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The following is an excerpt from the "Postscript" to Chapter One of the academic version of Ruth Sachs' White Rose History, Volume I: Coming Together (January 31, 1933 - April 30, 1942). It allows insight into the manner in which she has undertaken her research.

If you are reading this, chances are good that you will not be content with a superficial narrative of any historical text. You love the nitty-gritty. If you had your way, you would not even be reading this book. You’d rather be sitting in the Bundesarchiv in Berlin, poring over all 5,000 pages of Gestapo interrogation transcripts for yourself.

For you, therefore, I will explain three aspects of our work that can give you a greater understanding of the pages that follow: Our purpose, our preparation, and our methodology.

PURPOSE:

As noted in the July 13, 2002 introduction, a critical factor in the “why” of this book is traced back to a simple answer: It is a beautiful story that needs to be told. Clearly. The more I learned about Hans and Sophie, Schurik and Lilo, Christl and Willi, and all the rest, the more I loved their lives and deeds. I believed that above all, American youth – not just German majors – needed to hear what they did.

My first reaction involved writing a creative nonfiction novel (also called literary nonfiction). And indeed, the first three drafts of this book were in that genre.

I repeatedly ran into the same obstacle when I talked about that book. The story was so different from standard White Rose legend. No one would believe that what I wrote was true.

Without giving up on that project – it is on the back burner, but not forgotten – I changed direction. It now became critical to nail down what did happen. To establish beyond all doubt what transpired in the group we know as the White Rose resistance movement.

The new “straight nonfiction” book deviated from the “novel” version in genre only, not in motivation. Now as before, we want to tell the White Rose story in historical context, comprehensively, for contemporary American youth.

In historical context, because these students and their mentors did not live in a vacuum. Most were born in the years immediately following World War I. They grew up hearing grown-ups curse the Versailles Treaty. Several of them would have experienced firsthand the catastrophe of hyperinflation. All would have been in the equivalent of elementary or middle school when the depression of 1929 hit Germany. They well knew the turbulence of pre-Hitler politics; their parents would have expressed strong sentiments around the dinner table every time a new election was called.

The changes brought on by the Nazi regime affected their daily lives. Without exception. Where they lived, the schools they attended, activities of Hitler Youth organizations, what religion they adhered to (and whether they considered themselves religious),  what the local newspapers wrote, their Reich Labor Service duty (and for the young men, military service), the books they read and songs they sang: None of this context can be excised from the story if there is to be any hope of understanding what they did in 1942-43.

And not merely in the sense of where they performed Reich Labor Service, or what school they attended, or when they went to church. What did it look like, smell like, feel like, sound like, taste like? We may not be able to replicate the five senses exactly. But we can try. If we do not, we miss a crucial element of their lives.

Comprehensive, because for sixty years the story has largely been told with blinders attached. The White Rose was not the Scholl organization. Breaking down that barrier is the most difficult.

But it is not the Hans / Sophie / Christl / Alex / Willi / Kurt Huber organization either. If you take the time to add up all the people mentioned by Inge Jens (and subsequently, those mentioned in the Gestapo archives) who attended the various “readings” in the studio, you find there were sometimes thirty students and older mentors gathered at one time in that room. Do you hear thirty voices when you read standard White Rose texts? Where are the “missing” voices? Finding them has been a large part of our mission.

And yet – it is not even a Munich organization. By January 1943, groups were organizing in Ulm and Stuttgart, Freiburg and Saarbrücken. Attempts had been made in Bonn. Even if you limit “White Rose trials” to the three most well-known – February 22, April 19, and July 13, 1943 – you find that there were fourteen from the Munich base, two from Stuttgart, two from Freiburg, and three from Ulm.

Where are Gerhard Feuerle, Wolf Jäger, Günther Schmich, Lilo Ramdohr, Otmar Hammerstein, Raimund Samüller, Willi Bollinger, the Mauer brothers? And about 25-30 others who directly impacted the White Rose work in one way or another?

It’s like a person videotaping a family reunion who focuses on cute young cousin Heather, and forgets to keep panning to Aunt Gertrud. Or (for those of you who, like me, think musically), it’s like a choir that has microphones in front of the director’s six favorite singers, to the detriment of the choral performance.

