The Three Trials of Hans Scholl
I saw something on the German site Focus on Hans Scholl that gives me some hope.
I have always been upset at how films have portrayed the White Rose, the anti-Nazi resistance group in Germany. The true history was distorted with everyone concentrating on the role of Sophie Scholl. Hans was ignored, but he was the founder and did the lion’s share of the work. Sophie only discovered her brother was involved late in the game and the siblings may have survived the war had she never done so; a blunder on her part lead to their capture and execution. But, a young girl going to her death is so much more dramatic and people wanted good drama, not good history, so Sophie’s role was blown out of proportion.
Focus discusses a new book by author Robert Zoske, which is only available in German, and Focus has a sectional headline saying quite clearly “Sophie Scholl was just a marginal figure.” A rough English translation of that section says:
Sophie Scholl was probably not involved at all in the beginning and then rather passive. However, she soon took over important logistical work. Zoske is of the opinion that it is wrong to put the “Geschwister Scholl” at the center of the White Rose. For him, the spiritual fathers are clearly Hans Scholl and Alexander Schmorell.
Sophie was not involved at all in the beginning. She knew nothing about it. Hans had sent one of the leaflets of the White Rose to his own home in a direct mail campaign. His sister had read it. She later discovered a copy of the works of the classical liberal Friedrich von Schiller in her brother’s room. She opened it and noticed a passage was underlined, which was the very passage quoted in the pamphlet she had read from the already existing White Rose pamphlet. She put two and two together realizing her brother was behind the White Rose—unfortunately since then most authors and filmmakers pretend Hans didn’t exist or minimize his role. He becomes her assistant in many accounts of the group being spread today.
The First Trial of Hans Scholl
Some of the fault for this emphasis on Sophie belongs to Inge Scholl, a sibling who survived the war. Inge made the conscious decision to hide the truth about Hans from the public. She was a creature of her era and she couldn’t admit to the public the inspiration for Hans founding the White Rose was his arrest on charges of being homosexual.
For Hans his move away from National Socialism toward a more liberal approach began years before when he was passionately in love with Rolf Futterknecht, a young man in the same youth group as himself. While I had read histories of the White Rose it was only when Jud Newborn wrote a addendum to his book Sophie Scholl and The White Rose that I learned the true origins of the group. Before the Nazis grabbed Hans and sentenced him to beheading for crimes against the state, he had been put on trial for a gay relationship.
Hans described his relationship with Rolf in passionate terms and as his great love. At the time he was unaware such things were illegal under the Nazi regime. It was on a trip to Munich, as a member of Hitler Youth, he learned for the first time his greatest love was a criminal offense. He returned home disillusioned and confused and started to turn toward the more liberal thinkers his father had admired.
Conscripted into the military while still going to university, Hans served both militarily and studied. It was then he faced his first trial. Hans was arrested on three charges. One was being affiliated with a banned youth group, the second was when he and the other boys went to Sweden they took more money than allowed under exchange controls, and the last was related to his relationship with one of the other boys. (By boys I mean young men in their teens with just over 1 year’s age difference between them.)
The Scholl family couldn’t deny the first trial. Since other Scholl siblings were involved with the youth group they all got arrested but charges were dropped against them. Only Hans actually went to trial. The arrests were also critical in turning the siblings against the Nazi state. The family only allowed references to the first two charges but censored all references to the same-sex relationship. Zoske says Inge did this because she couldn’t see Hans being seen as heroic if people knew of his gay relationship. She had bought into the homophobic idea that gay men can’t be heroes.
But, the family did allow references in the diaries that alluded to the relationship, I presume on the assumption people would only associate them with the charges they previously mentioned.
For instance, they included references by Hans to the indictment of his friend Ernst Reden; they just don’t mention he was convicted under the anti-gay law, Paragraph 175. This omission leaves the impression Reden was only convicted of the other matters. Ernst remained a close family friend even after his conviction. Reden may have had a sexual relationship with Hans at one point and did try to initiate one with Han’s brother, Werner, which went nowhere. Hans also said he was aware Reden was gay and, I believe, said his mother was aware as well.
