Posted on 09/06/2020 6:18:02 AM PDT by CheshireTheCat
On February 22, 1943, Sophie Magdalena Scholl, former student of philosophy and biology at the University of Munich in Germany, was executed by guillotine for her role in the White Rose nonviolent Nazi resistance group. Scholl was born just 21 years earlier and spent a carefree childhood in Ludwigsburg and later, in Ulm. Although she initially joined Bund Deutscher Mädel at age 12 (as required), she quickly grew disenchanted with the group and began to identify strongly with the dissenting political views of some of her teachers, family, and friends....
(Excerpt) Read more at executedtoday.com ...
I don't think we should wait until February 2021 comes around to read about her.
I've read too many posts this morning by people relating the stupid mushy-brained thinking on the part of people they know who are under 30.
Please take a moment to read and reflect on this. The film discussed is excellent, although it is in German (with subtitles). I don't know where it is available in terms of Netflix and whatnot. I saw it when it was at a film festival.
If you know of a college student who is shut in the dorms due to Covid restrictions, consider sending him or her this film, if such a thing is possible.
The film may inspire them to recognize the tyranny we are facing and what one lone person can do about it.
I believe that Germany never did use a guillotine. They used an axe man and the victim was placed on his back.
There was also a German film made about Sophie in the late 80’s or early 90’s that was not bad, but the one made fifteen years later is better because in the intervening years, after the fall of the Soviet Bloc, a lot of the court records about her became available to the second filmmaker.
It is an excellent movie. The guy who played Freisler really nailed it.
“How should an individual act under a dictatorship? What obligations, or indeed, power, did a group of half a dozen students have in the face of such stifling repression?”
A great scene....the interrogater was also very well done.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqnD_165Ow4
If you run a ping list, please consider pinging this to people if you can make a case for this post to be somewhat related to the topic of your ping list (or even if you can’t relate but feel this is important enough to go off topic).
Thank you for your support on this post and this link.
I salute their courage....but damn. There was never any chance distributing a few leaflets was going to do anything but get them killed. The Germans - as brilliant as they often are in science, philosophy, music, etc - have this streak of naive idealism that often makes them do incredibly stupid things.
There were a few people they executed in the manner you describe because they were especially upset with them and wanted to make the experience particularly horrifying, but the vast majority of beheadings took place by guillotine.
More people were executed in Germany by guillotine in total than were executed in France by guillotine during the French Revolution. The East Germans continued to use it.
If you watched the end of the movie, they revealed that the Allies dropped thousands of those very same leaflets all over Germany.
In the case of the people executed for the attempted assassination of Hitler, they used piano wire to hang them.
I think I have that DVD
The courtroom scene in which her brother tells the judge that against England, Russia, and the United States, Germany could not win the war, only prolong it, is quite dramatic. He says further, that everyone in the room knew this.
On an historical note, Bavaria was where much of Hitler's opposition was located; it was apparently the reason he remained in Berlin against the advice of those who were telling him to flee to the Berchtesgarden in the Bavarian Alps. (He didn't trust the locals in that region.)
“The film may inspire them to recognize the tyranny we are facing and what one lone person can do about it.”
Okay, technically, it was not one lone person but Sophie, her brother, and some of their friends, but you get the idea.
Sophie, as the lone woman in the group, stands in stark contrast to the privileged young white women at the BLM and Antifa protests.
I also don't doubt he did so to be sure his orders had been complied with.
There was a very fine movie about Sophie Scholl and the White Rose movement called “Die letzten Tage”, or, in English, “The Final Days.” It came out in 2005.
Here is a part of the White Rose leaflet ” Fellow Fighters in the Resistance!” that has troubling similarity to today in our country. What is most alarming of all is that it seems NONE of our youth have arisen as freedom fighters like the White Rose. I know this is not true, but youth resistance to antifa, BLM, and the hundreds of communist groups operating In the USA seems nonexistent and almost all youth are in lockstep with tyranny and dictatorship.
For us there is but one slogan: fight against the party! Get out of the party organization, which are used to keep our mouths sealed and hold us in political bondage! Get out of the lecture rooms of the SS corporals and sergeants and the party bootlickers! We want genuine learning and real freedom of opinion. No threat can terrorize us, not even the shutting down of the institutions of higher learning. This is the struggle of each and every one of us for our future, our freedom, and our honor under a regime conscious of its moral responsibility.I have had the movie Sophie Scholl – The Final Days in my Netflix DVD Queue for a long time (it was at #143). I just moved it to the top because of how relevant it is today.Freedom and honor! For ten long years Hitler and his coadjutor have manhandled, squeezed, twisted, and debased these two splendid German words to the point of nausea, as only dilettantes can, casting the highest values of a nation before swine. They have sufficiently demonstrated in the ten years of destruction of all material and intellectual freedom, of all moral substance among the German people, what they understand by freedom and honor. The frightful bloodbath has opened the eyes of even the stupidest German - it is a slaughter which they arranged in the name of "freedom and honor of the German nation" throughout Europe, and which they daily start anew. The name of Germany is dishonored for all time if German youth does not finally rise, take revenge, and atone, smash its tormentors, and set up a new Europe of the spirit. Students! The German people look to us. As in 1813 the people expected us to shake off the Napoleonic yoke, so in 1943 they look to us to break the National Socialist terror through the power of the spirit. Beresina and Stalingrad are burning in the East. The dead of Stalingrad implore us to take action. "Up, up, my people, let smoke and flame be our sign!"
Our people stand ready to rebel against the Nationals Socialist enslavement of Europe in a fervent new breakthrough of freedom and honor.
Thanks again for posting this.
You are very welcome. Thank you for your support on my post and for posting the flyer excerpt.
I had been thinking about posting it for a while and was going to post it tomorrow, but some other posts by people on other threads this morning inspired me to do it today.
I’m going to see if my friend who has Netlfix is interested in looking for it and will invite me over to watch it. It’s been a while since I last saw it.
“Bavaria was where much of Hitler’s opposition was located”
Well....after all, as I am sure every student of history is aware, Hitler was not German or Bavarian. He was from Vienna Austria, the son of an Austrian Civil Servant (and Beekeeper!) Bavarians might resent that.
Hitler was a failed experiment in diversity and what you get when you have a non citizen elected to your highest office!
Imagine how Americans would all feel if a Kenyan or Indonesian was elected to the Presidency or Vice Presidency! (Or a Jamaican or Indian or Canadian or whatever she is this week!)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.