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The Anti-Nazi White Rose's Hidden Gay Co-founder
The White Rose's Sophie Scholl (center) bids farewell to her brother Hans (left) and friend Christoph Probst (right) before their departure for the Eastern Front in July 1942. Credit: George Wittenstein
Hans Scholl (colorized photo)
Dr. Jud Newborn
With the rise of far-right governments in this country and worldwide hurtling toward a latter-day racist and anti-queer fascism, it’s all the more urgent to study important forms of anti-fascism from the past. One such example is from Nazi Germany, the clandestine resistance group called The White Rose.
We spend the hour with Dr. Jud Newborn, an anthropologist who has analyzed all forms of Nazism and the Holocaust, and is also one of the world’s foremost historians of the White Rose. He has particularly focused on their most celebrated members, siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl, and helped bring to light that Hans was a gay man prosecuted for homosexuality years before he helped form the White Rose. Here are some excerpts from his writing:
The White Rose’s core consisted of six University of Munich students and a philosophy professor. All but one were executed in 1943 by guillotine within days of their arrest. At the time, Sophie was 21 and Hans was 24. A loose network of supporters and sympathetic acquaintances aided in distributing leaflets and providing money to purchase supplies.
Today, Hans and Sophie Scholl are celebrated as pivotal members of the White Rose. They joined the activist network after becoming disillusioned with the Hitler Youth, in which they were both leaders as teenagers. Castigating the German middle class for abandoning its Christian values and leadership roles, the White Rose set out to rouse the masses from their “slumber” and encourage effective passive resistance against the fascist regime.
A quote from a White Rose leaflet: “Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized nation as allowing itself to be ‘governed’ without opposition by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct.”
By all accounts, the White Rose activists were among the first within Germany to speak out widely against the mass murder of Jews, in their second leaflet in June 1942. Their legendary distribution of flyers at the University of Munich appears to have been the only fundamentally political public protest against Nazism to be staged by Germans during the 12 years of Adolf Hitler’s rule. The last words of the group’s fourth leaflet became its legacy: “We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace!” The Allies later dropped these leaflets all over the Third Reich.
Eighty years after their executions, the leaders of the White Rose are counted among the greatest Germans of all time. Numerous schools, streets and plazas are named for them, and monuments honoring their activism appear throughout the country. They have been the subject of plays, documentaries, feature films, and even two operas.
Yet two mysteries about the White Rose long bedeviled laypeople and scholars alike:
What motivated the 1937 transformation of the teenaged Hans and Sophie from fanatical acolytes of Nazism to passionate anti-Nazis?
Why did Hans and his friends choose the “White Rose” as the name associated with their resistance organization?
The answers to these two questions appear to be interwoven. According to previously ignored Gestapo interrogation transcripts, along with my own subsequent research – writes Dr. Jud Newborn – anti-gay Nazi policies played a pivotal role in the radicalization of the Scholl siblings, helping to turn them into exemplars of civil courage.
Our guest is Dr. Jud Newborn, a pioneer in the creation of modern Holocaust museums, who served as Founding Historian of New York's Museum of Jewish Heritage. Dr, Newborn is an acclaimed multimedia storyteller, lecturer, author and two-time Emmy Award winner, who has presented his programs coast-to-coast, at the United Nations, and from Canada to Cape Town. He is co-author of the now classic book, Sophie Scholl and the White Rose, which has been reprinted repeatedly, most recently in the updated 80th anniversary edition of 2023, and has been translated into many languages. He has also written for The New York Times, Jerusalem Post and Smithsonian Magazine among other leading publications. He is also a longtime member of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association or NLGJA. Dr. Newborn was honored in 2018 with the prestigious Spirit of Anne Frank Human Writes Award. Jud Newborn today is the Producer of Special Guest Programs for Long Island's Cinema Arts Centre, which for years has been a solid supporter of WBAI. Click here to see the video of the interview.
Hitler Youth Leaders. Why Did They Decide to Stand Up to the Nazis?
Dr. Jud Newborn performs five dramatic, richly multimedia storytelling programs worldwide, including his most popular "The White Rose Resistance - and Heroes Today in the Fight for Democracy and Human Rights.” He is also co-producing his second Holocaust-themed animated film, “Hidden Light,” with an award-winning team.
Stay tuned to Out-FM in a few weeks for the final piece of Pauline’s and our interview with Jud Newton about the overall Nazi policy toward lesbians and gay men, as well as other inspirational examples of queer resisters to fascism through Europe during World War II. Join our e-newsletter for the date of that segment - sign up at outfm.org. You may also want to check out John Riley’s two-part 2022 Out-FM interview with Professor Laurie Marhoefer of the University of Washington about her book, Sex and Weimar Germany: Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis. To hear that, click here for Part 1 and here for Part 2.
To add a note of context to the White Rose interview: While the accomplishments of the small White Rose group in Munich were remarkable, it should also be remembered that there were several other resistance groups inside Nazi Germany during this period, including within the Jewish community. And even after the regime largely wiped them out in the mid 1930s, the Social Democratic and Communist Parties maintained underground resistance movements.
ANNOUNCEMENT: Out-FM’s Pauline Park will be part of the panel during WBAI’s Special Live Coverage of the Inauguration of NYC Mayor Mamdani – that’s this Thursday, January 1st from 11 am to 3 pm.
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About Out-FM
Out-FM is a weekly progressive, intersectional queer show by and for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, two-spirit, non-binary, gender non-conforming, intersex, queer, and questioning communities. Our program originates from listener-sponsored, noncommercial WBAI/Pacifica Radio in New York, 99.5 FM and wbai.org. Our programs are archived at outfm.org. You can also follow us on Facebook, X, and Instagram.
