It
was January of 1943, and Hans Hirzel had a bit of a problem. Sophie Scholl—a
friend of both his sister and himself, now a student at the Ludwig-Maximillian
University in Munich, and (secretly, of course) a member of the White Rose
student resistance group-- had come Munich a few days before and had presented
him with a briefcase chock full of typewritten, mimeographed leaflets, ominously
titled “A Call to All Germans”. It was the fifth leaflet the group had
produced, and its content presented a direct challenge to the Nazi
dictatorship:
“The war is approaching its destined end,” the
leaflet read. “Hitler cannot win the war; he can only prolong it. The guilt of
Hitler and his minions goes beyond all measure. Retribution comes closer and
closer… But what are the German people doing? They will not see and will not
listen. Blindly they follow their seducers into ruin… Germans! Do you and your children want to
suffer the same fate that befell the Jews? Do you want to be judged by the same
standards as your seducers? Are we to be forever a nation which is hated and
rejected by all mankind? No. Dissociate yourselves from National Socialist
gangsterism… A new war of liberation is
about to begin. The better part of the nation will fight on our side. Cast off
the cloak of indifference you have wrapped around you. Make the decision before
it is too late…”
In
the Nazi state where a citizen’s every move was subject to scrutiny, mere
possession of such incendiary literature could bring swift retribution. Helping
to reproduce it and distribute it could bring a long term in prison at the
least-- and just as likely, a death sentence.
But
now, Hans Hirzel, 18 years old, just out of high school and waiting to enter
college in Munich himself, had about 1000 copies of the leaflet, hidden in his
bedroom at the parsonage of the church where his father was pastor. He had heard
from Sophie Scholl some of the things that she and her older brother Hans and
several other university students had been doing to show their opposition to
the regime. He had agreed to help them spread the word in other
cities—including their hometown of Ulm. Now, his chance had come—with all the
danger it included.
He
went to see his schoolmate, Franz Müller, whom he knew also opposed the Hitler
regime. Müller, a faithful Catholic, had even given Hirzel and some of their
other friends copies of sermons delivered by Bishop Clement von Galen of
Münster against the Nazis’ euthanasia policies. They had spoken among
themselves of doing more in opposition to the dictatorship. Hans knew that
Franz would help—or he at least hoped so.
 |
| Hans Hirzel |
 |
| Franz Müller |
Franz agreed to try to get enough postage stamps to mail the leaflets— and envelopes, too. Sophie had given Hans money donated by various individuals for just this task. Purchasing a thousand stamps at once, obviously, would arouse suspicion even in a society less-observed than Germany at the height of war. He would have to make trips to as many different post offices as possible—as far away as Stuttgart and Tübingen, if need be, always with a ready excuse of what the stamps were for. Finally, stamps and envelopes, were secured—not quite a thousand, but enough to get going on their dangerous project. The two schoolboys agreed to meet to get the leaflets ready for mailing.
But
where? Neither of their homes were safe, not with parents and neighbors and
siblings prowling around. Nor, of course, would any public place be acceptable.
Then Hans thought of the choir loft at his father’s church, the Martin Luther
Church in Ulm, which boasted one of the largest and best pipe organs in the
entire area. There was a large space behind the organ, where no one ever went.
They could move a table there, a couple of chairs; he could set up a small lamp
by which they could work; he would also bring a typewriter to address the
envelopes, with addresses taken at random from the telephone book. Meeting
there would arouse no suspicion: Hans was a gifted musician, who often used the
organ at the Martin Luther Church to practice; he even had his own key to the
building. He would even play a few pieces as they worked, to disguise their
true intentions in being there.
They
met the next night, and walked to the church. Hans let them in, then locked the
door behind them. They drew the black-out curtains in the sanctuary, then made
their way up the stairs to the organ loft. As Franz Müller arranged the
leaflets on the table, Hans sat at the organ bench and began to play. The first
song he chose was Luther’s Ein Feste
Burg—“A Mighty Fortress is Our God”.
Even
though he was a staunch Catholic, Franz Müller knew Luther’s masterpiece;
indeed, all Germans did. It was an important aspect of their culture and
history—a song sometimes called “The Battle Hymn of the Reformation”, a
stirring call to arms in the face of the evils of the world.
A mighty fortress is our God,
A bulwark never failing,
A helper sure amidst the flood
Of mortal ills prevailing…
Luther’s
last line brought to mind the high stakes of the fight these two boys were now
waging:
The body they may kill,
God’s truth abideth still,
His kingdom is forever—
Or, in the original German “Das Reich muss uns doch bleiben.” – “That
Reich will remain forever.” That Reich—not the insane Third Reich of
madmen who now ruled over Germany—that is what would abide forever.
“It
was as though I was hearing my own death sentence,” Franz Müller said later,
“That was clear. We might well die because of what we were doing there. But
then, I began to breathe heavily, and I thought to myself, ‘Finally, someone is
speaking the truth!’”
