Another justice

Julia Jentsch as Sophie Scholl in Sophie Scholl: Die letzten Tage (2005)

The past two weeks in my Western Civ II class I’ve been teaching the interwar period and the Second World War. By coincidence, I have two things fresh on my mind:

First, I recently finished reading Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich, by Richard J Evans. This collection of profiles and capsule biographies of people from every level of the Reich—from Hitler himself to ordinary citizens—concludes with a look at some commonalities: bourgeois backgrounds, decent education, a humiliating loss of status at some early point in life. Evans does not mention them specifically in his conclusion, but broken homes and religious apostasy feature in a nontrivial number of these lives.

Second, I recently listened to a Rest is History Club bonus episode with Jonathan Freedland, whose latest book tells the story of a German anti-Nazi resistance group. Freedland, in the course of the interview, notes that a significant factor in both motivating and sustaining the actions of many members of the ring was a deep Christian faith that allowed them to see beyond the Nazis and the Reich, to prioritize God above state and live sub specie aeternitatis.

In class Monday I mentioned to my students the story of the White Rose and recommended Sophie Scholl: The Final Days to them. Few movies tell a true story better or better demonstrate the truths to be inferred from the two items above.

Briefly, the film dramatizes the last several days of Sophie Scholl’s life in 1943. Scholl, her brother Hans, and a group of friends—Lutheran, Catholic, and Orthodox—had begun the White Rose as an anonymous protest against the Nazis’ conduct of the war. They drafted, printed, and secretly distributed leaflets denouncing Hitler’s leadership, the mass murder on the Eastern Front, where Hans had served, and the Reich’s top-to-bottom disregard for human life. Hans and Sophie were caught leaving stacks of their final leaflet outside the lecture halls at the University of Munich, and within days had been interrogated by the Gestapo, tried by hanging judge Roland Freisler in a specially convened Volksgerichthof (People’s Court), and guillotined.

The Scholl siblings had some steel in them, standing up to both the Gestapo, the Reich’s most brutal kangaroo court, and the threat and promise of death, and the film—which is very closely based on fact, including verbatim recreations of interrogations and the trial proceedings—shows us why.

There is their faith, invoked again and again and the source of their perspective. Hitler and the Reich hold no terror for them—these can only kill the body. Revealingly, the Scholls’ appeal to eternity and the City of God (he is never mentioned, but St Augustine heavily influenced the White Rose) are not so much disregarded by Gestapo investigator Robert Mohr or Judge Freisler as they are simply unintelligible. These two, the nose-to-the-grindstone cop and the ideologue, are alike so wedded to the State, the Party, and the Spirit of the Age that anything deviating from their devotion is worthy only of mockery and destruction. Evil cannot understand good.

Second, and inextricably linked with the Scholls’ faith, are their parents. Robert and Magdalena Scholl show up in the middle of the Volksgerichthof’s proceedings and demand a chance to testify. Freisler shouts them down and has them removed from the courtroom. Later, given a chance to see their daughter a final time, they praise her—“You did the right thing”—and tell her to remember Jesus. Like them, Sophie invokes the transcendent: “We’ll meet in eternity.”

Where do children get such faith and strength? Their parents. The film shows most clearly where the Scholls got their courage in their father’s one line as he is hustled out of Freisler’s courtroom, the line that still strikes me most powerfully: “Es gibt noch eine andere Gerechtingkeit!”

There is another justice. A promise to the faithful, no matter how terrible the suffering; a threat to the wicked, not matter how temporarily successful.

When introducing Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler in class a few weeks ago, I noted as an aside specifically for my male students that if they planned to have children they should take care to be good dads. All four of these dictators, and many others besides, not to mention many of their underlings, had terrible relationships with their fathers. The regularity with which the tyrannical, unfaithful, or absent father crops up in Evans’s book is telling. Hans and Sophie Scholl—not to mention the Stauffenbergs and Bonhoeffers—offer a positive counterexample and a challenge. We need more Robert Scholls than ever.

Sophie Scholl: The Final Days is well worth your time. I own the recent Blu-ray of the movie, but the entire thing is available on YouTube (with English subtitles available in the closed captioning button). I strongly recommend it.