Scholl was born in 1918. As a teen he was involved in bündische movement, a youth camping movement with strong homoerotic tendencies. The movement was banned by the Nazi government but Scholl’s local group informally continued to take trips together, which was one of the charges brought against him in his first trial in 1937, shortly after he turned 19.
Scholl was infatuated with another member of the group, Rolf Futterknecht. From 1935 to 1936 Hans and Rolf were very close, quite affectionate with one another and the relationship was clearly sexual — at least sexual enough charges were brought against the boys by the Nazis.
Scholl and Rolf met in 1934 and quickly became friends though Rolf was a year younger. In Jungvolk, where Scholl was a leader, Rolf was in a different squad but requested to be transferred to Scholl’s unit so they could be together.
Missing from the source I read is any testimony by Rolf, though other sources indicated he insisted the relationship was mutual. Hans, however, kept insisting to authorities he pushed Rolf into the relationship and Rolf resisted — which seems to indicate Hans was trying to protect his friend from prosecution. Hans told the court, “I was in a position of authority over Rolf and he felt obliged to submit.”
On camping trips Hans said he and Rolf “slept with our arms around each other” and he loved Rolf. On multiple occasions, during such excursions, as well as during the day, and in town, the two young men became sexual. While Hans admitted to authorities he had orgasms he insisted Rolf did not and didn’t enjoy it. This doesn’t seem truthful given that on one trip the boys had sex three times one night.
On a porch in the family apartment, on one occasion the two boys were making out and fondling one another when they had to stop because Hans’ mother came into the area. On another occasion the pair had sex in the dark outside Rolf’s home when Hans had walked him home one evening. Hans told authorities he could only explain his actions “on the basis of the great love that I had.” Hans said he was excessively passionate and, in his defense, argued leaders were encouraged to not date girls. Hans also said he was unaware it was illegal to have sex with someone of the same gender and didn’t become aware of it until late in the relationship.
The prosecution claimed Hans was an educational leader who corrupted the other boy. The court had a hard time buying his claim given how the two of them were so close in age and said Hans was not delegated with “significant” authority over the other boy. The court also noted Rolf had requested transfer to the same squad as Hans so they could be together and stated any superior rank of Hans had nothing to do with their relationship. The judge said Rolf “was probably not inexperienced in such matters” and was “pre-disposed to them.” The judge was inclined to see this as a youthful indiscretion by both boys.
To make this trial more complex was the involvement of a friend of Hans, Ernst Reden, who the court said personified the bündische spirit. Reden, who was older than Hans, had been briefly sexually involved with Werner Scholl, a younger brother. Werner, however, was not receptive and after some brief kissing and fondling the two parted ways. But, for Hans, his relationship with Rolf was for a period of a couple years and was sexual on numerous occasions. Reden, however, did serve six months in a concentration camp for his violation of Paragraph 175.
Indicative of the sort of whitewashing history does on this matter, a major book on the White Rose, A Noble Treason, never mentions Reden’s involvement with Werner and instead presents him as a romantic figure sought after by the Scholl girls. Inge Scholl, in her book on her siblings, left out all references to the actual charges.
Throughout this ordeal Hans protected Rolf from incrimination. Later he would do the same thing with his friend Josef Söhngen, the gay bookstore owner who helped hide the White Rose printing press in his basement.
Scholl’s commanding officer wrote a letter to Robert Scholl, Hans’ father. The officer stated, “The main problem is that, as a youth leader, your son may be held to have abused his senior status. But for this, the whole business would probably be dropped. I submitted a written recommendation that your son be released from custody….”
The only area where there were charges relating to Scholl’s “senior status” was the claim that as leader of the youth group he took sexual advantage of another young man. Scholl’s “status” was of no importance in regard to the other charges. This is also indicated when the officer states that other than this issue the whole matter would have been dropped, as it was with the other Scholl children.
