Long Live Freedom (Es lebe die Freiheit)

Robyn 0:00

Nothing is worse than a civilized nation allowing itself to be governed by a clique of rulers that is irresponsible and corrupt.

Thad 0:25

One year ago, we started the Messy History Podcast. And it didn't originally start out as a podcast. This was originally a book project. And we hadn't intended to do this episode. We actually had started recording another episode. And that episode kind of fell apart from underneath us. And so as we were sitting there, kind of despondent, uh, tried to figure out what we were going to do for this episode or how we were going to salvage it, we went back over all of the things that we haven't talked about, which have been many. In fact, we have sat down and recorded a number of half episodes or even full episodes that eventually we just scrapped because we couldn't use them or they didn't fit what we were trying to do at the time. And so when we were looking over the wreckage of the last episode that we were trying to put together, we we talked about it and we thought, you know what? Maybe what we should do is instead of trying to salvage or pull together this story that we wanted to tell you, maybe what we should do is tell you a little bit about our story over the last year, year and a half of how we got here and the stories that we didn't tell you. Why we didn't, why we didn't use those episodes use those stories, why we didn't make those episodes, and the difficulty of dealing with just the absolute actual messiness of people and their stories. So let's go back to January 2025. I'm sitting here in my office, and Robin walks in and says, I've got to do something. It's on my mind, it's on my heart. I think I'm gonna write a book.

Robyn 2:15

Well, that's not exactly how it happened. I came in and said, I've got to do something bad. And you said, Well, why don't you write a book? And I said, Because I don't have a PhD in history and no one's gonna read it. And he said, Well, do you have to have a PhD to write a book? Because there's a lot of books out there that haven't been written by someone like that.

Thad 2:35

Which, I mean, saying said it to be fair, you do have a master's in modern German history.

Robyn 2:40

I do.

Thad 2:41

And you are a teacher who has been teaching history for the last eight years now. Yes. So it's not like you're just completely unex inexperienced with his historical research and history writing and and doing, you know, doing that. I mean, you you spent, I mean, when I met you, had been telling me about you know the week that you'd spent in the archives of the Holly United States Holocaust Museum uh doing research on what's it the T4 program?

Robyn 3:07

Oh, T4 and the changing definition of racial hygiene in Germany.

Thad 3:12

So something incredibly, you know, mainstream.

Robyn 3:14

Uh totally.

Thad 3:16

But I'm curious now. Like let's let's talk about it for just a second.

Robyn 3:19

Okay. So basically, you came back from World War I. Uh a lot of healthy men had gone off to war, had been injured, uh, hundreds of thousands of people had simply died from starvation, and that healthy crop of men just wasn't there anymore. Now, this wasn't just a problem in Germany, it was pretty much around the Western world, um, that you just lost this generation of healthy men. But in Germany, they decided the best way to continue their society, like what would be the best Germany for the future, and it was racial hygiene, which they went into scientific textbooks to make it look like people of other races were not as developed as the Aryan race. And they based a lot of this on social Darwinism, which um Charles Darwin was the one that talked about, you know, the way animals would change over time to match their environments. I think one of the main ones he talked about were moths. And so they were basically applying Darwinism to the greater society. Gerhard, who we talked about a couple of episodes back. A couple of episodes back in the world turned upside down. Right. Um, he was a medical student. And he literally talked about going to lectures where they were trying to figure out how to change what courses to take, what to teach in those courses.

Thad 4:45

Uh so the pseudoscientific idea that you know you have like these deformities and these other races. So where they were thinking about they had this ideal race that you wanted to try to breed for. And so, I mean, you know, if you think about it, it's like, well, we can breed, you know, tomatoes to grow the way we want, and we can breed crops, you know, to be the kind of corn that we want. And so really we should do the same thing with people. And so that was the eugenics, the eugenics movement back then.

Robyn 5:12

With um the life unworthy of life is the way it's translated into English.

