The Real Damage is Done By Those Who Want to Survive

Sophie Scholl’s Message to Us at the Beginning of Trump’s Dictatorial Era

The entrance to the University of Munich with photos and some of the White Rose pamphlets as stone monuments on the stone walkway.

When I think of the vast number of Trump supporters and enablers, as well as the large number of people who go on living as if nothing is happening, or even worse those who fully understand what is happening and put their heads down and say or do nothing in order to protect themselves and way of life.

Of course this comes after Vice President Vance’s shameful visit to the NATO summit in Munich where after making the compulsory stop at Dachau he derided the Europeans, and met with the leader of Germany’s new incarnation of the Nazi Party. His ignorance and arrogance was disgraceful. But he is only the latest member of Trump’s criminal cabal to court or praise the AfD, or Alternativ für Deutschland Party, and attack Germany’s long efforts to cleanse its soul of the Nazi past by ensuring that it is not forgotten.

I cannot do that. I am a historian, a student of the Nazi Reich and the Holocaust. I learned well from my primary professor at California State University Northridge, Dr. Helmut Haeussler who severed as an interpreter and interrogator at the major War Crimes trials at Nuremberg and the twelve subsequent American trials of Nazi organizations that followed. As such I continued those studies, and all the times that I lived in Germany or visited I have visited concentration camps, museums, research centers and other important sites.

Tonight I leave you with a short article about Sophie Scholl, a true heroine of the German resistance. Since we are coming up on the 82 anniversary of her execution by the Nazis, I will be writing more about her as I write about the crimes of Donald Trump and his Nazi associates, including Elon Musk, J.D. Vance, Tom Homan, Pam Bondi, and Pete Hegseth and their enablers.

Sophie Scholl, a 22 year old student at the University of Munich was a leader of the White Rose resistance movement. They were a very small group of students who defied Hitler’s police state to publish anti-Nazi pamphlets and distribute them throughout Germany to sympathizers who would spread their message. Their leaflets drew the attention of Nazi authorities and Sophie, her brother Hans and their friend Christoph Probst after an informer reported her disturbing her last full leaflet at the University of Munich on 20 February 1943.

“The real damage is done by those millions who want to ‘survive.’ The honest men who just want to be left in peace. Those who don’t want their little lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves. Those with no sides and no causes. Those who won’t take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness. Those who don’t like to make waves—or enemies. Those for whom freedom, honour, truth, and principles are only literature. Those who live small, mate small, die small. It’s the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you’ll keep it under control. If you don’t make any noise, the bogeyman won’t find you. But it’s all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn.”

The question is, how many Americans will have even one tenth the courage of Sophie?

As for me, like Sophie, I will choose my own way to burn. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer noted, “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak.”

What say you?