This does not even begin to address the post-White Rose group around Hans Leipelt in Munich, many of whom suffered much worse fates than our young heroes. Or the White Rose predecessors in Hamburg, who gave us Traute Lafrenz. Would it surprise you to know that after she was released from her mild sentence connected with the group in Munich, she was re-denounced and rearrested? And that she barely escaped death the second time around, being saved solely by the end of the war? Inge Scholl knew that from the late 1940s and suppressed the information. You will have to read Volumes II and III of this history for the beautiful (though chilling) details. That by way of one small example of things that have been cropped out of the larger picture.

Part of the comprehensive nature of this work includes writing about these people in all their humanness. To understand the full impact of their noble deed – and truly, it was that and more – it is critical to comprehend that they were no different from you or me. Hans Scholl’s drug addiction and battles with sexual orientation, Sophie Scholl’s suicidal thoughts, Otl Aicher’s refusal to accept authority, Christoph Probst’s battles with depression, Alex Schmorell’s affair with a married woman and never-ending search for identity, Lilo Ramdohr’s fear, Werner Scholl’s brash bravery, Willi Graf’s overwhelming sense of aloneness if not abandonment, Hans Hirzel’s unreliability and mental illness, Hein Jacobs’ cowardice, Gerhard Feuerle’s insecurities – these weaknesses were part of their makeup, part of who they were. We cannot divorce their personalities from their actions and expect to grasp the magnitude of what they did.

How they overcame these very limitations to take a stand and speak words of justice – that is the part of the story that can still make me teary-eyed.

Finally, we have written this story for contemporary American youth. Not merely believing that it is dangerous to think “It” cannot happen here, though that is certainly a factor. But because these German students we call the White Rose – and their mentors – are  heroes worth talking about.

American youth is growing up in a dysfunctional society, without community. We adults have brought them into a world where they cannot so much as help a strange man find a lost dog. We feed them a diet of celebrity and wonder why they are shallow. Our pundits and politicians talk of family values, then divorce their spouses to marry younger women and richer men. Or admit to gambling addictions while writing about virtue. And then we wonder why young people are apathetic and apolitical.

I am convinced that the story of the White Rose will help these dear, beautiful, gifted young people know that they are not alone. It is far more than a tale of resisting Hitler during the Third Reich. The students of the White Rose teach us how to stand up for what is right, even if it is a losing battle. Their memory tells us that it is a good thing to fight injustice, though that may appear quixotic. And most of all, we see that one does not have to be good to do good. Often the “being” part comes after we listen to our conscience and act.

And maybe, just maybe, we adults can also learn – learn to be the mentors that Wilhelm Geyer, Josef Söhngen, Carl Muth, Eugen Grimminger, “Pater Eisele”, Theodor Haecker, Kurt Huber, and others were. Maybe, just maybe, we can figure out how to inspire teenagers and young adults to do something magnificent, by challenging them to move beyond themselves, to think, to do.

Which segues nicely into a brief explanation of the format of the “regular edition” of this book.

When I was a very young undergraduate, I was not interested in studying history. High school history teachers had been pretty… awful. One hated her job, another saw teaching as a bridge to marriage, another emphasized memorizing facts.

But TCU’s core curriculum in the 1970s – largely the love-child of Betsy Colquitt, a true Renaissance learner – “made” us take large doses of history and political science, even if we were Math and German majors.

The textbooks used in those American History 101/102 and German History 201/202 courses were written for us non-majors. No footnotes, no technical terminology, no abstract Buckley-esque verbiage. I found myself reading the books from cover to cover the same week I bought them. When other texts were re-sold to the Campus Bookstore or boxed up and placed in the garage, three of those books stayed in my active library.

I must have read Marshall Dill’s Germany four or five times over the last thirty years. Something about the immediacy of his words, the realization that he had lived some of the scenes he described in the sections on World War II, grabbed me and held my attention.

Did our history professors let us slide by with merely accepting what we read on unfootnoted pages? No way! One in particular – Frank Reuters – would hold our feet to the fire. He demanded that we look for sources that either contradicted what was written or that at least presented a different viewpoint. Verify, verify, verify! Without footnotes, we had to do the legwork to test the text. And that in pre-Google days. We learned from him to value primary source materials, to treasure them like gold. His classes were hard work. And like Prof. Kurt Huber’s, always the first to fill up.

