He was from Ulm, a small town she remembered visiting as a child, one hundred miles from Munich. He spoke about his family often. His father was a local politician and business owner, as well as an ardent critic of the Nazi Party, and had been arrested by the Gestapo for seditious thinking. He often mentioned his siblings, especially his little sister Sophie, who was to follow him on to the university the year after. He was a former member of the Hitler Youth. He should have been one of the bright lights in the movement—yet he wore no Nazi pin and spoke about the government evasively, always eager to change the subject. Instead, he told stories he’d heard from his fellow soldiers who’d served in Poland. He talked about civil liberties and freedom with a passion and vehemence that left her in no doubt as to where his allegiances lay. There was a liberty in being with him. He was someone she could discuss art and politics with and who agreed with her that the machinations of the National Socialist regime would ultimately lead to the destruction of the German nation. Some of the other nurses stopped talking to her when it became public knowledge that they were together.
At the end of the summer of 1941, Hans invited her to a gathering of a group of his friends. Ostensibly, he said, they were meeting to discuss philosophy. In reality they met to vent their political frustrations. The gathering took place not at a bar but in the study of a private home. Cups of coffee and glasses of beer lay on the table along with stacks of papers and books. Hans introduced Franka to his friends Willi and Christoph, and she sat around the table with a handful of others. All were students and younger than she, except for the owner of the house, Dr. Schmorell, whose son, Alex, sat beside him. After brief introductions, Hans began to talk.
“We’ve all heard stories from the front. Franka and I see the German victims of this useless war every day in the hospital.” The men glanced over at Franka before fixing back on Hans. “I heard just yesterday from a trusted friend who saw with his own eyes the sight of Poles and Russians being herded into concentration camps on the eastern front, to be executed or worked to death providing slave labor.”
The feeling of escape was overwhelming, almost giddying. Franka hadn’t heard anyone speak like that other than her father. Not even Hans had been this frank with her before. A fire had been set within her.
“Girls are rounded up,” Willi said, “and sent to whorehouses to service their new SS masters against their will. It’s more than the mere subjugation of a people. It’s rape and murder on an industrial scale. It’s horror that mankind has hardly known before, and it’s being perpetrated in all our names.”
Christoph stood up. “The treatment of the people in the occupied territories is an abomination, even more so than the regime’s treatment of its own citizens. The question is, do we act? Can we sit back and watch this happen? It’s all well and good sitting around this table, voicing ideas that, if known outside, would land us all in jail.” He turned to Franka, who felt the spotlight glare on her. “Franka, Hans has told us what the Nazis did to your brother. You’ve suffered terribly at their hands.”
All waited for her to speak, but the words caught in her throat. She’d only told Hans of what had happened to Fredi in stuttering sentences, hadn’t revealed the depth of the pain behind it, and she wasn’t ready to share with these strangers, like-minded though they were.
“I’m not ready to speak about that here and now, but suffice to say that the Nazis have destroyed, or attempted to destroy, all that was once virtuous and true in this wonderful country of ours, and you ask should we do something? My unequivocal answer is yes. It is our moral duty.”
“But what can we do?” Willi said. “If it’s our moral obligation to do something as loyal Germans, then what? The scope of the military is certainly beyond us. We’re not assassins or rabble-rousers. We’re not military strongmen or bullies like the Nazis themselves.”
“We use our strengths,” Hans said. “We channel our ideas onto paper, and we spread the truth as we see it. The Nazis are quick to proclaim their might and the fact that the empire they’re building will last a thousand years, but they’re so afraid of their own people that they suppress with terminal effect any denunciation. They’re terrified of one thing: the truth. If we can spread the truth among the people—about the horrors the Nazis perpetrate in their name—we will win. The Jews left in our cities are marked with a golden star, but where are the others? We know now. We know, but most people don’t or pretend not to. If we can force the German people to face up to the truth, we have a chance of real and sustained change. We must be the conscience of Germany. We must speak for the Jews, the homosexuals, the clergy, and the other enemies of the state who have disappeared. We need to let our people and the rest of the world know that there are Germans who are appalled at the actions of the Nazis and demand that they desist.” The political discourse lasted a few more hours, until, exhausted, Franka went home. The words she’d heard at the meeting buzzed around inside her head for days, drowning out the Nazi propaganda that would have otherwise dominated her daily life.
The steps to turning these words into actions took time. In the Nazi state, the necessities of their mission, such as typewriters, paper, and a duplicating machine, were hard to come by without drawing suspicion. Hans procured a location to house the tools they acquired, and they began to work out an outline for their leaflets. They came up with basic arguments, which were smoothed out and sharpened at their regular meetings.
They called themselves the White Rose, and their first mail drop was scheduled for a few months later, for that summer of 1942. There were no set rules or regulations for meetings or membership of the White Rose. No members list was formalized, and no one was sworn to secrecy or forced to place their hand on a Bible as they joined. It was understood that Hans was the driver of the organization and, as such, made the decisions about what direction the group was going. New members joined, always vetted by the existing ones, more on feeling than anything else. A Gestapo mole would mean arrest and prison, or worse, for all of them. The yoke of the Nazi state hung heavy on them, yet they laughed and had fun. They were still young.
None of the activities of the White Rose focused on the university, where most of them were enrolled. The group was an island in an ocean of Nazi loyalists, and they refused to take part in the university’s activities, all of which were sponsored or approved by the National Socialists.
Franka and Hans spent all their free time together now. There was more to their lives, more to their relationship than the politics of the White Rose. There was still time to be young and in love even as Germany sank deeper into the abyss.
In April 1942, weeks before the first mail drop, Franka and Hans walked hand in hand along the banks of the river. Other couples strolled past them. Some were teenagers, some were married couples with children scampering along in front of them, but none seemed fundamentally different from Franka and Hans. They passed an elderly couple sitting on a bench and staring out at the setting sun with contented looks on their withered faces.
“Do you think we’ll be sitting there together in fifty years?” She passed the words off as a joke, though the question behind them was quite deliberate.
“Of course,” he replied. “I could never imagine wanting to be with anyone else.” She was just about to say something when he spoke again. “In a way I’m jealous of other couples. They seem to be oblivious to the horrors around them. I can imagine there is some bliss in being able to remove yourself like that.”
“You could never do that, Hans. It’s not who you are. That’s part of the reason I love you so much.”
“That and my incredible good looks, right?”
“I didn’t want to say that first. I didn’t want to seem shallow.”
“Too late, I know now.”
“You’re different when we’re alone,” she said. “Lighter, somehow.”
“You see the real me, Franka—the person I want to be all the time.” He looked around to make sure no one could hear them before he continued. “You see the person that I’ll be for the rest of my life once the scourge of the National Socialist regime has been vanquished for good. That’s all I want—to live a quiet, simple life where I can be myself, with you.”