White Rose Black Forest(35)
He was from Ulm, a small town she remembered visiting as a child, one hundred miles from Munich. He spoke about his family often. His father was a local politician and business owner, as well as an ardent critic of the Nazi Party, and had been arrested by the Gestapo for seditious thinking. He often mentioned his siblings, especially his little sister Sophie, who was to follow him on to the university the year after. He was a former member of the Hitler Youth. He should have been one of the bright lights in the movement—yet he wore no Nazi pin and spoke about the government evasively, always eager to change the subject. Instead, he told stories he’d heard from his fellow soldiers who’d served in Poland. He talked about civil liberties and freedom with a passion and vehemence that left her in no doubt as to where his allegiances lay. There was a liberty in being with him. He was someone she could discuss art and politics with and who agreed with her that the machinations of the National Socialist regime would ultimately lead to the destruction of the German nation. Some of the other nurses stopped talking to her when it became public knowledge that they were together.
At the end of the summer of 1941, Hans invited her to a gathering of a group of his friends. Ostensibly, he said, they were meeting to discuss philosophy. In reality they met to vent their political frustrations. The gathering took place not at a bar but in the study of a private home. Cups of coffee and glasses of beer lay on the table along with stacks of papers and books. Hans introduced Franka to his friends Willi and Christoph, and she sat around the table with a handful of others. All were students and younger than she, except for the owner of the house, Dr. Schmorell, whose son, Alex, sat beside him. After brief introductions, Hans began to talk.
“We’ve all heard stories from the front. Franka and I see the German victims of this useless war every day in the hospital.” The men glanced over at Franka before fixing back on Hans. “I heard just yesterday from a trusted friend who saw with his own eyes the sight of Poles and Russians being herded into concentration camps on the eastern front, to be executed or worked to death providing slave labor.”
The feeling of escape was overwhelming, almost giddying. Franka hadn’t heard anyone speak like that other than her father. Not even Hans had been this frank with her before. A fire had been set within her.
“Girls are rounded up,” Willi said, “and sent to whorehouses to service their new SS masters against their will. It’s more than the mere subjugation of a people. It’s rape and murder on an industrial scale. It’s horror that mankind has hardly known before, and it’s being perpetrated in all our names.”
Christoph stood up. “The treatment of the people in the occupied territories is an abomination, even more so than the regime’s treatment of its own citizens. The question is, do we act? Can we sit back and watch this happen? It’s all well and good sitting around this table, voicing ideas that, if known outside, would land us all in jail.” He turned to Franka, who felt the spotlight glare on her. “Franka, Hans has told us what the Nazis did to your brother. You’ve suffered terribly at their hands.”
All waited for her to speak, but the words caught in her throat. She’d only told Hans of what had happened to Fredi in stuttering sentences, hadn’t revealed the depth of the pain behind it, and she wasn’t ready to share with these strangers, like-minded though they were.
“I’m not ready to speak about that here and now, but suffice to say that the Nazis have destroyed, or attempted to destroy, all that was once virtuous and true in this wonderful country of ours, and you ask should we do something? My unequivocal answer is yes. It is our moral duty.”
“But what can we do?” Willi said. “If it’s our moral obligation to do something as loyal Germans, then what? The scope of the military is certainly beyond us. We’re not assassins or rabble-rousers. We’re not military strongmen or bullies like the Nazis themselves.”
“We use our strengths,” Hans said. “We channel our ideas onto paper, and we spread the truth as we see it. The Nazis are quick to proclaim their might and the fact that the empire they’re building will last a thousand years, but they’re so afraid of their own people that they suppress with terminal effect any denunciation. They’re terrified of one thing: the truth. If we can spread the truth among the people—about the horrors the Nazis perpetrate in their name—we will win. The Jews left in our cities are marked with a golden star, but where are the others? We know now. We know, but most people don’t or pretend not to. If we can force the German people to face up to the truth, we have a chance of real and sustained change. We must be the conscience of Germany. We must speak for the Jews, the homosexuals, the clergy, and the other enemies of the state who have disappeared. We need to let our people and the rest of the world know that there are Germans who are appalled at the actions of the Nazis and demand that they desist.” The political discourse lasted a few more hours, until, exhausted, Franka went home. The words she’d heard at the meeting buzzed around inside her head for days, drowning out the Nazi propaganda that would have otherwise dominated her daily life.
The steps to turning these words into actions took time. In the Nazi state, the necessities of their mission, such as typewriters, paper, and a duplicating machine, were hard to come by without drawing suspicion. Hans procured a location to house the tools they acquired, and they began to work out an outline for their leaflets. They came up with basic arguments, which were smoothed out and sharpened at their regular meetings.