Posted on 02/22/2015 6:51:34 AM PST by Kaslin
The past offers us many lessons. And cause for alarm. And inspiration, too.
Seventy-two years ago today, three young Germans — 21-year-old Sophie Scholl, her older brother by three years, Hans, and their friend 24-year-old Christoph Probst — were put to death by the Nazis. They were decapitated — guillotined — within hours of being found guilty in a sham trial conducted by “Raving Roland,” a typical Nazi lunatic.
Their crime? Standing up against the most evil crime imaginable.
The charge was treason — treason committed courageously against the Third Reich.
The Scholls had a history of standing up to the Nazis. Hans was arrested in 1937 for involvement in the German Youth Movement, an unapproved group. In 1942, Hans and Sophie’s father, Robert, the former mayor of Forchtenberg, was imprisoned for several months for telling his secretary, “This Hitler is God’s scourge on mankind.”
So, perhaps it was no surprise that the Scholls helped organize a group known as The White Rose, comprised mainly of students at the University of Munich. These young people saw Hitler and the Nazis as pure, unadulterated evil — as a threat to all that is good and true.
They were convinced that most Germans felt the same way. But they knew most were too afraid to speak up, to stand up, to resist the evil in front of them. After all, the price would almost assuredly be death, and life is mighty dear.
The White Rose dissidents found the courage to put the “lovely intangibles” of justice and decency and truth ahead of safety and life itself. In addition to painting “Down with Hitler” graffiti on buildings in Munich, the group produced six pamphlets from June 1942 until February 1943 urging Germans to rise up against Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. The leaflets were distributed to students at the University, where they caused quite a stir, as well as throughout Germany — some even made it to German-occupied countries.
The White Rose leaflets and anti-Nazi graffiti unnerved the Gestapo, which feared this brazen public rebuke to their authority might inspire others to rise up in opposition. In a state otherwise tormented into silence, the totalitarians were frustrated in their inability to find and crush this resistance.
Then, on February 18, 1943, Hans and Sophie Scholl were caught distributing leaflets at the University. They were promptly arrested. Hans carried a paper on him that implicated Christoph Probst, a married medical student and father of three children, who was quickly arrested as well.
Afraid of public sympathy for these young people, the Nazi state moved quickly, putting the three on trial just four days later, on February 22. Roland Freisler, chief justice of the People’s Court of the Greater German Reich, came in to preside at the show trial. He lambasted and screamed at the three as traitors. At one point, the judge asked how the three could have been brought up in German society and yet turn against it. Sophie stoically responded, “Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just don’t dare to express themselves as we did.”
The judge sentenced all three to death. Hours later, after the Scholls’ parents had visited Hans and Sophie at Stadelheim prison, and before Christoph Probst’s wife, who was in the hospital having their third child, could see her husband one last time, the three were taken to the guillotine.
“Es lebe die Freiheit!” proved to be Hans’s last words: Long live freedom!
The Scholls and Probst were not the last of The White Rose activists to die for speaking out. Co-conspirators Alexander Schmorell and Willi Graf were put to death later in 1943, as was University of Munich Professor Kurt Huber, who had helped the students. Others involved in the effort were sent to prison.
Professor Huber, less sure than his young friends (many of whom had witnessed the Eastern Front) that Germany would lose the war, said at his trial, “We do not want to fritter away our short lives in chains, even if they are golden chains of prosperity and power.”
In remembering the tragic deaths of the White Rose fellowship, let’s take inspiration from their defiance of extravagant evil. The students’ professor was right: we don’t want to fritter away our short lives in chains. We must not sit idly by while more chains are placed upon us.
Even in America, vigilance is required to keep freedom alive. And resistance sometimes costs us more than a few bucks donated to a good cause. Sometimes it costs us reputation, too. We may receive no small amount of derision, even get called silly names, like “wingnuts” and “moonbats” and “wacko birds.”
And it is not as if the government doesn’t have the power to destroy us. The IRS can be set at us. (And has been.) The NSA and the CIA and the FBI and Homeland Security can spy on our emails and Skype conversations. (And undoubtedly has.) In the past, our government has framed “rabble rousers” for speaking up against it. Congress can destroy almost any business in the land with an unread addendum to almost any bill.
The bigger the government gets, the harder it is to control. And the more it can control us all.
The White Rose resistance should inspire us to bear a little more risk in the cause of civilization, justice, freedom.
I remember watching a movie about this and again, being livid that evil prevailed.
They were convinced that most Germans felt the same way. But they knew most were too afraid to speak up, to stand up, to resist the evil in front of them. After all, the price would almost assuredly be death, and life is mighty dear.
Where is today's USA equivalent of the White Rose in our universities? In the halls of Congress? In the media? Seems like only the internet and talk radio come close.
OK, who do we shoot first? Or is it better for them to have "accidents", or just disappear? < /sarc >
Precisely, the top two on the government list There Ought to be a Law.
Kudos to them for their bravery. But from what I've read, I'd say that rather than most, the numbers probably were closer to 50-50.
In any case, there was no chance that a popular uprising could succeed, even if such a movement had been supported by 80% of the people. The methods used by the SS and the Gestapo to suppress dissent were simply too brutal, too ruthless and too effective.