Indeed,
some would die. By the end of the next month, February 1943, Sophie Scholl, her
brother Hans Scholl, and their friend Christoph Probst, would be executed in
Munich when they were discovered distributing leaflets at the university. Within
weeks, the Gestapo had rounded up dozens of their supporters in cities
throughout Germany. Their investigations led them readily to Hirzel and Müller
in Ulm.
Thirteen
defendants went on trial at the Second White Rose trial in April 1943—among
them Hans Hirzel, Franz Müller, and Hirzel’s sister, Susanne. The judge was
Roland Freisler, president of the “People’s Court” of the German Reich, Hitler’s
“hanging judge”. Somehow, Freisler got it into his mind that three
Aryan-looking youngsters like Hans and Franz and Susanne—all were blonde with
blue eyes, epitomes of the German racial ideal—could have freely chosen to
become enemies of the Third Reich. They must have been tricked, Freisler
believed; misled, fooled; they were “impressionable schoolboys” who should not
have to pay for their errors with their lives. Instead, he sentenced Hans and
Franz to five years in prison, and Susanne to two years for her lesser role.
But
toward others of the defendants, whom he considered White Rose ringleaders from
the University in Munich, the hanging judge was not so forbearing. Three of
them-- Professor Kurt Huber, Willi Graf, and Alexander Schmorell—were sentenced
to death.
Alexander Schmorell was born in Orenberg, in the
depths of Russia, almost a thousand miles east of Moscow on September 16, 1917.
His father, Hugo Schmorell, was an ethnic
German, although he had also been born and raised in Russia. His wife, Nataliya
Vvydenskaya—Alex’s mother-- was the daughter of an Orthodox priest, and,
shortly after his birth, Alexander was baptized into the Russian Orthodox
Church.
When Alex was only two years old, his mother died
of typhus. In 1920, his father married Elisabeth Hoffman, a Catholic German
woman who had also grown up in Russia, and in 1921, the Schmorells left Russia in
order to flee the Bolsheviks who had just come to power. They took with them
Alex’s nanny, Feodasiya Lapschina, under the pretext that she was the widow of
Hugo’s brother. The family later had two more children, Erich and Natascha, who
were baptized Roman Catholic. But under the influence of Feodasiya Lapschina, and
in honor of his late mother, Alexander was raised in the Orthodox faith. Also
because of Feodasiya, all three of the Schmorell children grew up in a
bi-lingual household, maintain close ties to their family’s original roots in
Russia.
In 1935, when he was 17 years old, Alex met
Christoph Probst, a fellow student at the Neue
Realgymnasium, or high school, in Munich. Their friendship grew, and in
1940, Alex was best man at Christoph's wedding to Herta Dohrn. In 1942, he
became godfather to their second son, Vincent.
In 1939, more at the insistence of his doctor father
than by his own choice, Alexander began to study medicine, and in the fall of
1940, he transferred to the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, with an
internship in the medical student military company of the Nazi army.
From the start of Hitler’s Reich, Alexander
Schmorell despised the Nazis. Because he still considered himself more Russian than
German, their ideas of a "master race" were anathema to him. He
especially resented any ideas that he and his fellow Slavs were somehow
"inferior" to racial “Aryans”. When he was inducted into the
military, he refused to swear the oath of absolute allegiance to Adolf Hitler. But
for some reason, his commanding officer chose to ignore Schmorell’s actions,
and he was sent as a medic, first to Austria, then to Czechoslovakia, as those
countries were forced one after the other, under the German yoke. But Alexander
often told his friends that, even if ordered to do so, he would never turn a
gun on his Russian brethren. While he loathed Stalin and the Communists almost
as much as he did the Nazis, he still considered Russia his true homeland, and
yearned to return there when the war was finally over.
Sometime in the fall of 1940, Alexander Schmorell became
part of the same student-military company as Hans Scholl. They became friends, and Hans started coming
to the Schmorells' house for "reading evenings", which Alex would
host now and then. It was here that Hans Scholl also got to know Christoph
Probst, then later Willi Graf. Soon, this group began speaking among themselves
of the need for a concerted effort to oppose Hitler and the Nazis from within
Germany, and the nucleus of the White Rose was formed.
Between the middle of May and the end of June,
1942, Alex and Hans wrote the first four of the group’s leaflets. When, with
the help of an artist friend named Lilo Ramdohr, Alex managed to get hold of an
old duplicating machine, distribution of the leaflets began in earnest. Full of citations from German arts and
letters, the Bible, world religions, as well as facts and figures from the
daily papers, the early White Rose leaflets called upon the German people not
just to oppose particular policies of the German government, as Bishop von
Galen had done, but to rise up and topple the entire regime. A passage from the
Second Leaflet of the White Rose written by Alexander Schmorell in 1942,
contains the world’s first public outcry against the Holocaust and the
destruction of the Jews:
“…since the conquest of Poland three hundred thousand Jews have been murdered in this country in
the most bestial way. Here we see the most frightful crime against human
dignity, a crime that is unparalleled in the whole of history. For Jews, too,
are human beings-- no matter what position we take with respect to the Jewish
question-- and a crime of this dimension has been perpetrated against human
beings.”