Thad 5:17

So bringing that back, what you had been setting, you know, 20 years ago, was how Germany was dealing with societal change. Because, you know, World War I was a pretty big deal. And you have to remember that the people here in Germany, they have gone through the Franco-Prussian War, they had been multiple different states, they had come together as Germany, they'd been all unified, and then they have this huge war, tons of people die, everybody's hungry. They had this Treaty of Versailles that has punished them, and you know, they're they're having a problem, you know, that doesn't seem fair to them. It's not great. And so everything has changed. I mean, their world is literally. I mean, we we did a uh an episode, the world turned upside down. Their world has been turned upside down. And so the thing that motivated Robin was all this study of well, what do people do? I mean, what what does it look like? When your world's been flipped upside down and everything's changing, well, what do you do? Like, what what does it look like? And what did these people do? And not just Germany, but like she said, you know, France, England, uh, Russia, all these, you know, the Europe that we can look at during World War I, they like everything's changed for them. And, you know, when you take that, you look through that time period of industrialization and automobiles and electricity and wars, then you take, you know, Europe, but then you can go further and look at how this affected China and Japan, United States, south, I mean the countries in South America, like the entire world is changing, it's shifting, and it's happening really fast, and people are dealing with it in different ways. And so it seemed to Robin and to me as well that it's important to figure out well, what what were they doing? What did they do right? What did they do wrong? What were the missteps that they made? And to pay attention to that and to learn from it because our world is changing. In 2026, there are a lot of things happening that are changing the face of our politics, that are changing the face of our environment, that are changing demographics. We have AI now, which is you know coming along to possibly you know replace huge amounts of jobs.

Robyn 7:38

And so all of this was incredibly overwhelming for me. Just so much change, so much going on, so much uncertainty, and feeling like there is nothing I can do. Like, what am I what can I do to help this, not necessarily sta stop the change, but to adjust and to deal with the change. And so the only thing I could come up with was write a book. Because as that said, it's true. I already had a huge library, I already had knowledge um on the T4 euthanasia program and definition of racial hygiene, which of course, studying those things, you learn a lot more about what was going on in Germany at the time. And so I already had that to draw on. I was just worried at the time, no one is gonna take me seriously. And so Thad had to explain to me that I'm not writing for effort, this isn't for academia, right? This is this is for society, this is for everyone else who is as upset and just uncertain and feeling like there's no grounding anywhere.

Thad 8:48

And so the thing is, is that our society is changing. It has to. And we're not gonna stop it. And we can stick our head in the grounds and and pretend that it's not, but it's going to, regardless of what you or I or or anybody wants. History isn't going to repeat. When we look back, we we're not gonna say we can't look back and be like, oh, you know, we're gonna be just like Germany, or we're gonna be just like Russia, or we're gonna be just like the United States was uh in, you know, a hundred years ago. We're not ever going to get back there.

Robyn 9:22

And so the quote that Mark Twain is um Samuel Clemens is attributed to, not necessarily said, but attributed to frequently is um history does not repeat itself, it rhymes.

Thad 9:33

Right. So it became the thing that the way that we're looking at this is that you know, if we are going to be changing our social structures, if we're gonna be changing our society, if we're gonna be changing the economy, the environment, I mean everything, if we're gonna be dealing with this great change that is in the process of happening and going to continue for quite a while now, then it would be fit us to look at what our ancestors did. And in fact, not that far back. I mean, we're all related to people. We have grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents. They did this, they went through the world changing. They made mistakes, they had some good ideas, some things worked out, some things didn't. So, our job is to look at that and to learn from the things that they did. We're not going to repeat what they did. We're never going to be in those exact same circumstances because this is a different world. It's going to be something else. It's going to be something new, but we can absolutely learn from this. And so, when we we were talking about academia, this is the time for non-academics to engage with history. It's very, very important. We have to have those, the we have to stand on the shoulders of those giants. We have to have had the archivists, we have to have had the people that have been preserving history, we have to have the people that have been holding on to their family papers and their pictures and their family stories. We have to have the historians that help and come give us the broader context of what was happening and what was going on around, and what what do we think was real? What do we think was just kind of made up?

Robyn 11:15

And you need those books. We have to have them. You have to have the uh the historians that spend their entire life studying Hitler, right? Or even one aspect of something that's going on. You need those people.