We wanted this book to be the same way (and would that I were a Marshall Dill). One that non-majors would actually read, yet that could serve as a basis for much deeper discussions in a teacher-led class. I don’t consider it a textbook. I see it as a nonfiction book that can be used to teach. How well it is taught depends primarily on the person teaching.

We initially conceived of this section of “purpose” in somewhat broader terms, as we envisioned our book being translated into German so German youth could enjoy it the same way. However, the White Rose establishment has a firm grip on the legend, with most of the media in its pocket. You will read few unfavorable reviews of works that regurgitate legend. Yet those who try to paint a more honest portrait (e.g. Petry, Moll) often find their lives nearly ruined. For example, the Scholls undertook a virulent campaign against Christian Petry and one member of the Probst family when they questioned accepted legend about White Rose motivations. Challenge Inge Scholl, and it could be an academic death sentence in Germany.

Since 1995, I have repeatedly heard from people I interviewed in Germany that I have a distinct advantage in telling the “true story” of the White Rose resistance movement, because I am an American. What I at first perceived to be a decided handicap has proven to be beneficial. I do not have to worry about being black-balled from a professorship just because I crossed Scholls. Since it is not a professional or personal goal to receive the Bundesverdienstkreuz or the Geschwister-Scholl-Preis from the Weiβe-Rose-Stiftung, I can work in peace.

Do I want this book to be published in Germany? Perhaps. Would it be a positive influence on German youth? I think so, hope so. Is it worth the grief? Not alone, not without proper moral and financial support. Even the White Rose students required as much.

But this work will require a publisher there who has the guts and "intestinal fortitude" to stand up to White Rose establishment. A publisher who will say Enough!, and have none of self-serving censorship. I have searched for such a publisher, without success. Maybe one day a house with a good foundation will find me.

Until that happens, this series remains the province of American youth and their mentors.

PREPARATION:

Our two primary research trips – February through May, 1995; and April through May, 2002 – underpin a substantial part of our work. The written word is critical (as you will see in the Methodology section), but incomplete.

Before the first trip, I had finished writing what I deemed to be the first and final draft of my White Rose book, which at the time contained 1933 – 1943 in a single volume. The trip was undertaken merely to wrap up loose ends, meet whomever we could (with Inge Scholl and Franz Josef Müller at the top of the list), go to the Gedächtnisrede in Munich on February 22, 1995, take photographs and make videos of places, and ask a few questions.

I honestly did not think there were many gaps to worry about. I had read Inge Scholl’s White Rose (Students Against Tyranny) book, as well as the ones by Harald Steffahn, Richard Hanser, and Dumbach/Newborn. I had entered the information from those four books, along with the letters and diaries edited by Inge Jens, into an informal database of sorts (a handwritten notebook with everything in chronological order). I had mapped out major events and created a timeline – based on those books. Everything seemed clear enough.

As we packed, I would jot down notes. Find out if Fritz Hartnagel is still alive, and ask how he met Sophie. Ask Inge who Hans Scholl’s girlfriend really was. Ask Elisabeth Hartnagel nee Scholl if she could remember anything else from the time she was in Munich (February 1943). Find out more about Carl Muth.

It should be clear that that first draft was at least mentally subtitled, “The Hans and Sophie Scholl Story.” Which was normal at the time, considering the books I had read.

My friend Hans Forster had gone to a major bookstore in Munich – ironically, Hugendubel’s – and asked them for a printout of all their White Rose texts. I marked off the ones I had found at Rice University and at Houston Public Library, and noted the ones I needed to find in Germany.

While our trip was well-prepared (at least in light of what I knew then), I believed that the bulk of our work would consist of photography, to document place. I already knew Munich, Augsburg, Bad Tölz, and most of Stuttgart better than I knew my hometown of Houston, so it would not be a problem finding locations there. The people in Freiburg and Bad Dürrheim had kindly sent me free copies of maps. My to-buy list primarily included maps of Ulm, Krauchenwies, Saarbrücken, and Blumberg.

When Inge Scholl refused to grant an interview, and when Franz Josef Müller deferred to her request and denied access to materials at the Weiβe-Rose-Stiftung, I believed that seven months of work had been for nothing. We could still get the pictures we wanted, but not additional information.