“Radical right-wing extremists”
“Evangelical Christian extreme-right”
“Clinging to God and guns”
“America was never a Christian nation; it was an Islamic one”
“The Constitution is an old, worn-out document that should be discarded”
“We need to spread the wealth”
“This is an Islamic nation”
“Tea Party terrorists”
“Right-wing terrorists”
“I will stand against the enemies of islam”
Enemies of the State
Enemies of islam
Enemies of the people
arrests
execution by firing squad
beheadings
children removed from parents
sick, elderly, disabled euthanized
If the military does not rise up (because Congress will not), the last four on the list are a certainty to occur. We the People, we know that the Lord God told us to “Fear not”. It wasn’t a request from Him, but a command. “Perfect love casts out all fear”: God is love, perfect love. “Fear not those that can kill the body, but that one (satan) that can destroy both body and soul in Hell.”
“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, so whosoever shall believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
In order for us to be truly ready for the ultimate fight, we must put our entire faith in the Lord Jesus Christ—to guide us, to strengthen us, to feed us through His Word, and be ready to give an account for our faith in Him. Should that ultimate sacrifice come upon any of us, let us be true followers in Christ when we take up arms against the enemy, so on both fronts—temporal and eternal—we will truly be ready.
“Even so, come Lord Jesus!”
Quite often evil prevails in the short term. That’s why the tree of liberty must be watered with blood and not words, deed or actions. There must be sacrifice in order for a just and free society to prevail. The longer it is delayed the larder the sacrifice required. We have delayed a very long time. There are very few people left that even use the word liberty anymore and even less who know what it means. The pendulum must swing back to our roots. I know it’s going to get much darker before the next dawn.
Hans and Sophie Schall and friend.
This was their philosophy professor at the University of Munich, I think he was also executed.
He is the spitting image of William F. Buckley.
As brave as the White arose resistance was, as good and correct it was, inspiring it is not.
It certainly did not work.
It should show us that we must never encourage dictatorships. Right now, the left in the country defend Obama far too much. He is approaching dictator status. I know they might politically agree with him, but in reality these Americans don’t understand socialism and how perilous it is to top down overarching government control. They just think political correctness can be perfectly achieved to leave no one out and help everybody.
That is bull. The only smart leftists today are the ones disillusioned with Obama’s abuse of power. They know, that they would not want their political enemies to have this much, so they understand that it is wrong for a leftist President to take thst much power for himself.
The Media is as bad as Nazi propaganda and sadly, our uninformed, busy fellow Americans believe what they see and hear there. They just don’t understand that other than the films at 11 of car chases and crashes, nothing else on their news can be accepted as facts. And what their news show chooses to omit is sometimes jaw droppingly more important to them than what the media chooses to talk about.
Brutal,Ruthless and Effective,,,
Ultimately,
FAIL!
Actually popular revolution only take about 10% of the population. Most of the “people” are apathetic, old, government employees or just stupid.
Most of the population is unarmed.
Much of the population is unware.
But...show one video of the powers that be shooting into a peaceful crowd and you will change the world.
It worked in 1775 and 1970.
No, getting someone to stand in that crowd is the trick.
If you really want to know, read this:
WHAT I SAW AT THE COUP (FICTION)
Western Rifle Shooters ^ | 6/24/2013 | Matt Bracken/ Travis McGee
Posted on 6/24/2013, 5:34:23 PM by IbJensen http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3035114/posts
The Tea Party IS White Rose. That is why the Klown hates it so much!
Freisler was killed by Allied bombs during a bombing raid in February of 1945 in his own courtroom as he was trying to retrieve courtroom files. Supposedly when his body was taken to the hospital one of the workers declared it was God's verdict. None of the other hospital workers said anything so hated was Freisler by many Germans.
>> show one video of the powers that be shooting into a peaceful crowd and you will change the world <<
I wish it could be so, but nope, things don’t work out that way always, only sometimes. Granted that it happened in Romania in 1989, and it happened a few years ago during the “Arab Spring” in Tunisia and Egypt. But popular uprisings failed to topple Gaddafi in Libya or Assad in Syria. And you seem to have forgotten about the Tian An Men massacre in 1989, and about the similar massacre a few years later in Burma. Plenty of “video” about those incidents, yet the repressive regimes didn’t fall.
As I read history, the Nazi regime was so ruthless and savage toward its own people, thanks to the Gestapo and the SS, that overwhelming external force was the only possible means to end the Third Reich.
>> Brutal,Ruthless and Effective,,,
>> Ultimately,
>> FAIL!
Sorry, but I gotta disagree with what I infer to be your opinion. The brutality and ruthlessness of the Nazis were not what caused them ultimately to lose the war.
No, I submit that there was never a “failure” of the Third Reich. Rather, the regime was CRUSHED by the combined impact of America’s industrial might on the western front and Russia’s inexhaustible supply of manpower on the eastern front. Absent those twinned pincers, west and east, the Third Reich might still be with us today.
(A very good recent book about the Nazi regime’s distressingly effective control over the German people is “The End” by Ian Kershaw.)
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