Thad 11:30

The thing is, is that we we all have different things that we're interested in that we can go and we can take from. But what we feel is that us, but not just us, all of us together need to take a moment at this time in 2026 and re-examine our history, each of us. Not just we're we're doing a podcast, but we have gained a lot of insight from the research and reading the things that people have written and studying the wider history and digging down into various you know rabbit holes that you know we we find, you know, going to the diary archive and pulling these diaries out and reading what normal everyday people were writing and how they perceived the world changing around them and how they dealt with it, what they thought about it. Um, that has given us a lot of perspective. And so this isn't about just us coming and giving people stories. We feel that it's important for all of us collectively to spend time re-examining that, not huge amounts of time, but it's worthwhile looking at the past to figure out how we're how we're going to navigate the change that's happening to us now.

Robyn 12:40

So my first thought was I need to hear the stories of people who lived through this. Uh when I was in college in grad school, um I worked for the Center for the Study of War and Society, did an interview and that went to the National Archives, transcribed a lot of interviews, and worked and took oral history classes. It was a huge part of me, and it still is. But it I needed to find people that lived through this. So of course it was 2025 at the time, a long time after anyone would remember anything right. And so I searched through Holocaust Museum, um, their website, and read over a hundred of different transcripts of oral history interviews, things that had been done with their living history project, and came across Edward Adler, who we have a podcast on, the Jew who stood guard for Hitler. And and he was a Jew, but he had he had stories of what life was like in Germany at the time.

Thad 13:43

Which his story was interesting because you know he uh he thought the Nazis were were neat. You know, they were the ones that were standing against the communists, and so uh, you know, he was like, Yeah, these guys have a pretty good idea. Sign me up. And so Adler thinks that, oh, this is pretty interesting. The Nazis have a pretty good idea. So he joins the uh the Nazis against, you know, against the communists, because the communists are trying to create all kinds of problems and they're gonna create a civil war. So he joins the Nazis.

Robyn 14:06

And the Nazis were offering them jobs. He said, you know, nice, clean, shiny boots and money, because at the time there was a recession in Germany because, well, I mean, thanks like the Treaty of Versailles, basically, Germany was in debt. Unemployment was really high. So the Nazis came in and were like, hey, if you come work for us, we'll give you clothes, boots, a job, security. And so he was like, Well, that sounds like a good plan.

Thad 14:34

Yeah, and he's young, he's a young guy. You know, he he's he's young, dumb. He doesn't know what's going on. So he's like, sure, I'm gonna go to this. And uh, you know, he's there hanging out with and then eventually they discover that he's Jewish and they inform him that, hey, by the way, uh, being Jewish disqualifies you from hanging out with the Nazis. So unfortunately, he uh he's kind of bummed about that, but he goes on about his life. He has a really interesting story, and you should go listen to it. But so we find that but Adler, and Robin's like, this guy is really amazing. So, you know, we listen to his and also, I mean, we have a podcast on him, but he also has an entire oral history, an interview where he talks about this, and this is at the uh the United States Holocaust Museum. You can go find it online, and you can watch the interview with this guy where he is, you know, as an older man now describing his experiences, and it's really, really powerful. It's it's very interesting to watch. And and get his perspective on a thing that, you know, we just we we none of us were there, so we don't know exactly what it was like. And he's able to give you a perspective that's a little bit different than you might have imagined.

Robyn 15:39

Yes. And so that was what I was trying to find with someone to interview, like the Holocaust Museum. And so I searched through all kinds of places, and I ended up tracking down a 98-year-old woman who had lived through World War II in Germany and she was German. It's like, I have to meet this person. I absolutely have to interview this person. And I, you know, thought to myself, well, the Holocaust Museum might want this for their um for their archive. And so I contacted the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and asked them if they would want this interview with this woman I was going to do who had lived in Germany during the time. And they said, Oh yes, please, like we really want this interview. We don't have many of just regular, ordinary, non-Jewish um people that lived in Germany at the time. And so gave me all the things that I needed to do to have her sign off on and submit it to them later, which I did. Um, but I came in and I was like, Thad, we gotta go to New Jersey.

