Resistance to the Nazis

“The British would never have gone to the slaughter like the Jews did in Nazi Germany,” someone once said to me. That sentence angered me and stopped me in my tracks. Many years later, I am still reacting to its ignorance and arrogance. Frankly, what could all the victims of the Holocaust —Jews, Sinti, Roma, homosexuals, political prisoners — have done in the face of the terrifying German army? There weren’t many who went willingly to their death.

Eighty years ago today, on 27 January 1945, the Red Army liberated the Nazi concentration and death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, where more than a million Jews died. The Soviet soldiers found 7,000 inmates still alive. The SS had forced the remaining prisoners on a death march that would take them from Poland to Germany, ensuring they did not fall into the hands of the Allies.

Two women who were on that march were Fania Landau and Zlatka Snajderhauz, who had met in 1943 at the camp. They worked at the Union-Werke munitions factory, filling bullet casings with gunpowder under the watchful eyes of guards who would beat or even kill them for any infraction given the opportunity. Twenty women worked together, and in an act of defiance, whenever they could scoop up some dirt from the floor, they would add that to the gunpowder, making the bullets useless.

For Fania’s 20th birthday, which fell on 12 December 1944, Zlatka decided that her best friend needed to celebrate, so she asked the other women for their rations of bread, butter, and marmalade to make a “birthday cake”. Before the war, Zlatka had loved handicrafts and commandeered her fellow inmates to find any scapes they could—paper, cloth—so she could make Fania a present. She created, quite miraculously, a palm-sized origami book, which every woman signed. That act of defiance and resistance equalled humanity and love in a place that was hell on earth.

Having survived the war, Fania met Aron Fainer, with whom she was married for 60 years. They had a daughter called Sandy, who I met many years later in London; we became friends.  In April 2024, we travelled to Munich and Berlin together, where she and Zlatka’s granddaughter, Karina Feller, gave a talk. On that trip, I discovered the White Rose, a nonviolent resistance group organised by students from the University of Munich.

Hans Scholl, Alexander Schmorell, Willi Graf, and Christoph Probst were at the group’s core. Hans and his sister Sophie, who joined later, came from an educated, wealthy, middle-class family, but had previously been members of the Hitler Youth, much to their father’s horror.

Scholl, Schmorell, Graf and Probst were all medical students seconded for a compulsory three months to the medical corps on the Eastern Front, where they experienced the full horrors of Nazi atrocities against the Jews. It changed their views and they decided they needed to do something.

When they returned from the Front, they founded White Rose with other friends. Kurt Huber, a professor of philosophy and musicology, was known for his oblique criticisms of the Nazi ideology, and he became their mentor.

White Rose published their first pamphlet in 1942, advocating passive resistance to the Nazi regime. They published six leaflets, scattering them by hand, and wrote graffiti on buildings around Munich with slogans – “Down with Hitler” and “Freedom” on buildings around Munich.

On 18 February 1943, Hans and Sophie had taken a suitcase full of leaflets. They left sacks in the empty university corridors for the students to find.

Sophie and Hans had left their lectures early and discovered some extra pamphlets, which they threw from the rotunda onto the atrium of the Ludwig Maximilian building.

Maintenance man Jakob Schmid witnessed this spontaneous act of resistance and called the Gestapo. The Nazis arrested them and held a show trial. Four days later, they executed Sophie and Christoph by guillotine. They had remained silent, but Hans’s last words were: “Long live freedom!”

Freedom is under threat, and we should heed the words of White Rose survivor Jürgen Wittenstein:

“The government—or rather, the party—controlled everything: the news media, arms, police, the armed forces, the judiciary system, communications, travel, all levels of education from kindergarten to universities, all cultural and religious institutions. Political indoctrination started at a very early age and continued by means of the Hitler Youth with the ultimate goal of complete mind control. Children were exhorted in school to denounce even their own parents for derogatory remarks about Hitler or Nazi ideology.”

Our forebears defeated Nazism and Fascism eight decades ago, which is why we commemorate International Holocaust Memorial Day today. Yet, we see right-wing regimes around the world back in power – in Hungary and Slovakia – and with the AfD running second in the German election. The FPO is about to take over in Austria. We can see the warning signs. They are frightening. We need to heed those lessons of resistance.

Genocide: Personal Stories, Big Questions by Heidi Kingstone is published by Yellow Press and available on Amazon for $8.87

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