So, the only reason charges were brought against Hans—while his siblings spent a few days in jail and were released—was due to the sexual nature of his relationship with Rolf. Zoske wrote:
For Hans Scholl there was only one “great love” throughout his life: This is what he called Rolf Futterknecht from his group of boys, with whom he had an almost two-year passionate relationship. He was therefore detained for seventeen days. Six months later, a court saw this as “youthful aberration” and dropped the case. But the humiliation of being a “175” (according to criminal law paragraph 175, which punished male homosexuality) marked Scholl’s break with the National Socialist ideology.
I suspect most readers of the published letters of Hans and Sophie were unaware of the third set of charges under ¶175, and would not notice this, when the comments actually only make sense in light of those charges. So, even as the family attempted to alter history by hiding this relationship, they weren’t careful enough and small slips can be detected.
Given this is the main reason Hans was put on trial then another comment he made takes on new meaning. In a letter to his parents on April 25, 1938 he wrote, “I received the indictment today. The boys were released under the amnesty, thank God… Application is being made to put Ernst Reden on trial and remand him in custody…. I’m not afraid of going on trial. Even if I can’t justify myself in open court, I can justify myself to myself.”
Given the other two charges were inconsequential and easily explained, as Hans did, the one issue he felt he couldn’t justify in court was the relationship. He said as much during questioning after his arrest. He told police he could only explain it in terms of the great love he felt for his friend. It would seem the one issue he felt he couldn’t justify to the court, but could justify to himself, was his relationship with Rolf. “I can justify myself to myself,” is actually the central point of “gay pride.”
Also note the infamous symbols of censoring something, or deleting it, the ellipsis used in the published letter. In many cases it is extraneous material being deleted. However, I fear in this case it was references to the crimes for which Reden and Scholl were both charged, violating ¶175, which were being deleted.
After his trial for his relationship with Rolf, Hans struggled emotionally with his own sexuality. One young woman, Traute Lafrenz was presented by the family as his “girlfriend.” Lafrenz has been silent about the actual nature of her relationship with Hans and especially about his sexual orientation until only recently. Amazingly she is still alive and just shy of 100 years old. [2022 update: Traute is still linving on an island off the coast of South Carolina and will turn 103 in May.] Jud Newborn told me he and Zoske both tried to encourage her to speak out with the truth, which he said is “not easy, she really doesn’t want to, as you know.”
AnnMarie Kolakowski wrote that while LaFrenze helped with White Rose activities her status as girlfriend to Hans was short lived. “Their relationship didn’t last. She later told Dr.Robert Zoske that Scholl was plagued by problems whiche kept ‘dreadfully secret,’ and that they had no sex.” Given that the relationship with Rolf never lacked in the sexual department it would seem to indicate that Hans was far more likely to be gay than bisexual.
Lafrenz couldn’t bring herself to say homosexual or homosexuality and didn’t address what the first trial clearly exposed. Like Inge before her, she is of a generation where such things are truly “the love that dare not speaks it’s name.” Newborn wrote of her conversation with Zoske:
Traute Lafrenz remained silent about the reasons she and Hans Scholl broke off their relationship. But in a telephone conversation on August 28, 2018, she finally explained that Hans had had a ‘deep problem’ that ‘plagued him greatly,’ but one which he had kept ‘dreadfully secret.’ He had attempted ‘to eliminate this conflict by focusing on higher ideals’ but could ‘never free himself of it.’ This burden was ‘so significant for him, that it had ‘formed his character profoundly.’
My reading of the facts indicates it wasn’t Hans who kept this “secret” so much as his sister Inge. Hans was quite open about his relationship with Rolf when he was charged with violation of ¶175. Yes, after his arrest he took measures to hide his sexual orientation from public view, including being seen dating young women, which makes perfect sense given a further offense would send him to a concentration camp. But Hans remained close friends with gay men in spite of the risk. Comments by Zoske implies a new relationship may have inspired the White Rose quite directly.