Thad 16:43

Well, because you tracked her down and then got in contact with her, and she told you, she said, you know, yeah, I'd love to talk to you. And you said, Hey, we're gonna be near New York, we're gonna be Jersey, New Jersey this summer. Could we come and talk to you then? And she said, Look, I'm really old. I don't know that I'm gonna be here this summer. So Robin says that we we gotta go right now. So so we go in and we get that we get a plane, we hop on a plane, we go to New Jersey.

Robyn 17:10

And and this is like probably within a month of when I decided that I had to write this book.

Thad 17:15

Right.

Robyn 17:16

And so we went on a plane, went to New Jersey, spent three days interviewing her.

Thad 17:21

She has a great story. We haven't told it yet, but we're going to. It's it's on our it's on our list.

Robyn 17:28

So we went, interviewed her, came back, we did all the transcription and everything, submitted it to the Holocaust Museum, which was really cool because someone else in the Holocaust Museum like recognized that they had done an interview with someone else who lived in, I think, Seattle, Washington, or something, who had lived in this teeny tiny town. It was just a suburb, and they'd heard of each other and knew each other. So they were able to get into contact with us. And I think that's that was pretty cool. That is pretty cool.

Thad 17:57

Bringing people together.

Robyn 17:58

Um, yes, connections. And so, anyway, so we submitted it to the museum, and we still have all of our things.

Thad 18:05

So, after after interviewing Gisla, uh Robin went through a ton of historical documentation, tons of books, and decided that what we really needed was more stories of just regular people living through this. And we didn't have access to that here. So we were going to need to go to Germany to to run down a few things that uh she wanted. For example, the the White Rose, and then visit the Diary Archive in Mindigan and a few other places that we needed to go and get some information. And she, in fact, I think she had set up a an interview with or had gotten an interview set up with somebody who had been the husband of a woman who had interviewed a guy.

Robyn 18:52

Who is the niece of?

Thad 18:53

Who's the niece? Sorry, that'd be the niece of a guy that we are going to do a full set of episodes on in the future. There's that is a story that is near and dear to Robin's heart, and she is very passionate about this guy. Um, not in a good way, but uh when we when we come to the story of George Reno, then you will know that we have uh we have a lot to tell a lot to say about that. Anyway, so we went to Germany.

Robyn 19:21

Um well yes, and so actually Reno is associated with Hartheim, which is near Linz, Austria. So this is five months now after we decided to write a book. And then we did interviews um through actually there were people that we met that uh we were staying at the Airbnb of um families and a guy in the town that lived nearby. So we did interviews with them, drove up to Bomberg, Germany for a day, and did another interview. And this was the first time that we went to Mindingen, the diary archive, and did research there. It was the first time that we were able to get diaries and understand how the system worked, and visited the White Rose Foundation in Munich. Also, on that trip, it was a very long trip, we went to Auschwitz. And I still kind of have trouble describing Auschwitz. There's some places in life that you you just can't describe, like the Louvre or trenches, the trenches that we went to between Brussels and Paris. And Auschwitz is one of those. And for me, it's not because of the things that were there, not because of the hair that's there or the glasses or the suitcases, because I knew all of that, because I had done all kinds of research 20 years before. So for me, you know, we're going through the tour and I already I already know everything. I think it hit different than it would for a lot of people. Because for me, the coming away from Auschwitz, the scary thing was how easy it would be to replicate.

Thad 21:02

It's because when you're when you're there, you're walking around. And we we did get on a tour like eventually, but the first time when we first got there, we went to the wrong direction. Went in the went in the back way, and we're just kind of walking around completely like lost people for, you know, several hours.

Robyn 21:19

Which um I just need to say was very surprising to me. None of the plaques or anything there are are written in German. It's uh in Polish and Hebrew and English.

Thad 21:32

I think that was intentional.

Robyn 21:33

Yeah, it was intentional. But the interesting part was I uh I decided to join a group so that it looked like we fit in. And the tour was in German. So I watched around.

Thad 21:44

So you were walking around with a bunch of German speaking people, but all the plots were not in German.

Robyn 21:48

It's getting the tour from the uh for the German tour guide.

