What’s in a name?

When I started researching White Rose resistance in July 1994, especially in my correspondence with various survivors or family members or friends of those who had been executed, they knew me as Denise Heap from Houston, Texas. My mom and I traveled throughout Germany for 3-1/2 months in 1995, booking flights and cars and hotels and B&Bs with me registering as Denise Heap. I contacted Erich Schmorell, the Geyers, Anneliese Knoop-Graf, and others, all as Denise Heap.

Returned to Texas to start putting all that material together. Follow-up letters to those beloved people went out as Denise Heap. Enquiries to the Bundesarchiv, Denise Heap.

I moved to Pennsylvania in 1997, one of the best moves in my life. I found a community where I felt welcome, that accepted me with all my quirks and foibles and strengths and weaknesses. That community welcomed me as Denise Heap.

An older gentleman in that community, a precious nonagenarian named Lou Lieberman, encouraged me as I planned a Chai-trip to Israel in late 1998. As did a BFF named Dan, who enlisted friends in Israel to put up with me, I mean put me up, when I traveled. Because of Dan, I met Arab- and Jewish Israelis who broadened my horizons, made me think outside that proverbial and very-limiting box.

Because of Dan, I walked from Hebrew University — co-founded by Albert Einstein and Chaim Weizmann in July 1918 and located on Mount Scopus — to Har Ha-Zeitim, more commonly known as the Mount of Olives. And then from there, down the mountain to the Western Wall. That was what Dan recommended, so that’s what I did. Which meant walking through East Jerusalem. Whereupon people back at the hotel asked me if I were out of my mind. To which I replied, “Dan said.”

And through all of that, as Denise Heap.

As I sent out various manuscripts related to White Rose resistance, those publishers knew me as Denise Heap. One publisher liked what he saw. Plus my timing was perfect. Anita Diamant had just resigned as weekly columnist for America Online’s Jewish Community, aka JComm. Her novel, The Red Tent, had been published in 1997 and she was working on her next. My query in mid-1999 showed up soon after she gave notice.

Although the query had been accepted under my “real name” of Denise Heap, my rabbi was concerned. Neo-Nazis had begun making noise in our area, even demonstrating under the Nazi flag in Valley Forge. You may not remember those days, but the violence was increasing and increasingly real. R’Iser fretted about me. Google Benjamin Nathaniel Smith if your memory fails you.

He recommended that as protection, I write under a pseudonym. That conversation is seared into my memory, as it was extraordinarily somber. Around the same time as that conversation, the Philadelphia Inquirer sent a reporter to cover an event I participated in at Gratz University in Philadelphia. The paper’s photographer wanted to take a photo of the assembled group, which consisted of very old and very young students, as well as some of us middle-aged learners (I was a student, not presenter).

When the oldest person, a Holocaust survivor, realized what was happening, she jumped up from her chair and ran out of the room. Standing in the hallway, she shouted at us, “Don’t let them take your picture. Don’t! Don’t!” I think the photographer ended up taking the photo from the rear of the classroom at Gratz.

That scene at Gratz, combined with my rebbe’s very serious demeanor, caused me to contact AOL’s JComm editor. Would you mind if I wrote my column under a pseudonym? I explained the reason, and he agreed.

And thus was “Ruth Hanna Sachs” born — Rut Chanah my Hebrew name, Sachs from my great-grandfather’s side of the family.

New people to my writing and research therefore communicated with or spoke to Ruth Hanna. While nothing changed for those who had long known me forever.

I had been corresponding with Jürgen Wittenstein since 1995/96, so he was among those who knew me as Denise Heap. In 1999, I let him know about my pseudonym and the reason for adopting it. At that time, I was still thinking of him as having been part of White Rose resistance. My OH-NO moment regarding him would not come for a couple of years.

What I found most interesting after assuming the pseudonym for White Rose work: Many of “my” families used Denise and Ruth interchangeably. They saw me as both, which was somehow endearing. I took to mentioning both my birth name and my pseudonym in letters and cards. It was no big deal. If anything, these people whose friends and family had died or been imprisoned for resisting Nazis got it. They remembered the violence that Jewish Germans had experienced in those dark days of the Third Reich.

An anecdote that illuminates just how nasty and vindictive Wittenstein could be: When I refused to allow him to censor my White Rose histories, he started a letter-writing campaign to key people in Germany, “outing” the fact that Ruth Hanna Sachs and Denise Heap were one and the same. I was unaware of this until Armin Ziegler shared the letter he received from Wittenstein, to which Ziegler replied, “Yes, we all know that, so what?”

Due to the change in copyright law, where publications require submission to Library of Congress to qualify for statutory damages, the pseudonym protects me less. When I registered the Histories and English translations of the Protokolle, I had to declare my birth name alongside the pseudonym.

I thought about dropping the pseudonym because it no longer offers that protection that my rebbe thought I needed. But the association of Ruth Hanna Sachs to those publications is so strong…

So why am I telling you all this? Why should you care?

Because just as Wittenstein thought he could use the pseudonym as a weapon against me (only to encounter shrugs), so too there are people — primarily in Germany — who are trying to attach some nefarious motive to my use of a pseudonym. Should you run into one of these Taugenichts, please let me know so I can contact their publisher.

But also because on this October 7, 2025, we should remember that woman who ran out of the room at Gratz, refusing to allow herself to be photographed. If you think your Jewish friends are overreacting to antisemitism in the USA, please point them to this Substack.

The fears are very, very real.

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Image credit: Top photo--Seen in Vegas. Photo © 2019 Denise Elaine Heap. Please contact us for permission to use. Bottom image--NSDAP propaganda, July 1, 1942. Wikipedia Parole der Woche contributor. Anonymous. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

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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The reason the fear is justified...