In July, Scholl, Schmorell, and Graf were sent to
the Eastern Front in Russia for three months. In spite of the severity of the
conditions he faced, Alex was thrilled to step foot in the land of his birth
once again. Because of his fluency in Russian, he was able to meet with regular
Russians on his own, and even attended Orthodox services, while still dressed
in his Nazi uniform.
When they returned to Munich in October of 1942,
the efforts of the White Rose were revived and redoubled. Hans Scholl’s sister,
Sophie, joined the group, as did Professor Kurt Huber. Contact was made with
the Hirzels in Ulm and allies in other cities. There were tentative ties forged
with other small circles of resistance throughout Germany. In January of 1943,
the Fifth Leaflet was published, and the White Rose members sought out ways to
distribute thousands of copies throughout the German Reich. Alexander Schmorell
made the most arduous and dangerous of the journeys—traveling to Linz, Vienna, and
then Salzburg, to distribute leaflets.
After the fall of Stalingrad in February of 1943, a
wave of pessimism swept over the German nation. It now seemed evident that
Germany might well lose the war. A sixth White Rose leaflet was published,
calling for wide-scale desertion from the Nazi cause. On February 18, however,
Hans and Sophie Scholl were caught while distributing this leaflet at the
University in Munich. They were arrested, and soon, too, was Christoph Probst. Immediately,
the search for other accomplices began.
At first, Alexander Schmorell attempted to escape to Switzerland, and even
managed to secure a forged passport. But when he realized how dangerous this
ploy might be, he decided to return to Munich and go into hiding there instead.
But on February 24, he was recognized at an air raid shelter, and turned in to the
police. On April 18, he and twelve other White Rose accomplices were placed on
trial. On April 19, three—Graf, Huber, and Schmorrel-- were sentenced to death.
On July 13, 1943, Alexander Schmorrel was executed by beheading in the same
room at Stadelheim Prison in Munich where the Scholl siblings and Christoph
Probst had met their fate a few months before.
But the story of Alexander Schmorrel does not end with his death, of course. Nor does the story of the White Rose.
In their fifth leaflet, the members of the White Rose had written:
“Only in large-scale cooperation among the nations
of Europe can the ground be prepared for reconstruction… The Germany of the
future must be a federal state… Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the
protection of individual citizens from the arbitrary will of criminal regimes
of violence-- these will be the bases of the New Europe.”
However imperfectly, their dream of a New Europe would be realized in the years after the war by the work of the European Union.
The White Rose was not a religious group per se, of course. But it cannot be doubted that faith in God and a search for a wider, deeper meaning of life were among the primary reasons that these young people acted as bravely and selflessly as they did. Alexander Schmorell was the only one of the group who was Orthodox. Some, like Willi Graf and Franz Müller, were Catholics. Most, like the Scholls and the Hirzels, were Lutherans, of varying degrees of piety. Some professed no particular faith all. But their deep and fundamental faith in the ability of men and women of goodwill and sacrificial spirit to transform the face of the world is obvious and exemplary. Even some of his closest friends thought of Alexander more as a cultural exponent of Orthodoxy than as a deeply religious person. His faith seemed, at first, a way for him to stay connected to his Russian heritage, if nothing more. But his faith would be deepened in the crucible of a heroic and self-sacrificial life. It would become real in the face of danger and then death. In his letters to his family from prison, Schmorrel would write about this deepening faith in the clearest of terms. Facing certain execution, he experienced a deep and transcendent feeling of peace, knowing he served the truth. In his last letter, written just before his execution, he exhorted his father, step-mother, and siblings, "Never forget God!" Alex felt comforted by God’s presence, surrounded by the deeper meaning—a deeper truth which the example of his life now demonstrated clearly to all of us, and all posterity. And for this reason, if no other, Alexander Schmorrel is a saint.
For perhaps true sainthood is not necessarily about
outward holiness and piety, but about how a person lives out the Way of God in the
years and days and hours of the life he or she is called to live on earth. And
it is about the ways in which these blessed men and women remind us—constantly,
persistently, in all their diversity and glory—what God requires of each of us
in our own lives—right now.
St. Alexander Schmorell was glorified as a New Martyr by te Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia in Munich, Germany on February 5, 2012. His home parish lies across the street from the cemetery at Perlacher
Forest where he was buried in 1943, in the shadow of Stadelheim Prison where he
was killed.
No comments:
Post a Comment