Young Voices Against Hitler
KAHN, LOTHAR
Young Voices Against Hitler A Noble Treason By Richard Hanser G. P. Putnam. 319 pp. $12.50. Reviewed by Lothar Kahn Professor of Modern Languages, Central Connecticut State College; author,...
...it was their very commitment to a just life that made them die...
...In May 1942, they distributed leaflets that were somewhat restrained, demanding merely more freedom...
...the unparalleled military and political successes of the Fiihrer that made resistance seem ever more fruitless and sterile-All combined to generate a climate of fear, despair and futility...
...That of the White Rose and the Scholls is one of them...
...There were the seeds of conservative resistance...
...Nevertheless, all five Scholl children joined the Hitler Youth and Hans even occupied a leadership role...
...It is fortunate that a man of Hanser's skill, moderation, and sympathy has told it...
...Worse, several of the men were in uniform when they were committing their "noble treason...
...Within this common frame they were as different as the Scholls' friend, Alexander Schmorell...
...Sophie Scholl was offered a lighter sentence in return for a public statement, but she preferred to die with her brother...
...Nor did Hitler's increasing power diminish the regime's watchfulness...
...As he demonstrated in his previous book, Putsch: How Hitler Made Revolution, the author has a genuine flair for recreating a place and time by way of a revealing incident, and for suggesting a broad range of possible motivations and explanations...
...A bomb planted under Hitler's table did explode...
...Hanser believes the young Scholls responded generously to Hitler's call for greatness because German youth, with its idealistic-romantic traditions, needed to have demands made upon it...
...They were attractive youngsters in their 20s when they were discovered as the authors and the disseminators of anti-Hitler leaflets, were summarily judged, and guillotined...
...From the least threatening of enemies, an obscure student or publisher, to the most powerful, a Stauffenberg or Rommel, Hitler or his People's Courts meted out the same punishment: death...
...at least one military effort, the attempt on Hitler's life on July 20, 1944, nearly succeeded...
...But after Hans returned from the Nuremberg Party Congress, where he was representing his local Hitler group, he was strangely withdrawn...
...he was angered, too, when Stefan Zweig, his favorite author, was denounced as decadent for his internationalism, pacifism and Jewish birth...
...author, "Insight and Action: The Life and Work of Lion Feuchtwanger" There were indeed Germans against Hitler...
...But the leaflets of 1943 called for outright opposition to the regime and its overthrow...
...Some have argued in retrospect that Hitler's premature death might have kept alive the myth of his invincibility, of what he could have accomplished for Germany had he not been stabbed in the back...
...The Communist opposition was also alive, but for a party once solidly organized, it proved singularly ineffective...
...The countless tales of Na/i atrocities have been repeated many times...
...the latter exhilarated him...
...they were, after all, advocating an uprising in time of war...
...The former depressed Hans...
...who had pro-Russian and Leftist sympathies, and (heir mentor, Professor Kurt Huber, a philosopher who leaned strongly toward conservatism...
...The utter ruthlessness and Prussian efficiency of the state machinery, the omnipresence of several types of police forces, of which the Gestapo was only the best-known...
...A Noble Treason is popular history at its best -Accurate, lively, readable...
...The answer, Hanser persuades us, lies in the very character of the Nazi regime, brilliantly depicted by him in its various phases...
...Different generals at different times planned to take action...
...The conspirators, von Stauffenberg and associates, were found out-Again largely by accident-And promptly executed...
...Alienation had led to an inner break with the regime...
...Hanser begins their tale in the South German town of Ulm, where they were raised...
...Their father, a liberal, rationalist, anti-nationalist former mayor, never embraced Nazism and would openly criticize the Fiihrer at the dinner table...
...The author accompanies the Scholls and friends to Gestapo headquarters, to long and painful hearings, to a mock trial followed immediately by their execution...
...They all insisted on truth, unfettered investigation, the free unfolding of the personality...
...Hanser further notes one important nonhuman factor that accounted for the short life of every opposition group: Nearly all anti-Hitler enterprises were mysteriously pursued by bad luck...
...Certainly Hans' loyalty to the Party suffered after a leader of the Hitler Youth reprimanded him for singing foreign as well as German songs...
...His enthusiasm seemed to diminish...
...only a few lacunae have to be filled in...
...Unlike Hitler's other opponents, these students had no clear political orientation, only a commitment to decency and the dignity of the individual...
...Yet it killed only some bystanders, miraculously sparing the dictator...
...Hanser's intense admiration for this brother and sister team leaps from the pages...
...Finally, there was the revolt of the Munich university students, a small group that called itself "the White Rose...
...Their mother was religiously trained...
...For besides a mounting distaste for Nazism, they all shared a belief in humanity, in Bildung, in art...
...Hanser also has the knack of anticipating his reader's questions...
...Hans, supported by his sister-for whose quiet thought-fulness and strength Hanser displays a special affection-by a handful of other students, and by a professor of philosophy ultimately took that road...
...Theirs is a story of conscience and courage, recounted in detail for the first time in Richard Hanser's A Noble Treason...
...The rare stories of heart, passion, conscience and courage have been slow in coming...
...Faint echoes of Weimar ideals could be discerned in the actions of Willy Brandt, Walter Schmedemann and Carlo Mierenbach...
...There was the opposition of the Church of Rome through Cardinals Faulhaber and later von Galen...
...Moving from inner break to outer resistance, however, meant taking a long, perilous road...
...Thus the July 20 assassination attempt should have succeeded...
...They all needed to protect their own values against Nazi ideology, Gleichschaliung and terror...
...Still, at least from the standpoint of German pride, one wishes that 12 years of crime and atrocity had produced more people like the heros of A Noble Treason-hans and Sophie Scholl...
...Protestant resentment spoke through Niemoeller and Bon-hoeffer...
...The group, though, did not have a death wish...
...For instance, one wants to know why there were so few anti-Nazi initiatives and why they were merely noble failures, symbols of opposition rather than fear-inspiring actions...
...Neither would have expected to go free, even with a more benevolent regime...
...Hanser also vividly depicts the Scholls' visit in 1935 to two art exhibits in Munich-one the sanctioned art in Hitler's Haus der Kunst, the other Goebbels' exposition of "degenerate" modern art...
...Perhaps the flags, uniforms and medals, the inflammatory yet empty rhetoric, the sloganeering, the substitution of romantic claptrap for substance and reason began to bore a bright young man who was developing values and attitudes of his own...
Vol. 62 • November 1979 • No. 22
