Their leaflets were--they distributed them daringly all over Germany. Now, this is the age, Cindy, before the internet where you can do an instant leaflet to a million trillion people. In those days, you know, they had to secure suspiciously large amounts of paper. They had to get illegally a mimeograph machine, or a printing press. Then they had to print these things up, these very eloquent leaflets. They were not like rigid ideological tracts. They were beautiful, philosophical and poetic and human and passionate leaflets, and they would like get-- Sophie Scholl, for example, would take these leaflets, put them in a knapsack. Then she'd go into a train, put the knapsacks in a different car than hers, so if they were caught, they would not be associated with her. Then she would travel illegally--because you needed certain papers to travel at certain points in Germany in the war, and she'd travel let's say from Munich, where they were based, to Stuttgart. At Stuttgart she would get out and she would mail these leaflets back to Munich, and off to Hamburg, and over to Vienna, so that no one should be able to trace where the White Rose really was based.
The truth is, they were just a handful of students based in Munich. And they outraged the Gestapo and Hitler himself. They couldn't find them. The White Rose, the name, resonated and it seemed like, could it be--so how many could it be? You couldn't tell. But they were cropping up all over the place.
Just to close the core story, on February 18, 1943, after the fall of Stalingrad, which was a turning point that they hoped that they hoped that German morale was low enough to want to finally, you know, respond with conscience to the horrors of Hitler and the war, Sophie and Hans together went into the University of Munich's vast inner atrium. They carried a suitcase with 2,000 leaflets in them, and they went to the highest gallery, and after placing leaflets at different places, they, as students were about to come into the lower courtyard, they shoved leaflets down from the highest gallery so that they came flowing down like snowflakes over the heads of the students who were milling about now in the change of class.
It was the only public protest against Nazism as a whole, Nazism ideologically, ever to be staged in the entire history of the Third Reich.
They tried to merge with the crowd, but they were spotted by a custodian taking the role--you know the SS and the Gestapo had tried to recruit all German citizens to be a kind of auxiliary Gestapo force. So this custodian said, "I've-- You're arrested! I arrest you in the name of the Folken Fuhrer!" And they just went limp. They'd been under such incredible pressure. They knew that the Gestapo was on their trail.
So they were taken off and then subjected to, over a weekend, grilling by the Gestapo. They kept on protesting their innocence, and the noose of the Gestapo kept on pulling tighter and tighter around them, tripping them up with what they said, until they finally had to confess, "Yes, I did it, and if I had another chance I would do it again," call out against Nazism in all its ways, both mass murder of Jews, the murder of Slavic intellectuals, especially the stifling of dissent and voices of freedom among Germans themselves, indoctrinating Germans into becoming immor--people with no sense of conscience, moral turpitude, sheeps just following along, when in fact they knew that they could do something. So that's it in a nutshell.
Cindy Sheehan: And they were executed.
Jud Newborn: Oh, I forgot to say that. Yes.
Cindy Sheehan: And, you know that's a very--I've read about it. I've read about their last moments with their parents. I've read how brave they faced their punishment. And what gets me, and what intrigues me so much about the White Rose Society and the resistance and the Scholls is that people here in the United States--you said sheeple. You know, people here--
Jud Newborn: Did I?
Cindy Sheehan: --in the United States, they--I--did you?
Jud Newborn: I don't know.
Cindy Sheehan: I thought I heard you maybe. [laughs}
Jud Newborn: You mean like sheep and people? [laughs]
Cindy Sheehan: That's what--well, maybe you didn't, but that's what I heard. Because I think that's what people are here in the US. They don't even really know the extent of the crimes of our government, and if they do, very few people are afraid to speak out, but we don't stage, even though there's all kinds of ways to keep us quiet and there's a lot of oppression, we don't stage executions for speaking out like Sophie and Hans did, and that's why I think their story is so important to tell. That they cared more about other people than they cared about themselves.
Jud Newborn: Yes. I agree with you wholeheartedly. They are unique in that way, and today what I do in--I do a dramatic multimedia lecture program. I'm a lecture artist, and although I'm a scholar, I also come from a showbiz family, and what I want is for people to hear the story and be moved by it but also relate it to current events today.
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