Müller did give me the addresses of Erich Schmorell and the Hartnagels. And you know from the July 13, 2002 introduction that both did agree to see us.

At that point our “preparation” changed course. We had to throw out the questions we intended to ask, as they had become meaningless. Instead, we concentrated on ways around the blocked door. My mom was in charge of videography; she had a sixth sense about when her camera was making someone uncomfortable. Most of the time, she did not bother filming the first hour or two of a conversation. They were trying to decide whether they could trust us.

Erich Schmorell in particular said that cameras and tape recorders made him uncomfortable. He was fresh off an unpleasant experience with Dumbach and Newborn. He said they had thrust their tape recorders under his nose and asked him to talk. He’s a fairly reserved person, and that bothered him. He was even more upset when their book used what he said out of context.

So we would just talk a while, basic chit-chat about “stuff” – very often the fact that Inge Scholl refused to see me generated a good sixty minutes of enthusiastic conversation, almost without exception – before moving on to questions. I kept paper handy, jotting down notes, and recording important utterances word for word. That seemed to work best with practically everyone. It’s old-style journalism.

When my mom was certain that they would not object (and she asked every time), she would record as many hours of conversation as seemed appropriate. If the person or family could speak English well (e.g. Inge Jens, Anneliese Knoop-Graf), she occasionally asked her own questions. Amazingly, the informal conversations often led to the most astonishing revelations, when they would simply reminisce without regard to White Rose history.

That’s how we learned the famously funny stories of Alex Schmorell’s bicycle trip, Sophie and Elisabeth’s unchaperoned overnighter on the mountain with Fritz, and “the boys” smoking pipes without tobacco. The Schmorells, Hartnagels, and Lilo Ramdohr were not thinking in terms of Globally Important White Rose Historical Significance. They were recalling family members and friends they loved, deeply loved.

If the interview were going well, my mom (video camera in hand) would ask, “Would you mind if I looked around your house [meaning living room and study only – never private areas!]?” Again, when not being asked to talk in terms of GIWRHS, they told us things we never expected to learn. Erich Schmorell: “And that’s the samovar that belonged to Alex, you know the one they talk about using when they came back from Russia in 1942. And that’s the bust that he sculpted that Lilo mentioned in her book. And that’s his piano from my parents’ house.” – Lilo Ramdohr: “See that broom closet? The same one that I kept in the basement where Schurik would store leaflets. And here, these are some of the sketches we did of Pinzinger.” – Hermann Geyer: “Those are some of my dad’s designs of the stained glass windows he worked on, and here are mine. You know when you go into the Münster, you can see his post-war work [and he told us where].” – Elisabeth Hartnagel: “These photos over here, these are unpublished pictures of Sophie. And this is the book she was illustrating with Hans Peter Nägele.” – Elisabeth Geyer: “This the bust of my dad that someone did after the war. And Carl Muth? Wait a minute, I will find you a print of the portrait my dad painted of him.”

We were often overwhelmed and moved by how open some of these people were.

If they offered us documents of any sort, we gladly accepted. Copies of letters, out-of-print books, unpublished lectures they had given, extra copies of then-new books (and in the case of Dr. Wolfgang Huber, copies of two very old books his father had written), newspaper articles, copies of poems they loved then and now, it did not matter. We took it all, and read it later – often the same night. Sometimes I would have more questions days after the interview, after reading the things they had given me.

And always, but always, our interviews ended with, “Whom do you know who would talk to us?”

Schmorells recommended Probsts and Ramdohr. Lechner recommended Geyers. Geyers recommended Daub and Saur, along with a couple of people who refused interviews. Jens talked to Hartnagel on our behalf. And so the network expanded.

The “interviews” did not stop there. I guess we pestered more people in Germany those months than most people pester in a lifetime. We talked to people in archives, in hotels, over dinner. If they were open to questions, we asked. Some people did not even wait for us to ask. Frau Braun in the Stadtarchiv Ulm overheard our queries at the main desk, and volunteered to talk to us. The staff of the Martin-Luther-Kirche in Ulm was so eager to set the record straight on the ‘involvement’ of that structure in White Rose activities that they anticipated inquiries by saying, “You may have heard X, well, that’s simply not true.”