Thad 21:51

So, you know, uh like Robin's saying, yeah, the the thing about Auschwitz is you're walking along there and it's you know, it's it's the the building. Buildings are orderly, you know, the German construction. You walk in among them and and they're not. I think the thing about Auschwitz is walking through the barracks, walking through the grounds. It looks and feels like uh a place that you could go to a summer camp at. It's, you know, aside from the barbed wire and the guard towers and stuff, it's you know, it's the type of place that doesn't look like a Holocaust-level horror place. Although there are definitely places, you know, where you go and they're like, okay, and this is the punishment room where they punish people. And it, you know, that that's pretty horrible looking. But, you know, they at the at the point that the the Germans or the Nazis had abandoned Auschwitz before that had scuttled the gas chambers, they blew them up. Essentially, they were trying to hide the evidence of what they had been doing there. But yeah, just walking around, it it looks like not that bad of a place. And yet it impresses upon you the normalcy of a place like that, in that this is a place that we could build. It's a place that you could tell yourself, hey, we need to move this group of people and put them here because uh for a reason, whatever that whatever that for their safety, right? Because the Germans, you know, they really hate the Jews because they're bad, because reasons, right? And so we're gonna put these people here for their safety, or we're going to do something else. But the concentration camps, of which there were a number in in Germany, um, you know, that was a place to to put these people that they didn't want for whatever reason. And the thing is, is that, you know, that's not something that can't happen today. There are places other than Germany that have rounded up groups of people and put them together in a camp and held them there against their will for prolonged periods of time.

Robyn 24:07

And I think that it's important to point out um at this point that it was not just Jews. There were gypsies and homosexuals and um people with mental deficiencies, people with physical deficiencies.

Thad 24:23

Societal undesirables.

Robyn 24:24

Yes, political opponents, but basically anyone who didn't fit into this Aryan mold. It was not just the Jews.

Thad 24:33

Right.

Robyn 24:34

And Auschwitz and you know, throughout the other ones.

Thad 24:37

In in the case of uh Nee Moeller, it was uh it was a Christian pastor who just happened to disagree with the politics of the ruling class at the time. And because he was vocal about his disagreement, well, he got to go cool his heels in uh in the concentration camp.

Robyn 24:53

So we went through all this, went through Auschwitz, uh, came back home. I was piecing all of this together, and and the book that we were working on, because at this time it was still a book. Um, the title we had working was Long Live Freedom, um, after the last quote that Hans Scholl that's been attributed to what he said before he was guillotined. We'll talk about the Scholls in a minute, but that's why the book was Long Live Freedom. And there was gonna be a chapter on the White Rose, which was the organization led by Hans Um Scholl. And then there were going to be uh two or three chapters on Rudolf Haas, the commandant of Auschwitz. Yes.

Thad 25:39

And also one of the guys we helped build part of it.

Robyn 25:42

Yeah, yes, he did. Uh we were going to have a couple chapters on him.

Thad 25:46

As as Robin was writing a book, we looked at what it would take to put the stories that we had into a book. And we had gathered a bunch up and we looked at the the format and we looked at the stories, but one of the problems was that we had far more stories than we were going to fit into these chapters of a book. And we also just didn't have the time to be able to tell all the parts of the stories that we wanted to tell. And also, it turns out that a lot of these things just are hard to convey. Um, because everybody comes to writing and they read it in a certain way, and it takes time for you to get into somebody's head. But after looking at it and talking through it and working through it, we felt that a number of these stories, they just need to be personally narrated. And so I kept saying, you know, look, I think that maybe there are other ways to tell stories other than just writing them in a book. Um, and so that was the at the point in time where eventually she relents in and said, You know what? I think you're right. I think we need to we need to tell these stories, but we need to tell them in a different format.

Robyn 26:57

And we need to tell a lot more.

Thad 26:58

A lot more because we had a lot more, and we still have a lot more.

Robyn 27:02

And we had the first few, you know, with the opium war and Shanghai refugees and Leopold's ghost that, you know, were kind of all over the place and that showed the good the good that's there in people. Right. And then we got into Russia, where we're looking at the Russian Revolution. It's like, where do you start with this? So we went back, did the first last family of Russia, and we actually recorded a whole episode on Rasputin.