In one German publication Zoske wrote:
“ Although same-sex love was punished in the Nazi dictatorship with up to ten years in prison, there is clear evidence that Scholl also lived this part of his sexuality. So he was intimately familiar with the poet Ernst Reden and the bookseller Josef Söhngen — both homosexual — and lived for months with Hellmut Hartert, a fellow student, in a tiny attic and a snow-covered holiday room.”
Focus wrote Hans tried to sublimate his desires by dating girls but “when he met Alexander Schmorell, his comrade in the White Rose in 1941, they probably caught up with him again. The two young men established a very close relationship, studied medicine together, and were sent together to a student assignment on the Eastern Front. Scholl described Schmorell as his only friend. ‘Was that friendship or love?’ Perhaps the erotic dimension was missing, but it certainly was love too,’ concludes Zoske.” And it is Scholl and Schmorell who Focus called the “spiritual fathers” of the White Rose.
As Hans wrote at the time, “I can justify myself to myself,” it was the rest of the world of whom he was unsure.
The Second Trial of Hans Scholl
This is the one trial most people, who know anything about the White Rose, know about. It was the show trial where in a matter of hours Hans was convicted and sentenced to almost immediate execution. The history of the White Rose was again intimately connected to the issue of homosexuality. Hans had become friends with another gay man, Josef Söhngen, who owned a bookstore near the university. Söhngen introduced Hans to banned books, including, I believe, the book The White Rose by B. Traven (1).
Hans recruited various friends and together they formed the secretive White Rose, which published anti-Nazi leaflets mostly authored by Hans. Sophie was uninvolved in this until near the end. In her interrogation Sophie openly told the SS she turned against the Nazi regime when her brother was arrested for his relationship with Rolf.
Hans secured the paper and a printing press, which was hidden in the basement of Söhngen’s bookstore. Thousands of anti-Nazi leaflets were secretly distributed throughout Germany by Hans and his friends. After his arrest Hans tried to take all the blame—something he tried to do in the first trial as well—especially when it came to protecting Söhngen. While Söhngen hid the press Hans seems to have kept him at arm’s length to protect him. I suspect this had two motivations; the first was his close friendship to Josef, which he downplayed with the Nazis, and the second was because the bookstore was where they hid the printing press they used.
While there is good reason to assume the group was named after the banned book, The White Rose, Scholl pretended the name had no meaning, probably because Söhngen’s bookstore was a source of banned books for trusted friends.
Before his execution Hans wrote graffiti on his prison wall, quoting the classical liberal Goethe, “Stand firm against all powers that be.” He went to his death shouting, “Long live freedom.”
The Third Trial of Hans Scholl
The third trial is one in the court of public opinion. One amateur historian, Ruth Sachs, has gone out of her way to smear and attack Hans and the entire Scholl family. She presents herself as an admirer, but her writing is scurrilous and, in my opinion, less than fully honest. However, she has provided a service by translating many important documents into English, even if she later then distorts what is in those documents—as we shall see.
Digging through her material is a real chore. She is needlessly verbose, runs off on tangents, and unable to edit. There are hundreds and hundreds of pages to dig through and much of it unrelated to anything of importance. She even goes into telling irrelevent stories about herself — as if she matters in this history.
But, she rarely passes up a chance to smear the Scholl family, even if she has to fantasize or distort facts to do so.
The crux of her libelous assault was the arrest of Scholl for a gay relationship when he was a teen. I will first recount what Sachs claims. Please do not assume her comments are true, as I will show her own publications prove otherwise.
Sachs claimed Hans Scholl sexually assaulted a young boy (Rolf) repeatedly and was a pedophile. Her “books” on the topic are actually ring binders, with photocopied pages inserted. They are a nightmare to work with because they are oddly numbered, with “updates” scattered throughout them. They are also extremely expensive. To make things more complicated she has an “academic version” and a “regular version” where content varies. In her White Rose History, Volume 1 she writes, “One of the most controversial topics in the academic version only centers on Hans Scholl’s pedophilia.” She says, “The details make it clear that his [Hans] assaults were escalating and that his advances (and remember, “Robert” was only thirteen) were unwelcome.” She calls Rolf by the pseudonym Robert.