Even our purely-photography sessions evolved into exciting Q&A. While snapping pictures of the Scholl’s house on Kerner Str. (now a modest governmental structure), the office manager came out to see what we were doing. When we explained, she went back inside, reemerging with the blueprints of the 1934 remodeling. We talked to groundskeepers, building supers, maintenance personnel, secretaries, librarians, whomever would spare us a minute. If possible, we found old-timers who could explain neighborhoods, structures, re-routed streets, and more.

In December 1998, I had to go to Munich on non-White-Rose business. Even that trip was used for the underpinnings of our work. Dr. Hermann Krings had written me in 1995 after we returned the first time, giving us the exact address of Willi Graf’s “refuge with friends” called the Siegfriedstrasse in White Rose literature. I found it, taking pictures of that house and its neighborhood. I also took a printout of the routes they followed during the graffiti operation, and tracked one of the paths on a nearly moonless, brutally cold night – at midnight, alone – duplicating as nearly as possible what it felt like to do something that recklessly courageous.

The next night, I visited Hans Forster – a Münchner – with my 1937 map in hand. He retrieved his modern map, and we worked through all three routes through the eyes of a student at the University of Munich, as Hans Forster had been.

Our much shorter 2002 trip truly was a matter of wrapping up as many loose ends as possible. We took a list of places we had missed photographing or videotaping before, and arranged in advance to talk with Lilo Ramdohr, the Probsts, Susanne Hirzel, and Dr. Huber, all of whom had either been ill, unknown to us, or going through a rough spot in 1995. We re-visited some whom we had met in 1995. And we met Dr. Armin Ziegler and his wife Brigitte face to face for the first time, a serendipitous occasion.

We followed the same procedures as in 1995, only videotaping once we were certain it was all right. In all, we have about twenty-two hours of video, plus approximately one thousand photographs.

METHODOLOGY:

It is one thing to have that much information. It is quite another to be able to process it.

As previously mentioned, in 1994 I had compiled a written ‘database’ of sorts to organize events. Even with such sparse references available, it comprised 750-800 handwritten, double-sided pages. I knew I could not continue with that compilation method.

But first, to backtrack. Even in my naïve, innocent days of White Rose research, I understood that to “see” this story, I could not merely look at the (then-Scholl) letters in order and layer on the commentary. One of Sophie’s letters could cover two or three weeks of activity. To write about their lives in a halfway chronological fashion required deconstructing the correspondence and diaries – preserving the integrity of when a letter was dated, but breaking down what they said they had done to the proper timeframe, as well as keeping an eye open for what they said they were going to do the next day.

Maintaining this chronology was hard but viable if I limited myself to the Hanser, Steffahn, et al references.

When I added in Willi Graf, and the Geyers, and Schurik, and Lilo’s memoirs, and then Susanne Hirzel’s? Unwieldy does not even begin to describe it.

At first, I tried creating a document ‘database’. That is, I set up one document as April 1942, one as May 1942, and so on. I typed in the text, putting it in proper sequence as I went. That worked fine, as long as I was inputting sequential data, e.g. diaries or letters, that did not skip around a lot.

The minute I addressed the memoirs, miscellaneous letters, and other documents, and more general materials, the document database likewise became unwieldy. In addition, document files were unstable as they grew larger – something that was truer with DOS- and Windows 95 based word processors than with subsequent software.

I attempted to finesse the issue by using Microsoft Outlook, which had the distinct advantage of allowing me to cut and paste from Word documents. But I could not manipulate data output, and it was a pain to use. (That being said, for smaller projects I would highly recommend Outlook.)

So I spent some time researching available databases on the Internet. The ones I had known best from accounting days – especially Paradox – were too expensive. Others like the old Lotus Symphony were too geared to financial information. I played around with Microsoft Access and could not see how to customize it sufficiently.

Just as I was about to give up, I ran across Active Diary, which appeared to be precisely what I needed. When I downloaded it, I realized it could not import Word documents. And it had the nasty habit of cutting off longer entries. The entries showed up onscreen, but when printed, stopped at about half a page. The software designer kept promising to fix that bug, but he never did. I began to feel like this project would die for lack of adequate resources.