Thad 27:31

Yep. Yes, because Rasputin is one of those really interesting characters. And if you don't know who Rasputin is, he was a he was a mystic who worked his way into the royal family, and they had some issues, and a lot of issues, actually. And so he he worked his way in there, and he was a huge character, and there's all kinds of stuff that that went on with him, but essentially he caused all kinds of problems with the aristocracy there because he was sleeping around with all the wives and he was drinking all their wine. So yeah, it was a lot. Anyway, so he's he's really just making a huge mess there, and eventually somebody takes it upon themselves to kill him, right? So he is assassinated. But the story for how that happens is interesting, and but when you start digging into it, there are layers and layers and layers of different different people with different stories, um, different accounts of what happened. And so as we were going to to tell this story about Rasputin, it turned out that there was it was very, very difficult to separate out the the fact from the fiction because so much had been fictionalized about it at that point.

Robyn 28:47

Right. And so, yes, we have that episode recorded that we just I told Thad we just can't release this because you know we couldn't find enough evidence um for really any of the things to be able to bring it to you and feel confident in it.

Thad 29:02

Right, which is unfortunate because it really is. There's a lot of interesting stuff, and at some point maybe we'll talk about it in the future or or publish some stuff on it because when we did do a lot of research and there are you know, there's all kinds of interesting intrigues uh involving for one of them involving a British Secret Service agent who may have had part of this, but you know, because of the war, you know, yeah, there's there's a lot of stuff there. And and and a lot of it we just may never know. But yes, that it's something that because we're trying to be focused on separating out and telling things that are personal accounts that we that we feel confident in. We couldn't just start throwing out all this stuff that was speculative.

Robyn 29:45

Yes. And so we went from there from Rasputin to, well, we have we've told the royal family story. So let's tell the story of Underground Russia. So I found the book, 20 years in underground Russia, by a woman named Cecilia. And I read the book and it was like, well, this is really cool. Um we recorded a chunk of that episode, and then Thad said.

Thad 30:08

I said, uh so I went and I read part of it, and I said, I don't, I don't know that we can, I don't know how how reliable this is. I don't know that we can trust this woman. And so we did uh we we did a little bit more research into her. And so and the part that the part that caught me off is she's talking about Vladimir Lenin. And she knew Lenin, but she was a one of the old Bolsheviks who were was a member of his party, and she had met him years earlier before the Russian Revolution. And so she talks about going to his house and what a great guy he was. His wife has always had amazing Russian soup there. He'd go upstairs and he'd be reclining in his Russian attire, and he was oh, just so gregarious, and he'd take her and he'd talk to her about stuff. It was just fantastic. And that's great. And that is her account. And the reality is that probably most of the things she talks about in her book happened almost certainly about the way that she talked about them. However, Cecilia was a member of the Communist International, which was an organization in Soviet Russia dedicated to the spreading of communism throughout the world, which isn't that big of a deal, except when you look at what was happening at the time that Cecilia wrote this history book. She is in an organization that Stalin was pruning in order to make the history that he wanted for Russia. He was also, around this time period, pruning many of the old Bolsheviks by sitting in Siberia or killing the shot right in order to clean out anybody who may have a story that wasn't, you know, flattering to him or didn't align with whatever his vision for Soviet Russia was. So when you take the context of what's happening and the context of who's writing Cecilia and what she what she writes and when she's writing it, these memoirs, which are 20 years after the after the fact, almost certainly they have to be tainted by a sense of self-preservation. What she is writing is, yes, her story, but it is a story that she's writing because she's trying to save her life. She has to be writing a history that is aligned with Stalin's vision. Because if it had been misaligned, or if she said had presented Lenin in any way that Stalin hadn't approved of, or if she had really talked about Stalin at all, probably, then, well, she probably wouldn't have existed long after the publishing of her book. As it was, she outlives Stalin and dies, I think, in the 60s. So she had a good long life, but this book is probably one of her ways to achieve that long life. And so when you look at that in context, you're like, well, we have to, you know, we we this is good. This is so that she's writing stuff that no we may not have from anybody else. We may have, we don't have her account, we don't have accounts of lots of things that she was privy to. But at the same time, uh, you know, we have to take it with a grain of salt. And so we have to deal with the struggle that all historians have is that you have these records, you have these stories, you have these accounts, but you have to weigh them with, you know, the self-motivation of the people that wrote them. And you can't just take what somebody says uh at face value because we are always telling stories for a reason.

