Posts Tagged ‘Christian Resistance to Hitler’
Ten Mounted Photographs to Honor Sophie Scholl’s 100 Birthday
Charlestown, Rhode Island, May 5, 2021. Starting on May 9, BoP Gallery at 289 Narrow Lane will be showing ten historic photographs illustrating the heroic lives of Munich’s White Rose resistance group. Sophie Scholl, German teacher and student (1921-1943), was a principal figure in a cell that would grow beyond 23 members at the…
Read MoreSeventy-Five Years Ago Today
Seventy-five years ago today Sophie Scholl sketched “FREEDOM” on the backside of her conviction for “treason.” F R E E D O M. She would die hours later, forgiving her executioners as the passageway to eternal life. (See: Pastor Alt’s eyewitness testimony to her last Communion.) If one wants to know this great hero of…
Read MoreChristmas Greeting from Stalingrad
Translated here into English for the first time with permission of S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt. To Sophie Scholl from Fritz Hartnagel, December 1942. Yesterday, my dear Sophie, as the Russians fired on our position with heavy artillery and the sirens went berserk, a little bird suddenly sat at the edge of our trench and peeped…
Read MoreWhat we said and thought, so did you, only we were capable of saying it
What we said and thought, so did you, only we were capable of saying it -Sophie Scholl (1921-1943) speaking to the crowd of onlookers during her show trial where she was convicted of treason. Seventy-four years ago on February 22, Sophie Scholl was sentenced to death by the notoriously delusional President of the Peoples’ Court,…
Read MoreSophie Scholl’s “Library” 1937-1943
Sophie Scholl gave us a very thorough “intellectual history,” often quoting from and mentioning the books she read in her letters and diaries. Sophie decided to engage in “inner emigration” by retreating into literature as the Nazi hold on society grew more restrictive. The Reich Cultural Directorate had declared many of Sophie’s books “degenerate or subversive.” She read…
Read MoreHans Scholl (1918-1943)
EXCERPTED FROM “WITH YOU THERE IS LIGHT”: Hans and Sophie’s mother knew what to do. She hurried down the hallway into her son’s room. The voices in the living room grew louder and louder. She grabbed a basket and started tossing books into it. Thomas Mann. Heinrich Heine. George Bernard Shaw. Jack London. Ernest Hemingway.…
Read MoreSophie Scholl Defiantly Enjoyed Art Labeled “Entartete Kunst” (Morally Degenerate)
Historical Context: Summer, 1937. There was no stopping “American Swing” from making its way across the ocean. “Negermusik” was the Nazis’ pejorative term for Jazz and Swing. In July at the newly built “House of German Art,” the Nazi Minister of Culture infamously put on his first exhibit of “degenerate” paintings. Many of these now…
Read MoreSophie Scholl, Inspired and Motivated by Christian Faith
Historical Context: Throughout her young adulthood, political activist Sophie Scholl delved deeply into Christian faith. As the Nazi Party dismantled Christianity and arrested and interned religious leaders, Sophie grew up in a Nazi run school and in the girls’ Hitler Youth. Her formal education revolved around indoctrination and propaganda. With the help of her family, Scholl began to…
Read MoreLove Blooms Among the Ruins in Hohenstaufen
Historical Context: January, 1939. The city of Ulm is a part of Baden-Wuerttemberg, a German province that was the seat of the Hohenzollern dynasty located in the Swabian Alps. Hitler makes a speech at the Reichstag that in the event of war, it would mean the “annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” Ulm’s local…
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