Remembering Traute Lafrenz, last surviving member of the White Rose resistance

Traute Lafrenz Page, the last surviving member of the White Rose conspiracy, passed away on March 6 at her home in South Carolina at the age of 103. The White Rose was a small band of courageous students at the University of Munich who wrote leaflets and put slogans on public buildings around Munich and other German cities in 1942-43, calling for the overthrow of Hitler and an end to the war. They may have taken their name from a Spanish novel about a brave woman revolutionary in Cuba under its dictatorship; in any case, it was a fitting image of purity and light in that darkest of times.

I narrowly missed meeting Lafrenz when she visited Berkeley around 1980; to my great regret I was not on campus that day. One of my colleagues shared that she had told them a story that I’ll get to shortly.

She had been the “last surviving member” of the failed conspiracy for a long time. The entire group 𑁋 Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans, Willi Graf, Alexander Schmorrell, their mentor Prof. Kurt Huber and the others 𑁋 were betrayed to the Gestapo and summarily executed in 1943. Lafrenz herself was later imprisoned several times and was probably within days of execution when the prison that held her was liberated by the Allies in April 1945. 

As it happens, the French resistance fighter, Simone Seguin, who took the nom de guerre Nicole, also survived the war and passed away only recently at the age of 97. She fought Hitler with a submachine gun, Traute with words. I dare say, hers was the more powerful weapon. Partisans who took up arms against Hitler, while we admire their courage, were using the weapons Hitler understood — the same kind of force where he had the overwhelming advantage. Gandhi once said, ominously, “The Allies will win, but they will have to be more brutal than Hitler to do so, because they have chosen to use the same weapons.” Traute chose the exact opposite weapon: Truth. Truth was the antidote to the barrage of lies on which the Nazi war machine ran. 

In “The Nightmare Years,“ journalist William Shirer, who experienced the rise of Hitler first hand in Berlin, reported that while the physical violence of the Nazi regime was well known, less obvious were the endless lies that made violence appear acceptable. Absent such a climate of lies, it would be hard to fathom how millions of people were able to accept such horrors. For is not violence itself a lie? A lie, namely, that we are all separate; that one person can benefit from the suffering of another?

One of the flyers passed out by the White Rose said, “And are we not ashamed of the German government now?” This “inconvenient truth,” had it spread more widely, might have brought down the whole Nazi enterprise. No wonder Hitler refused to pardon the White Rose students. 

What does all this mean for us today?

This grievous lie did not originate with the Nazis, and it has not died with them. It lives on even in our culture, and its connection to violence can be far from obvious. A billboard that greeted me on my way down to campus some years ago read, “Our pain is your gain.” They may have been selling real estate, but they were also “selling,” albeit unconsciously, the lie of separateness that enables violence.

In contrast, the courage and sacrifice of the White Rose could potentially, if it were better known, uplift humanity. This, then, should give us pause: What if the White Rose had rallied thousands, or tens of thousands to their cause? Idle to speculate, of course; but it brings up a really practical question: What would it take to create a world where that kind of heroism would be recognized and could prevail over lies and hatred? 

It would be a world with a very different culture from our own; a world where the news media covered very different stories 𑁋 and they’re out there 𑁋 than the drumbeat of mass murders and other forms of violence they describe in detail, with little or no reflection. A world in which weapons would be shunned instead of fetishized because people would be aware that such instruments of death violate their connection to life and all living beings. They would be aware of the power within them to correct injustice without resorting to violence. The name of that power, of course, is nonviolence. Being a human endowment, as Gandhi discovered, it cannot but inspire others.

This brings us to the story Lafrenz shared that day in Berkeley. At one point, before she was finally arrested, the Gestapo came looking for her at the chemistry lab where she worked (like most of the White Rose, she was a medical student). By a stroke of luck, she was out sick that day. Her professor laughingly told the Gestapo, “Lafrenz? She’s definitely not involved.” He knew perfectly well it was a lie, and he was risking his life by telling it. But professors were, and are, so respected in Germany that they took him at his word. As a professor myself, I remember being profoundly moved by his responsibility to protect his student at the risk of his life.

It may be of interest to ask whether Gandhi, that servant of truth, would call his statement a lie. I don’t think so, and I believe he would say the same for the many brave souls who lied to hide people from their persecutors, including at least one high-ranking German officer. Major Julius Schmehling, a senior Gestapo official, knew perfectly well that refugees, including Jewish children, were being hidden in the woods around the French village of Le Chambon, but he never authorized a raid. As he told professor Philip Hallie after the war, “I’m a good Catholic, you know, and I understood these things…” — namely that violence can do nothing against this kind of courage and humanity. 

Likewise, a Catholic priest who similarly “lied” to save Jews, explained, “When the whole society is a lie, some kinds of lies become the truth.” After all, Gandhi himself said, “You must always tell the truth, but never an unkind one.” Because unkindness is untruth, just as violence, as I’ve claimed, is a lie. He would even say that to fight the only way you know how in a situation of such tyranny, as Simone Seguin and so many others did, is the highest courage 𑁋 and courage is the core of nonviolence. The France Tireurs, the partisan unit to which Seguin belonged, hadn’t had any training in nonviolence. Even today, that kind of training is hard to come by — though the evidence piles up that nonviolence can be well-nigh unbeatable when done right for a right cause.

And there’s a third coincidence to Lefrenz’s passing: By a curious turn of fate, lawyer Ben Ferencz (whom I also had an indirect connection with through a mutual friend) also just died at 103. Ferencz was the first Jewish soldier to enter the death camps, and then the first lawyer to secure convictions of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg.

We can take these three “great souls” as allegories for three responses to extreme violence. Traute Lafrenz threw truth in the face of untruth, and lived to tell the tale. (Although she was apparently too modest to tell it very often, as even her children were unaware until they were adults). Simone Seguin fought back with counter violence. Ben Ferencz used law to deter such things from happening again. (There’s also, of course, a little matter of justice; that is open to interpretation, and I won’t comment on it here).

The France Tireurs were not nonviolent. They were using such violence as they could command against much greater violence, and were doing it in a good cause. Gandhi always said that nonviolence was only for those who believed in it as a principle, and particularly if they had some access to violence but renounced its use. Lafrenz and the White Rose were certainly not violent and did not call for violence in their pamphlets; they risked their lives (and most of them lost it) for truth, which is as close to active nonviolence as they could possibly come in their dire straits. Both groups had a courage we can only applaud with deep gratitude. When the Poles mounted a defense against the German onslaught, Gandhi called them “almost nonviolent” because “they knew they would be crushed to atoms.” But why be technical.

When people say 𑁋 as they still do, I think perversely 𑁋 that nonviolence “would never have worked against the Nazis,” they would do well to realize that we really don’t have the tools to evaluate how much these efforts challenged the monstrous untruth of Nazism. The examples of the Rosenstrasse Prison demonstration and the resistance at Le Chambon, among others, suggest that when well done it’s a powerful tool of justice. If one has any faith whatsoever in the orderliness of the universe and the meaning of human life, we must believe that all this heroism cannot have been in vain 𑁋 quite apart from its effect on the heroes who carried it out. The very fact that Traute Lafrenz outlived her nemesis, Hitler, by some 80 years is an example of what Martin Luther King said, which is that the universe bends toward justice and nonviolence is its instrument.

The real lesson is, start sooner and do more. Ban guns and elevate stories like these to give people insights into who they really are.