Germany during WW2 seemed, at first, to be headed for economic recovery and a bright shining future. A few young people recently returned from witnessing the true heart of the Third Reich thought differently and sought to oppose the Nazi movement and Hitler’s government. They called themselves “The White Rose”*. They operated in secret, distributing pamphlets trying to wake up the populace to the reality of their situation:
“…our present ‘state’ is the dictatorship of evil. …if you know that, why do you not bestir yourselves, why do you allow these men who are in power to rob you…of one domain of your rights after another, until one day nothing, nothing at all will be left but a mechanized state system presided over by criminals and drunks? Is your spirit already so crushed by abuse that you forget it is your right – or rather, your moral duty – to eliminate this system? But if a man no longer can summon the strength to demand his right, then it is absolutely certain that he will perish.”
* We mistakenly call it the “Order of the White Rose” a few times during this episode. That’s a different thing.
Show notes and links:
- Memoirs of a Professional Cad, George Sanders (amazon.com)
- A History of Egypt from the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest, James Henry Breasted (amazon.com)
- White Rose (infogalactic.com)
- “The White Rose Leaflets” Revolt & Resistance
- White Rose leaflet images with translations (holocaustresearchproject.org)
- “The Man in the High Castle” (2015) (imdb.com)
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