The White Rose & Hoar Frosts

What I Learnt:

Tyranny doesn’t often appear in designer uniforms and jackboots. It can also take insipid forms like faceless bureaucracies, silent majorities, or shrill intelligentsia. Quite often the only thing these diverse forms of tyranny have in common is an unshakeable belief in a particular dogma or scripture, to the exclusion of everything else.

Most of us have been exposed to tyranny in some form, but perhaps with varying levels of power over us. But luckily very few of us (I hope) have had to deal with the most extreme and malevolent form of tyranny, pure evil. The Nazi regime embodied evil right from its founding principles to its outlook to how the world should be run. It took the greatest coalition of peoples and nations the world has ever seen to put an end to it. It took their industrial might, the intellect of their brightest minds, the organization of their institutions and the material output of their economies to stop this evil.

But it also took the extraordinary bravery and sacrifice of ordinary people.

People like Sophie Scholl, Hans Scholl (her brother), Willi Graf, Kurt Huber, Christopher Probst and Alexander Schmorell. Five students and a professor who had the guts to stand up to the Nazis. They formed a non-violent resistance group called the White Rose that called for active opposition to the regime. And they paid for this with their lives.

The core members of the White Rose were young, from affluent families, university educated and religious. They drew on their own backgrounds – including some at the Eastern Front – to write six pamphlets that they distributed across Germany in an attempt to inspire people to rebel. They certainly would have written more if they hadn’t been betrayed to the Gestapo.

These pamphlets were distributed not just by the Germans, but even by the Allies – leaflets in July 1943. The last surviving member of the White Rose, Traute Lafrenze, died in March 2023. 80 years after so many of her fellow resistance members were executed. What would she think of the world today?

And, do we need more White Rose activities?

What I Like:

Hoar frosts, which turn everything into a ‘winter wonderland’.

A wonderland in which trees and grass look like they have had sugar icing sprinkled on them. Where houses look like they are from old paintings found in Christmas postcards. And where grays and blues dominate the colour spectrum, and yet the world doesn’t seem cold or sterile.