I finally saw Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, the story of the capture and execution of the members of The White Rose movement in Nazi Germany. The White Rose was a small nonviolent resistance group of students (and their philosophy professor), formed during WWII, who famously printed anti-Hitler leaflets in an effort to inspire an anti-Nazi uprising. The film is meant to be an accurate(ish) historical depiction based on interviews with survivors and transcripts that were only discovered after 1990.
The film is excellent, and, for the most part, steers clear of caricatured depictions of the Nazis as irrational demons. I found the most powerful scenes to be those in which Sophie Scholl faces repeated sessions of intense interrogation at the hands of a Nazi investigator, at one point even engaging in a kind of intellectual argument over the moral justifications for Hitler’s total war and German purification. It’s an important scene because it humanizes her captors (a far cry from the Hollywood characterization of Nazi Germany as a society of brainwashed Satans) by presenting the investigator’s rationalized, albeit repugnant, justifications for aggressive militarism versus Sophie’s idealistic and compassionate moralism. It reminds us that similar logic is still being used today to rally support for abusive acts of state-sponsored violence, including the all-too-familiar persecution of those dissenting against the status quo of patriotic nationalism. The White Rose warns us:
“The German people slumber on in their dull, stupid sleep and encourage these fascist criminals … Each man wants to be exonerated of a guilt of this kind, each one continues on his way with the most placid, the calmest conscience. But he cannot be exonerated; he is guilty, guilty, guilty!”
The question today is, are we guilty too? How will history judge the American people?
Learn more about The White Rose and their nonviolent resistance. Also, here’s a relatively recent anti-war action, inspired by The White Rose, in which nine activists were arrested.
i’ve never seen the film, but will definitely see it some time.
btw, thank you for your excellent responses to franklin in ed’s blog. i was going to write something but then i saw your posts and thought, wow… probably nothing much i can add.
I just saw this last night, boy was I impressed. The end was so hard to watch I almost had to turn away.
did you seriously compare the horrors of nazi germany to what is going on in the US?
thats a pretty outrageous and offensive question/thought. (and im not even american)
annyways, the movie was great. however i couldnt stop thinking about, while she was certainly a hero and courageous for standing up against nazism… the movie makes us feel like she was doing something amazing that none of us could ever do… when in reality hundreds of thousands of allied troops were volunteering to go fight in the war. people were lying about age and health conditions so they could get over there and help.
im not trying to take away from what she did, it was amazing… but to the question about whether or not most people would stand up - they did.