Little of what she writes is accurate. Do NOT stop reading with only these accusations, as you will be left with a grossly distorted view of the facts.
She continues with her smear that Hans was a “pedophile” and “molester;” because as a teen he had a relationship with another teen. Sachs, however, lies about the age of the other young man, even though the documents she has translated clearly states his age.
Once she got out Hans had a relationship with this other boy she turns him into a full-time “pervert” who apparently would shag anything in sight.
Her low point was when she starts suggesting something has to be off between Hans and Sophie because Sophie asked her boyfriend not to come visit her at the same time Hans was visiting.
My first thought was she wanted to be able to spend time with her boyfriend, and time with her brother, and not seeing them both at the same time, optimized her time with each. That isn’t how Sachs thinks, her mind got to work and she turned it into something filthy.
Sachs wrote Sophie’s letter “clues us in to an unwholesome development in Sophie’s bond with Hans. …Somehow their closeness had evolved into conduct that more strongly suggests a tie between boyfriend and girlfriend, not brother and sister. We cannot be sure how or when the siblings crossed that imaginary line, since we cannot follow the flow of their correspondence.”
Sachs provided nothing to indicate incest, yet that is what she is strongly hinting at in this passage. She doesn’t even allow she might be wrong. She says the unknown is the “how or when” it happened, not whether it happened.
She feigns indignation when relatives of White Rose students later damned her for this insinuation. “You would have thought I accused Hans and Sophie of incest,” she whines. Well, yes, people would have thought it, because that is pretty clearly what she did. “Scholls and Hartnagles undertook a vicious campaign against our work, accusing me of accusing Hans and Sophie of precisely that.” Note how she talks about “our work” as if she is part of a team. If she has a team, hiring an editor would be a good idea.
Like a wacky conspiracy theorist she uses the reaction to her nonsense as proof her accusations must be true. “This abnormal response served to confirm my suspicions that the Scholls were hiding a dark secret.” Everything confirms her suspicions, even if she doesn’t present a single shred of real evidence, other than her imagination.
To then show she isn’t accusing them of incest she suggests another possible explanation — which again shows Sachs to be sexually obsessed. “They may have both been molested by a ‘funny uncle’ in the family. Sexual issues play far too large a role in the dysfunction of the Scholl family for us to not consider that possibility. From Robert Scholl’s numerous dalliances that threatened to undo his family, to Hans Scholl’s pedophilia, (once even when his mother came into the room as he was assaulting the young boy)….”
You can see what I mean in that one disgusting sentence. Robert Scholl, the father, is repeatedly attacked as a philanderer. Sachs asserts it yet never offers examples — at least not in the hundreds of pages of minutia she wrote up to this point that I could force myself to read. She calls the relationship between Hans and Rolf an assault and calls Rolf “the young boy,” to set up a false scenario.
The two boys were sitting on the couch petting. They stopped when they heard Scholl’s mother approaching and waited for her to leave to resume. Hans specifically said his mother didn’t see anything.
What makes it assault? In her mind it was assault because when the Gestapo arrested Hans for violating Paragraph 175 — the legal code making homosexuality a criminal offense — he took all the blame to protect his friend. In Sachs’ mind that is “a confession” and one she takes literally. When Hans did the same thing regarding White Rose activities, and lied to the Gestapo to protect friends, she doesn’t argue it proves he was the only White Rose member. Then he’s lying to protect his friends, yet in the first trial he wasn’t lying to protect his friend he was confessing he was a rapist.
Elsewhere she is outraged the Judge in the first trial didn’t punish Scholl more than “time served.” This has to be one of the few times someone seriously claimed a Nazi judge was too lenient! She falsely claims the Judge “blamed the victim” for “the assault.”
There was no victim and no assault. There was a consenting relationship between two teens of similar ages. That is what the Judge actually said. He said the “victim” was a “willing participant.” It wasn’t assault, it wasn’t molestation and since there were no children involved it wasn’t pedophilia. But, Sachs has her mind in the gutter.