I mentioned my quandary to a friend named Finley Shapiro, who unbeknownst to me designed massive Microsoft Access databases for the manipulation of engineering data. In fifteen minutes, he whipped out a form and tables design that became the basis for everything I’ve done since. Over the next two or three weeks, he assisted me as I worked to set up drop-down lists (you have to write names and places the same way every time to have a hope of success – computers are picky), added new fields, and created reports.

For the next several years, data entry was breakfast, lunch, and supper. Ali Hossein Zadeh Sarraf figured out a way to get old documents off a PC that did not have a 3-1/4” floppy drive. Anything already done could be added to the Access database.

To make certain that it is clear: If I enter a letter dated October 10, 1942 into the database where the person writing the letter says “On Monday, we did X and Y,” I do two things. I enter in the database that that person wrote a letter to whomever on October 10, 1942; and I enter the action on the Monday’s date. Since I keep Microsoft Outlook running in the background, I can quickly know that the previous Monday was October 5, 1942. For the October 5 entry, I note in a primary footnote that the information came from a letter dated October 10.

If there is another undated reference to that same event (e.g., “Do you remember when we said goodbye at the train station?”), I enter it on the date I am certain that event happened. Once an event has been credibly dated, it anchors all subsequent references to that event, or to anything that is dated by that event (e.g., “the day after we said goodbye at the train station”). Dates that I can fix with a high degree of certainty are my favorites!

When an entry states – as many do – “at the first of September 1939” or “in the summer of 1934”, I assign an arbitrary date. First of a September is always assigned September 1. Mid-September is always assigned September 15. End of September is always assigned September 30, and the same for all months. In the body of the entry, I write: “[Date is estimate. First of September.]” For the even less specific “summer of 1934,” I assign an arbitrary date of July 15, with a similar note in the body of the entry.

Occasionally these vague dates have a way of sorting themselves out. What may read as “the first of September” in one account may be called “the first Sunday in September” in another. Non-dates like “first Sunday in September” are just as good – and in fact, sometimes more accurate – than writing “September 3, 1939”. More accurate, because these very human people sometimes wrote dates inaccurately, mixing up their days (e.g. “Monday, October 6, 1942”).

In addition to date, author, and footnote, I have fields for source information, and a secondary footnote area that is largely superfluous – a “just in case” field that does not print. I have recently added a new field called “Update 2003” that I will use to indicate materials entered into the database since July 13, 2002. Finally, Access automatically generates a record field, which will primarily be useful if we ever receive funding that would enable us to put the database online.

As an aside: I can search the entire database for a name, or place, or other reference. Access has a small bug that confuses it occasionally with multi-word searches (“Carl Muth” sometimes sends it spinning). But generally, this is one of its most valuable tools. I can also sort by date, by name, by reference, and now by update level; and I can filter by those same criteria. Want to know what Otl Aicher had to say? Hit the funnel on an Otl record.

These features provide the critical ability to narrow heretofore-impossible dates down to a few highly probable scenarios. In this volume, it enabled us to reasonably identify the date of the weekend that Otl Aicher spent with Sophie Scholl in Freiburg. Once we excluded dates that were out of the question, there were only a few “possible” dates left, which in turn were whittled down to two choices.

As important as the “dating” mechanism proved to be for Volume I of this history, it is even more vital in Volume II.

At this stage of data entry, I do not deconstruct the letter, diary, interview, or memoir into hours and minutes. If Willi Graf writes that he did this, that, and the other on a specific date, that all goes into the same entry without a time notation.

As of November 30, 2003, the Microsoft Access database contains only primary source materials, plus Inge Jens’ excellent footnotes to both the Scholl and Graf letters and diaries. Please note that I did include the historical comments that Susanne Hirzel made in her memoirs as part of the “primary source” materials entered into the database. She did not personally witness every historical incident recorded in her book, but it was a part of her world that she felt was important enough to include.

When it was time to write the book, the Access database in essence became my 3” x 5” note cards.

I had already decided that I wanted to cover about three months in each chapter. January 31, 1933 through April 30, 1942 encompasses 9-1/2 years. Thirty chapters at three months apiece seemed to be a reasonable approach. I knew I would not stick to that division religiously, as history does not break down into nice, neat semesters or quarterly statements. But it was my goal.

