Here is a piece I published last year. I am repeating it because of a recent news item revealing that the guillotine has been rediscovered in Munich which was used for the killing of Sophie Scholl and so many others who resisted Nazism. I feel that such items are particularly topical when the tyrannies under which we currently live have such interesting parallels with Nazism.
[May 9 is] the Birth Day of Sophie Scholl, executed under the German National Socialist Regime for High Treason. She hobbled to the guillotine on crutches, because her leg had been broken during interrogation.
I pray that I and every reader of this blog may be a whole-hearted and courageous High Traitor to the Zeitgeist of our own time. Not least when, in its 'soft' version, it is impertinently packaged as 'British Values'.
When such High Traitors are brought before the equally distinguished jurists who, in every age, uphold the dark precepts of the Zeitgeist, I pray that they may speak as boldly as Sophie did to Roland Freisler.
Now there's a real example of Parrhesia.
I never heard of this lady. It is awful to hear someone's leg being broken during "interrogation". And a lady to boot. The things that have happened and do happen in this world. How did it all get so incredibly ugly.
ReplyDeleteSome people do have the courage of their convictions and never lose that no matter what comes.
We don't have as many of these people as we used to.
Dear Reverend Fr. Hunwicke.
ReplyDeletePrayers assured, today, for both Sophie Scholl (R.I.P.) and for your good self.
We all look forward very much to your swift return to The Blogosphere and a well-deserved Rest and Recuperation.
in Domino
From a Gestapo Memorandum, they were executed on the same day they were convicted:
ReplyDelete“ Those named in numbers 1 through 3 – Hans Scholl, Sophie Scholl, and Christoph Probst – were already sentenced to death and loss of civil rights for their entire lifetimes by the 1st Council of the People’s Court on February 22, 1943, for preparations for high treason, seditiously aiding and abetting the enemy, and demoralizing the armed forces. The sentence was executed on February 22, 1943.”
https://whiterosehistory.com/1943/03/23/gestapo-memorandum-in-support-of-indictment/#more-3487
I have read, elsewhere, that she gave her boyfriend two books of Newman’s sermons to take with him when he was sent to the Eastern Front
May the brave Sophie Scholl be among the blessed enjoying the Beatific Vision (notice I do not state it as a fact as I try to avoid the vulgar, heretical instant canonizations that Modernists today falsify as "love"). But I strongly suspect she is in that blessed joy! What a luminous, perfect model for our Christian youth---and, yet, you hear so little about her and her equally valiant companions. Her story is largely unknown because the "Powers That Be" have a different narrative, one that avoids any hint of Christian martyrdom---and with them it is all about the "narrative" and not about real people and real sacrifices.
ReplyDeleteFun fact: When I read our reverent host writing just now "it is the birthday of Sophie Scholl", I had to look up which of the two birthdays he meant. It really does sound like a martyrology entry.
ReplyDeleteNot that this would be unfitting: She was, in fact, perhaps the most classically-saintly of all anti-Nazi resistance fighters, at least as far as is known, perhaps even more so than Alexander Schmorell (canonized by his own Church as St. Alexander of Munich the Passion-Bearer). One really does feel that St. Joan might not only have fought for the same cause, but spoken in the same tone and with roughly the same amount of overt religious references, had she lived then and been a German.
I do so very much hope (but rather confidently) that our Lord gives her a pass on her reason of not converting to Catholicism. She had, as a matter of fact, converted in voto, but said "when I am executed for fighting against the Nazis and my faithfully Lutheran parents support my fight against the Nazis, and, in their own way, also fight against the Nazis; plus are facing kin-liability-detention and are doing so gladly, I cannot do this to them". The fact that she died on the feast of St. Peter's Throne might be a little wink-wink hint-hint.
(Speaking of dates: her twenty-fourth birthday into natural life, with her being two years dead, was only 16 minutes old when the final signature was set under the instrument of surrender. This, and the fact that Moscow is in a different time-zone than German where the weapons were silent since May 8, 23:01, is the reason why this day rather than May 8 is celebrated with great pomp throughout the Soviet Union and its successor countries das Victory Day. Including those at war with each other, but that is a different story.)
When her mother Margarete saw Sophie for the last time, shortly before her execution, she said to her daughter "But, you know - Jesus!" Sophie answered "Yes - but you as well!" And she said that with conviction, almost as an order - reports her mother.
ReplyDeleteThis telegram-style conversation conveighs the deep faith of mother and daughter in Jesus as their saviour in death and despair. It is because of this that I am convinced that, even though Sophie Scholl was a pietist, protestant Christian, we must not pray for her but to her.
She truly is a Great German and a wonderful example.
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ReplyDeleteSome of her letters to Fritz Hartnagel, her boyfriend, are online at:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.plough.com/en/topics/life/relationships/sophie-scholls-love-letters
Well worth reading.
Good Grief. I got that letter from Francis completely wrong. I saw what I wanted to see, not what was there.
ReplyDeleteIs there some sort of award I can get for being so stupid?