Sachs is at war with the Scholl family. They denied her access to all letters and such. Now, there is no doubt Inge Scholl (now deceased) did her best to hide certain facts from the public — such as her pretending the first trial of Hans had nothing to do with a gay relationship. It certainly appears plausible, and this is only a theory, that the Sachs vendetta to smear the family is, at best, a misdirected attempt to force them to release all the information she wants, if only to prove her wrong.
Wading through Sachs research material is tiresome; she takes gems and tarnishes them with her innuendo, tangents, and lies. At points she seems to insert her obsessive accusations whether relevant or not. She is so obsessed with the “dark secrets” of the Scholl family she can’t even see she is inventing most of them herself.
Sachs labels each sexual encounter between the Hans and Rolf an “assault”. She writes things such as, Rolf “had a hard time escaping Hans Scholl’s clutches” or “Hans again molested” Rolf. She says, “to understand the gravity of the situation, consider that Hans Scholl was seventeen years old, turning eighteen in September 1935, while ‘Robert’ was NOT EVEN THIRTEEN (My emphasis). Under American law in the 21st century, this is considered pedophilia.” She says, “The progression of events is clear and disturbing.”
Let’s unpack the slander and show why it is false, according to evidence Sachs herself gathered.
But first, let me address her claim that under current American law this would be pedophilia. That is a false and very amateurish mistake. There is no legal definition of pedophilia, which is instead a clinical term. All American law does is define a sexual age of consent; it does not try to legally define psychological terms.
In addition, as we will see, the age she gives for Rolf is false. On top of that, the relationship would not necessarily be illegal in all American states. There is no “American law” on age of consent, but each state has it’s own. Not all sex between “minors” is illegal, and numerous states have “Romeo and Juliet” provisions for minors of similar age. More importantly “pedophilia” as a clinical term and when properly defined does not apply to Hans Scholl.
Pedophilia is a persistent sexual attraction to prepubescent children. Rolf was a teenager, not a child. And, while Sachs says, in one place he was “not even thirteen,” implying he was twelve, and in another says he was thirteen, neither claim was true, he was older. In addition, just as she falsely lowers Rolf’s age, she falsely asserts Hans was older than he was, claiming he would turn 18 in September, 1935. Hans was not 17 going on 18, he was 16 going on 17. Do the math yourself, his birth date was September 22, 1918.
Sachs translated partial transcripts of the interrogation and trial of Scholl after he was arrested for homosexuality. These are found in another binder of material, The Buendische Trials (Scholl/Reden) 1937–1938. Those documents expose the libel Sachs perpetrates against Scholl.
The transcripts show, contrary to Sachs’ claims, Rolf was older than she claimed, and barely more than a year’s difference in age existed between the two boys. In his interrogations with police Hans admitted the nature of the relationship and recounted at least some of their sexual activities. He said he had no idea “intercourse between persons of the same sex was forbidden and liable to prosecution.” “I can only justify my actions on the basis of the great love that I have had for ‘Robert’.” (Rolf) Now, remember all quotes are from the translations done by Sachs herself, so she is familiar with this material.
Sachs appears to assume because Scholl took full responsibility, claiming he was the aggressor, it must be true and thus assault. But, remember Scholl was on trial, as was his friend. Hans maximized his responsibility and, if he had been believed, would have exonerated Rolf to his own detriment.
Historian Jud Newborn wrote, “The Gestapo transcript reveals headstrong, garrulous testimony as Hans strove to justify himself while protecting Rolf from indictment.”
We see precisely the same thing when Hans was later arrested for his White Rose activity. He tried to exonerate friends and take full responsibility in order to spare them his own fate. His friendship, perhaps relationship, with gay bookseller Josef Söhngren was another example. While it appears the White Rose name comes from the banned book, The White Rose, Scholl said it had no real origin at all.
