sleuthing

“I unlatched the shutters. The light was as intense as a love affair. I was blinded, delighted, not just because it was warm and wonderful, but because nature measures nothing. Nobody needs this much sunlight. Nobody needs droughts, volcanoes, monsoons, tornadoes either, but we get them, because our world is as extravagant as a world can be. We are the ones obsessed by measurement. The world just pours it out.”

Hans Scholl was arrested at age 19 for homosexual activity, after his former boyfriend Rolf outed him to the SS. In a letter to his parents from prison, Hans vowed to become “something great for the sake of mankind.” He and his fellow White Rose members Sophie Scholl and Christoph Probst were executed on this day in 1943 by the Nazi government (at ages 24, 21, and 23).

Hans and his comrade Alexander Schmorell founded the White Rose in 1942 at the University of Munich as an anti-fascist resistance movement. They wrote flyers urging Germans out of their "dull, stupid sleep" and encouraging tactics like sabotage and withdrawal from German institutions.