Various press agencies reported that on March 6, Traute Lafrenz Page, the last surviving member of the German anti-Nazi youth movement resistance, the White Rose, died at her home in Yonges Island, South Carolina, at 103 years old. Lafrenz, then a medical student in Munich, received a leaflet in 1942, distributed by the White Rose, a grouping of students and others, who were among the first to protest the brutal policies of the Nazis, and to expose their atrocities against the Jewish people and other “impure people.”
The leaders of the White Rose resistance movement were brother and sister, Hans and Sophie Scholl, and their mentor was philosophy professor Kurt Huber.
The Guardian reported, “the White Rose distributed anti-war pamphlets at Munich university in 1942-3, calling on people to rise up against the regime.”
The Washington Post reported, “[A] leaflet Ms. Lafrenz distributed said Jews in Germany and its occupied countries were being murdered ‘in the most bestial manner imaginable … a terrible crime against the dignity of mankind, a crime that cannot be compared with any other in the history of mankind.’”
According to the [White Rose] foundation, Lafrenz met Hans Scholl, one of the founders of the group along with his sister Sophie Scholl and Christoph Probst, in the summer of 1941.
It was only later, when she received a leaflet, that she recognized some of the quotes of philosophers that Hans Scholl often cited, and made the connection between them.
The Gestapo arrested the Scholls, Christoph Probst, and Huber in 1943, and after a show trial, they were executed by the guillotine.
The Timeline website quoted the 21-year-old Sophie, awaiting her execution, “Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go. But what does my death matter, if through us thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?”
Traute Lafrenz was herself arrested twice by the Gestapo, and spent time in four Nazi prisons before her liberation from the one in Bayreuth in April 1945. She emigrated to the U.S. in 1947, and completed her medical studies.
The Washington Post noted, “In a 2018 interview in the German magazine Der Spiegel, she said she felt shivers when she saw images of modern far-right followers using Nazi stiff-arm salutes at a rally in the German city of Chemnitz.
“‘Maybe it’s no coincidence,’ she told the magazine. ‘We are dying out and at the same time everything is coming back again.’”
So, the next time you sing, or hear “Die Gedanken sind frei,” keep in mind it has a long and noble history.
According to Wikipedia, “Since the days of the Carlsbad Decrees and the Age of Metternich, “Die Gedanken sind frei” was a popular protest song against political repression and censorship, especially among the banned Burschenschaften student fraternities. In the aftermath of the failed 1848 German Revolution the song was banned. The Achim/Brentano text was given a new musical setting for voice and orchestra by Gustav Mahler in his 1898 Des Knaben Wunderhorn collection.
“The song was important to certain anti-Nazi resistance movements in Germany. In 1942, Sophie Scholl, a member of the White Rose resistance group, played the song on her flute outside the walls of Ulm prison, where her father Robert had been detained for calling the Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler a “scourge of God.” Earlier, in 1935, the guards at the Lichtenburg concentration camp had ordered prisoners to stage a performance in celebration of Hitler’s 46th birthday; the imprisoned lawyer Hans Litten recited ‘Die Gedanken sind frei in response.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2023/03/11/lafrenz-white-rose-resistance-dies/
https://timeline.com/sophie-scholl-white-rose-guillotine-6b3901042c98