Additionally, the April 30, 1942 cutoff was not a capricious date. From May 1, 1942 on, everyone who composed the core of the group of friends in Munich was in Munich. They did not all know each other yet. Only a few had talked openly – openly meaning “to each other”, not “in public” – about resistance. But they had gathered in a place and at a time where they could find mutual sustenance as their “No” resonated ever louder.

This book therefore tells the story of how they got to the place where they would risk their lives for justice and freedom. What happened in their childhood, school days, Labor Service experiences that made them decide to rebel.

To write it, I printed out six months at a time from the Access database. The “dump” shows the date, who said what, and any footnotes (such as “from letter dated October 10 to Fritz Hartnagel”). Access perfunctorily prioritizes the dump alphabetically within dates, an attribute I actually like. You may notice a sense of rhythm in the way the narrative alternates between individual. That is a carry-over from the Access dump, which I frankly enjoyed reading.

I printed out six months, instead of three, so I could ensure that I told the story in context. Having the ability to look back and ahead enabled me to keep one eye on where the story had been, one on where it was headed, and a critical eye on where it was at present.

At this point, I examined the printout to see where dates are still open. If something was clarified by that review, I edited the date in the database, if necessary adding how that date was determined. If a single day was cluttered by too many entries, I split up the entry, adding hour and minute to the date. This procedure did not affect Volume I as much as it will Volume II, where several people describe the same event, and we know more about their activities from the Gestapo transcripts. (I can promise you now that no matter your White Rose knowledge level now, you will still be astonished when you read about events on February 18, 1943.)

Four history texts stayed close at hand during the writing: Marshall Dill’s Germany, Philip Gavin’s History Place, Frank Smitha’s long, informative chapter on European history of the 1930s, and the Reichstag’s bluntly honest Questions on German History. Additionally, my ISP ran in the background as I typed. If I found a name, place reference, or event, which was not explained in a White Rose text or one of those references, I Google’d for it.

Sometimes I even Google’d for an item where an explanation existed, if I was not satisfied with the explanation. Example would be Susanne Hirzel’s holding up Rev. Grüber as an example of a Lutheran pastor who helped German Jews. When I Google’d for him, I found the Web site of the organization in Berlin that he founded – and learned that her account did not say that he rescued only German Jews who had converted to the Lutheran religion. When Dr. Wittenstein told me that his friend’s father had worked at the mental hospital in Zwiefalten, but that he was just a pencil-pusher and not really responsible, I Google’d for + Zwiefalten +Metzger and found partial transcripts of his post-war interrogation by the French military in which he admitted to having been fully responsible.

If Dill or the others referred to a document, I Google’d to see if that document was available online. I did not doubt Dill’s assessment of the Treaty of Versailles or Chamberlain’s speech to the House of Commons. But if at all possible, I wanted to read it myself. Thanks to Yale University’s Avalon Project, and others like it, I could do precisely that.

Because the Internet is not a static community, I printed out the online documents referred to in this book. That binder is in my “active library” alongside other reference materials.

The written layers of this, the seventh draft, were (in order of importance): Primary source materials about the White Rose from Access database; secondary sources about the White Rose (rarely used); the four historical references named above; and finally, Web sites.

As I finished chunks of the book, I emailed them to Dr. Armin Ziegler. He apologized once for being such a “pingelig” (picky) fact-checker. I responded that that was exactly why I was pleased he had agreed to the task. While he concentrated on keeping my work honest, our correspondence frequently would drift off to discussing “tangential” issues – what had happened in Crailsheim over Kristallnacht, our similar-yet-different views on Sophie Scholl’s relationship with Otl Aicher, what the world would have been like had there never been a Hitler.

Those emailed conversations made me comprehend the potential of this book. If discussions like ours can spring up in small groups wherever our work is read, I will feel like we have achieved something monumental.

Our vendor twice messed up the order for the covers of the regular edition. That allowed a bit more time to chase rabbits and add a few details that would have gone neglected otherwise.

Once I was convinced that the details were nailed down and shoelaces tied, the manuscript went to Joyce Light for copy-editing. Almost immediately, work began on the 2003 update.

© 2003 Ruth Hanna Sachs

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Date of last update: 18 March 2008