White Rose Black Forest(37)
Any refusal would have been futile, and Hans gave in after a few days of fighting. Within weeks, she had become Hans’s equal in spearheading the group. She took over completely while he, Alex, and Willi were sent to the Russian front with their units at the end of that summer.
Franka continued working in the hospital, her secret life as a seditious traitor hidden from all but her closest confidants. Doubt and suspicion overtook her relationships with her colleagues and casual friends. She examined every word they said, every gesture they made. No one could be trusted. And within this isolation, Franka felt the lack of Hans in her life even more. Her regular letters, coded and repressed as they were, referred to their work with the White Rose as “the building project.” There was much to tell him. The writing and publication of the White Rose leaflets had gone into hiatus pending their return, but still the activity continued in the background. A Hamburg branch of the White Rose had been founded to help distribute the leaflets. She closed every letter to Hans with a paragraph only about her, only about them. No matter what else, she wanted him to know she thought of him every hour of every day and was counting down until his safe return. There were some things she knew the Nazis wouldn’t censor in the letters to soldiers at the front.
Her father didn’t return to the cabin that summer. The heartbreak was too much for him. He came to Munich at Christmas, a pale reflection of the man he’d been before the National Socialists had broken him. His job in the factory had been given to a local Nazi half his age. He had been demoted and was considering early retirement. Father and daughter met on the platform of the train station. His face was unshaven, his skin sallow, and he smelled of whiskey. They went to dinner but spoke little, afraid of what the other might say. They went for long walks in the city, passing the rubble of the bombed-out buildings that were becoming more and more common, and past the air-raid shelters that were being constructed all over. They spoke about the old days, the golden times in the cabin, and her mother. That was all. They barely mentioned Fredi’s name. It would have been too painful. It had already drained so much from them. They had no more left to give.
She left her father at the train station late at night on that Sunday in January. The tears came again as she hugged him.
“Will you be all right?” she asked as she drew back.
“Of course,” he said, but his eyes spoke a different truth.
“Would you consider moving here?”
“No, thank you. I’ll stay in Freiburg, where my work is, where your mother and brother are. I still visit her grave most days. I only wish I had somewhere to go to visit him. We’ll never know what those animals did with his body.”
Her father broke down on the platform, the tears gushing down his face. She offered to stay with him, to come back to Freiburg for a while, asked again if he’d stay, but he refused. They sat on a bench, waiting for the train, holding one another until the train finally arrived and she said goodbye.
When Hans came home from the Russian front, he was more determined than ever to spread the ideas of the White Rose. In his time as a medic on the front he had witnessed how the German soldiers had been stripped of any chivalry, mercy, or humanity. The career army officers who had once followed a strict code of honor now fully subscribed to the Nazi racial dogma that drove the Wehrmacht and SS forces alike. The war on the eastern front was sold as a defensive crusade against communism, but, Hans told her, it was actually a ploy to provide the living space that Hitler had promised the German people. The real crusade was against the Jews. Hans had spoken to dozens of soldiers who had witnessed the mass murder of thousands of Jewish civilians, lined up along the edge of mass pits that would become their graves. He was changed by what he’d seen. Franka held him as he lay shaking in bed on the first night he returned.
The newspapers were full of stories of heroic victories against the communist hordes on the eastern front. The Russians were portrayed in caricature as beasts, dismissed as uneducated subhumans unworthy of existence. Only the Jews were a lower form of life. Only they were more beastly, more inferior to the Russians, whom the dashing Aryan soldiers would vanquish with ease. The Battle of Stalingrad changed perceptions that the Nazis were invincible. The members of the White Rose took careful note. Hitler refused to give the order to let his men retreat, condemning them to death in a frozen city over a thousand miles from home. The German Sixth Army was wiped out. The official reports held that the hundreds of thousands who died were heroes, and stated that their sacrifice would lead the Reich on to greater victories to come. The members of the White Rose knew better. They knew that Nazi victory was no longer inevitable and that for the first time, Germany was looking defeat square in her cold, gray eyes. Hitler had tasted his first major loss. The White Rose wasn’t going to pass up such an opportunity.
Stories of the regime cracking down on any defiance, no matter how inconsequential, littered the newspapers. A man was put to death for stating that Hitler should be murdered for allowing so many German soldiers to die. The Gestapo beheaded a waiter for making fun of the führer and executed a businessman for daring to state out loud that the war was going badly for Germany. In Berlin, fifty people were executed for transmitting sensitive information to the Russians in what became known as the Red Orchestra affair. The men involved were not executed by guillotine—the official method of the Nazi executioners. They were hung on meat hooks and left to die in agony. The women, who were sentenced by the court to life in prison, were executed by guillotine on Hitler’s personal orders.