On This Day in History: February 22

The White Rose Movement Against the Nazis

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You know how Trump was always trying to shut down the media from criticizing him? Fascists hate freedom of speech because it exposes them for the pieces of shit they are. The White Rose was a nonviolent resistance group in Nazi Germany whose only crime was spreading anti-Nazi leaflets and graffiti. It was a crime punished by death.

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: February 22, 1943--

Most of the White Rose was comprised of students from the University of Munich. Two core members were brother and sister Hans and Sophie Scholl, especially Sophie. Funding for the group came from Eugen Grimminger of Stuttgart, who had lost his job as an auditor for a government agency because he’d dared to marry a Jewish woman.

Everything, especially the media, was tightly controlled by the fucking Nazis; the indoctrination began at a young age and continued via mandatory enrollment in the Hitler Youth. Children were encouraged to nark on their parents if they said anything negative about Hitler or the fucking Nazis. Anyone could join White Rose, regardless of age, gender, race, or religion. The only requirement was to hate fucking Nazis. Continues below …

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In 1941, a Catholic Bishop gave a sermon that decried the Nazi eugenics program that forcefully euthanized anyone who didn’t meet their standards of genetic purity. Sophie reprinted and distributed the sermon at her university to let people know what kind of fuckery their government was engaged in. Meanwhile, her brother Hans, a medical student, was forced to serve terms on the Eastern Front in the medical corps. While there he witnessed the mass murder of civilians in Poland and the Soviet Union.

Between the summer of 1942 and February 1943, White Rose published and distributed six leaflets. Sophie’s role was both as author and primary distributor; the latter she insisted upon because as a woman she was less likely to be searched. The leaflets said that every honest German was ashamed of their government, exposing the mass murders of Jews and others and saying it was their moral duty to resist.

On February 18, 1943, Hans and Sophie left an open case filled with their sixth and final leaflet at the University of Munich in a building hallway for students to find as they left their classes. Afterward, there were a few leaflets left so Sophie took them and flung them from the top floor down into the atrium for others to find and read. The fucking janitor saw her and narked her out to the fucking Gestapo.  

Hans, Sophie, and another White Rose member Christopher Probst were all arrested and quickly put on trial. They were forbidden to speak but Sophie kept interrupting the judge, yelling things like “You know as well as we do that the war is lost.” All three were executed by guillotine on February 22, 1943. Hans yelled his final words as the blade fell: “Long live freedom!”

But that fucking janitor got his. He was arrested after the war and served five years in prison for being a fucking nark.

Thanks, Jenny, for the suggestion of today’s topic.

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