Newborn writes:
“If, as it seems likely, Traven’s The White Rose was the inspiration for the name, why would Hans Scholl have given the Gestapo such a vacuous explanation — saying they had picked their name at random, while still providing them with a concrete source, a harmless 19th century poem called ‘The White Rose?’
The reason now seems obvious: he was probably trying to divert the Gestapo’s attention away from his dear friend Josef Söhngen — the ‘bachelor’ bookseller who secretly nurtured the White Rose resistance by providing a meeting place and an endless supply of banned books from his cache to boost their morale. He and Hans had also exchanged warm, if hardly romantic letters, especially when Hans was serving on the Eastern Front.”
When Söhngen was interrogated by the Gestapo he repeatedly lied about his relationship with Scholl, saying Hans rarely spent time in his apartment. After the war he made it clear these were lies. Hans, of course, never had the option of restating things after the war since the Nazis beheaded him for his resistance activity. But, even if he had survived the war it is unlikely he would have talked about gay matters given that homosexuality remained a crime in Germany until 1994.
Söhngen didn’t admit his sexual orientation either, and Inge Scholl, in her book, pretended a trial for homosexuality never took place, and the trial was purely about other matters. Jud Newborn spoke to the son of Söhngen’s closest friend who said Josef lived openly as a gay man after the war and his entire family was aware of it. But I know of no public statement Söhngen made indicating this—no doubt due to legal reasons
Even when the diaries of Scholl were released, they were edited and references to his sexual relationships were deleted. So, there was no attempt to set the record straight and most accounts of the White Rose leave out the important role gay issues played in the conception of the group.
While Sachs doesn’t ignore the issue she does read the trial transcripts in the worst light possible.
I quote Sachs own translation of the court proceedings:
“The Special Court does not share this view [the misuse of authority]. To begin with, a Jungsvolk Squad Leader is a subordinate position. One cannot say that that position has been delegated with a significant amount of the administration of the education for which Hitler Youth is responsible. Moreover this is especially true in the case at hand, which deals with the relationship of a 16–1/2 year-old boy to a 15-year-old buddy. It would offend national sensibilities to consider an immature young man as the educator of a young person only 1–1/2 years his junior, especially when that [16–1/2 year old] young man is himself still developing morally.”
The court noted Rolf was not originally in the same squad as Hans and specifically asked to be transferred to the unit so they could be together. The court also said Rolf “was probably not inexperienced in such matters and pre-disposed to them.” Rolf also defended Hans and, also trying to paint things in the best legal light, told the court Scholl often felt remorse for what they had done. He was defending Scholl, as Scholl was trying to defend him.
The records Sachs translated indicate Rolf was 15, not 12 or 13 as she claimed elsewhere. It states Scholl was 16 when the relationship began. It simply is not pedophilia for someone 16 to have a sexual relationship with someone 15. To call this relationship molestation or sexual assault is hardly warranted, especially when one takes into account how Scholl was trying to protect his friend from criminal prosecution.
The relationship between Hans and Rolf appears to be the reason the White Rose was eventually conceived. Sachs notes when Scholl was asked to be the standard bearer for Hitler Youth at a rally it was one of the “highest honors” bestowed on a young man at the time. But, when he returned from the rally he “went from unquestioning support of Nazi policies, to a teenager who began to ask hard questions… this Party Day Rally proved to be a turning point in the evolution of a hero.” It was at that time Scholl discovered his passionate love for his friend was a criminal offense.
Shortly after this trial Scholl wrote in his diary, “If you tear our hearts from our bodies, you yourselves will burn to death for it.” While Hans died at the hands of the Nazis his prediction of a violent end to the Nazi regime proved accurate.
Footnote:
1. B. Traven was the anarchist Ret Marut who had published an individualist anarchist publication Der Ziegelbrenner, which was strongly influenced by the writings of individualist Max Stirner. Coincidentally another publication influenced by Stirner was Der Eigene, a German language gay magazine published by Adolph Brand from 1898 to 1932.
For more information on Jud Newborn and his work on the White Rose and resistance to Nazism, visit his Linedin page here.
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