steered clear of murdering them. For 536 years.

We stopped at the memorials to Jews massacred for nothing. At statues of reformers who tried to clean up excesses of the ruling church — whether Catholic or Lutheran or Hussite. Although still in Switzerland at that point, we couldn’t help but think about the parallels to what happened in Germany between 1933-1945.

One last stop — Donaueschingen. Most of the times Sophie truly met up with Fritz, they were in Donaueschingen and not Freiburg. It had been Donaueschingen, January 1942, where Fritz learned to stop telling Sophie he loved her and used the phrase lieb haben (like) instead of lieben. It had been Donaueschingen where he first knew that a hug was off limits for Sophie.

February 1942, Fritz tried to cajole Sophie into another meeting in Donaueschingen. He had given up on the slightest expression of friendship, telling her that he hoped one day he would be permitted to “like you [Sophie] wholly and completely.” Her self-hatred spilled over into her other relationships, not just her friendship with Fritz.

We enjoyed our brief tour of Donaueschingen, especially finding the source of the Donau [Danube] where it bubbled up out of the ground. In Donaueschingen, you’d never think that the Danube could become a mighty river.

Before ending the day in Blumberg, packing for a long, long drive through France and Luxembourg to Berlin, we stopped at a newsstand and purchased multiple newspapers and magazines commemorating the end of World War II in Germany.

I was struck by the solemnity with which Germans remembered that anniversary. It had been fifty years. Germany was not the place it had been then.

And yet, it bore numerous scars — in some cases, gaping wounds — left over from the Third Reich. Many scars and wounds are self-inflicted, from refusal to completely open archives. As long as individuals and their descendants can legally block access to their records, Germany cannot heal.

Four years later in Philadelphia, I would hear Dr. Ernestine Schlant define what I was feeling. It’s the language of silence, she said. It’s not the good words that are spoken. It’s the words that stay unspoken.

We’re now thirty years past my V-E Day in Germany, eighty years after the war ended. And we still are listening to the language of silence. We’re still tolerating censorship of records, permitting people like Inge Scholl, Franz Josef Müller, and Jürgen Wittenstein — long dead, but with archives blocked — to control the conversation about White Rose resistance.

If White Rose resistance were the only false narrative, we could possibly survive the assault on historical accuracy. But it’s not.

We have permitted and continue to permit historians, politicians, judges, teachers, and writers to tell their legend-ary stories, to reinvent themselves with no accountability. We permit their children and grandchildren to pen false narratives. Because children and grandchildren can block their ancestors’ archives after their deaths.

Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by this work. The brick walls reach to the sky. At least it feels that way some days.

Even our own National Archives in Washington, DC refuse to provide documents requested under FOIA. My third FOIA request for Wittenstein documents — submitted December 18, 2023 — is still in limbo. At least this time I received a response. No documents, but a response. (My previous two attempts in 2002 and 2012 went unanswered.) Despite the July 2024 response, I am still waiting.

In my White Rose Histories, I note known gaps. Dr. Inge Jens helped me out in April 1995. She explained that in her edition of the letters and diary entries from Hans and Sophie Scholl, where I saw a normal ellipses (“…”), it meant the ellipses was in the “original” document. Where I saw “. . .”, it meant the document was censored at that point.

She also clued me in to the fact that less than 10% of Scholl Archives was open for research, and that the documents she received for her edition of Scholl correspondence had been transcribed by Inge Scholl. Inge Scholl denied Inge Jens’ request to see the originals.

Again — White Rose research is a microcosm of the larger issue of censorship in Germany regarding the Third Reich and Nazism.

I hope I live long enough to celebrate a full-throated V-E Day when Truth has been unleashed. One of these days, justice will prevail and archives will open, spilling their secrets, exposing the good, bad, and ugly.

Hope we’re all ready.

Comment worth keeping

I also hope we will see a full release of the papers you are seeking Denise. Powerful piece.

--Graham Lovelace, May 8, 2025.

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--V-E Day celebration in Toronto, Canada, May 7, 1945. (Yes, May 7.) Photo is public domain. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1266, Item 96241. Photo of Blumberg: Zollhaus/Blumberg, 1940. With Pension zur Post. Public domain. Bottom photo--Shopify, public domain for platform users.

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.