Expansion of Operations

(January 1943)

The members of the White Rose spent Christmas 1942 at home with their families, then came back to Munich to keep working on their next big push. Hans and Alex both wrote drafts for a fifth leaflet, with Professor Huber actively helping in the process. Professor Huber wasn't terribly pleased with either of the drafts, but figured that Hans' was much more acceptable than Alex's, which seemed to be too sympathetic to the USSR.

No longer was this a leaflet of the "White Rose". This leaflet was titled "A Call to All Germans", and was much shorter, and much less academic than the previous four. With the money and supplies that they had managed to gather up, the number of leaflets that they produced was far greater than any of the previous four.

The time seemed to be right. Despite all the Nazi propaganda, people were beginning to see more clearly that the war was not going well. The Soviet Union had not surrendered, and the fate of what was happening there became more uncertain every day. German cities, including Munich, were being bombed. The Americans and the British were pushing Rommel back in Africa, and many, many people believed (including Anne Frank) that an American invasion of the European continent was not far off. In Munich, university students stood up in spontaneous protest when the gauleiter of Bavaria, Paul Giesler, when he insulted the university students for their pursuit of intellectual studies, and then went on to say that the women studying there were perhaps doing so because they couldn't find men. If that weren't bad enough, he continued by saying that he could find men for them, and that they'd be better off producing children for the Führer. When the members of the White Rose heard about this, their response was to print up and distribute another 1300 copies of their new leaflet to be circulated in Munich. All in all, an estimated 10,000 copies of the fifth leaflet were produced.

During a short university break in January, all of the members of the White Rose undertook dangerous journeys to distribute this leaflet. Traute Lafrenz, who had known about and been a part of the White Rose since June of 1942, travelled up to her hometown of Hamburg, and met up with friends of hers, including Greta Rothe and Heinz Kucharski, and convinced them to help copy and distribute the leaflets. (Thus, a good part of the "Hamburg Branch of the White Rose). Jürgen Wittenstein even brought a few copies up to Berlin, where small numbers were reproduced by Helmut Hartert and his anti-Nazi friends. (Helmuth von Moltke, who was active in the resistance in Berlin, got ahold of one of the leaflets and was able to send it on to Norway, where resistance elements there translated it and circulated it.)

Hans made it to Salzburg and mailed off approximately 150 leaflets. Alex made his way from Linz to Vienna to Salzburg and back again, distributing about 1400 leaflets along the way. Sophie, travelled to Augsburg, Ulm, and Stuttgart. She had some 2000 leaflets with her, and got together with Susanne Hirzel, and her little brother, Hans. Hans took many of these leaflets, and he and friends Franz Müller and Heinrich Guter, selected names and addresses from the telephone book, typed out the addresses on the envelopes, and mailed them out. Hans Hirzel played the organ in the church where his father was pastor, and so he had access to the church in order to practice. It was also a place where one wasn't going to be surprised by intruders, and so much of this work took place there.

Willi Graf probably made the most dangerous journey, as he travelled not only with leaflets, but with a duplicating machine as well. He was determined to try to get friends of his to join the resistance, but in Cologne and in Bonn, his friends, though staunch opponents to Hitler, were not willing to come out into an active resistance. Finally, in Saarbrücken, he met up with Willi Bollinger, who not only took leaflets and the duplicating machine, but gave Willi forged papers so that he could travel on the trains with less fear of getting arrested, as well as enough for future endeavours. After this, Willi Graf stopped in Freiburg and then Ulm, before making it back to Munich.