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Forejustice |
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On February 22, 1943 Sophie
Scholl, her brother Hans, and Christoph Probst were found guilty of treason
against Germany. The three were beheaded the same day. They were condemned as
traitors for producing and distributing leaflets titled - Leaflets of The White Rose - the name of their
loosely knit group. Those leaflets clearly and passionately explained the
crimes being committed against millions of innocent people in Europe and
Russia by politicians acting in the name of the German people. The leaflet
was the sixth in a series that had been distributed over a period of a little
less than a year by various means throughout Germany. The White Rose movement was intended to trigger an awakening by the
German people to their ability to positively influence society to become more
humane. Their rallying cry was “Freedom and Honor!” The White Rose advocated
that German’s proactively work towards creating such a society by rising up
and refusing to passively go along with the government that was staining the
good name of the German people. For daring to suggest that German’s act on
their conscience instead of mindlessly following the government’s directives,
the people of The White Rose were targeted by the German government to be
ruthlessly hunted down, In addition to the Scholls and Christoph Probst,
Alexander Schmorell, Willi Graf, Professor Kurt Huber and Hans Leipelt were
executed. Whether explicitly or intuitively, The White Rose participants recognized
that the means used to achieve their desire to live in a society in which
women, men and children were respectfully treated and did not exist to be the
tools of the government needed to be consistent with that end. The men and
women of The White Rose did not engage in violence. Rather, they pursued
their dream and conveyed their message by distributing leaflets that
expressed truths otherwise unavailable to be read by the German people. In
the midst of war torn Germany they dared to go beyond exercising freedom of
thought by exercising freedom of association, speech and the press: for which
some of them paid with their lives. Click on
The White Rose to go to an excellent website about
these courageous people. The power of The White Rose
was proven only days after the execution of Hans and Sophie Scholl and Christoph Probst, and it showed
that the political authorities in Germany indeed had much to fear from an
elevation in the consciousness of the German people. Beginning on February
27, 1943, German non-Jewish women began a non-violent protest at the Jewish
Community Center on Rosenstrasse in Berlin, where nearly 2,000 Jewish men
were imprisoned. Slated for deportation, those men were the husbands,
boyfriends, sons and friends of the women. For a week the women, who are
estimated to have numbered as many as 6,000, sang songs, held hands and
openly defied the Gestapo’s orders to disperse and ignored threats of being
machine gunned or arrested. Fearing that non-violent challenges to their
authority would spread throughout Germany, the government relented after a
week and released all the men. Most of those men survived the war. They were
only saved by the courage of the women who rose to an extraordinary level at
a time when it was a matter of life and death for those they loved. Click on
The Rosenstrasse Protest to go to an excellent website about these courageous women. It is in the spirit of the heroes of The White Rose and The Rosenstrasse
Protest that the word forejustice was created to express action that moves towards an
increase in the justice prevalent in a society. Proactively expressing one’s
insistence on justice creates a positive bubble that displaces a like amount
of tolerance for misjustices that would otherwise occupy that space in time,
consciousness and reality. Envisioning that an increase in the justice in
society is possible is the first step to proactively expressing that belief
through the means of positive and non-violent action consistent with achieving
that end. Hans Sherrer |
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To contact us: |
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Sophie
Scholl 1921-1943 |
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Hans
Scholl 1918-1943 |
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Go Directly To The
Following Web pages |