White Rose

Just finished an interesting and moving read of 'Sophie Scholl and the White Rose', a fictionalised account of a pocket of student resistance to Hitler and his regime in war time Munich.

Perhaps doubly interesting because firstly these students were not that much younger than my own parents, both more or less of the same generation and inhabiting more or less the same sort of world, and secondly because we had student resistance in my own day, albeit of a rather different kind, not least because it was risk free, both in the sense that resistance was unlikely to have consequences and in that one was not going to be drafted to fight in Vietnam from the UK. This resistance was likely to have consequences and did; it must have taken a lot of courage.

The numbers of students involved appears to have been small, but it is nevertheless good to read that there were some. Humanity had not been completely snuffed out by Hitler's regime from the gutters and there were perhaps plenty of people who resented being pushed around by the sort of people who floated to the top of the Nazi party brew. I suppose that all revolutions are going to provide opportunities for such people, after all, that is in part what revolutions are about, but perhaps the Nazi party was unique in the way it promoted the gutter; being good at leading a bunch of thugs at beating people up in the street was what got you promoted, at least in the early days. And a love of marching, marching songs, marches and drums helped too - activities drawing, certainly in part, from the same well as those of our own Boy Scouts.

I don't suppose we will ever now know the balance: how many Germans were actively for Hitler, how many went along for the ride, how many were sullen but passive and how many actively opposed. How many were swept into the brutality of it all? What happened to all those members of parties of the left which fought (and lost) against Hitler's rise? But at least we do know that at least some Germans were actively opposed. And books like this one do give one an accessible feel for the complexity of it all.

One snippet at the end stuck for some reason. It seems that the executioner at the regular prison at Munich - that is to say not the place where the Gestapo did most of its stuff - was in place before Hitler and was still in place after Hitler, apparently living more or less peacefully through it all. The civil service lives on! I was reminded of the sometimes hereditary nature of the occupation in both Britain and France.