Robyn 33:56

Which is why we weren't able to use Cecilia. And we really tried it in a bunch of different episodes and it fitting it in a bunch of different ways. You know, we had women of the world unite for a while, right? And uh the red dawn rises. Um, but there were just there were a lot of things we went through um with it, and we were just unable to use Cecilia. And so that was another one.

Thad 34:21

Maybe in the future.

Robyn 34:22

Yeah, maybe, maybe she'll come up.

Thad 34:23

But again, it's you know, it comes back to you know, your your narrators and being able to trust what they're saying or not. Like, like Cecilia, you know, we we can understand the context that she's talking about, but it's also important for us to understand when she's writing and why she's writing. And same thing with the people that we get.

Robyn 34:42

All right. And so a few weeks ago, Thad said something to the effect of why don't we go ahead and record some of the stories, the chapters from the book that we'd written, you know, while while it was still kind of fresh in our mind. And so I was like, Yes, okay, we'll do the white rose. And then I'm very excited, had the whole thing planned out. There was this letter from Elsa Gable, who was we know that she was in the Gestapo headquarters with Sophie, was one of the last two people to see her alive. And there's this letter that is so moving and amazing, and I I cry whenever I read it because it's like, you know, the last minutes of her life, and it's very dramatic and very good. The problem with it was, you know, we found it in German, we found it English, and in the sister's book, Ingescholl, who is the sister of Sophie, but we could never find the original copy. And I searched hard, and eventually it's like it was in her the private archives or something. And the fact that I couldn't actually lay eyes on this letter that was so well written, so dramatic and things, I just I just couldn't put that in a podcast. Whoa.

Thad 36:02

Okay, so it's it's more than just that though, right? It's not that we mistrust that this letter ever existed. Right. Or or that it, you know, it didn't say what it said. But one of the issues when when Robin was putting her book together the first time and was going through and putting together the material, the historical material, the historical context on the White Rose, was that a lot of it comes from Ingersoll's book. And when you read her book, it is it's a very good book. The White Rose, Munich 1942 to 1943, is a is a well-known book. Uh lots of people have studied it. It's been assigned in schools or for German classes and various things. So this is a well-known book. But when we we got into it and we're reading it, we quickly realized that some of the material in it had to have been sourced and created liberally.

Robyn 36:56

Like there were quotes from conversations that Sophie and Hans supposedly had when they were like in a different town than Inga, and there's no way that she would have known that. And it's it's one thing to like hypothesize about the feelings and what might have happened, but she she used quotation marks. And I saw that whenever I whenever I got to the quotation marks, it was like happening here, right?

Thad 37:23

Yeah. So it's not that we're saying that Inga Schol is a liar. We're not saying that what she's writing here wasn't a good, faithful recreation of what was going on with the White Rose. But the problem is that there is a lot of material in here that is going beyond what we have, that we have uh uh externally verifiable evidence for. And a lot of that material is locked up in their family estate. And so Robin actually went and emailed and asked if if we could see it. Like can we can we come see this? You know, can we come see this letter and get access to it? So because we aren't able to, we're not able to verify it, and we're not able to get something to say, yep, this is actually a thing that happened, we had we that kind of fell apart. And so that part, which was going to be an important aspect of telling that story, was gone. Um, but you know, no problem. There is another letter that's in board.

Robyn 38:23

Yes, so then, and this actually existed, and there is a transcript for it, uh, that Sophie and Hans's father, Inga's father as well, Robert Scholl in 1951, asked the secretary of the Gestapo, Robert Moore, to um to give his account of what happened to Sophie because he was also one of the last two people to see Sophie alive. He and Elsa that wrote the letter we were just talking about. Right. And it it was also emotional good. When you were reading it, it made you feel like maybe he kind of had a daughter. If he had had a daughter that that's that age, he would feel all this sympathy for her and try to get her out of it.

Thad 39:07

Here's this good guy who's trying to save her life, and he tried really, really hard. And so you you read the letter, and it's really about her. But the the subtext of the letter is hey, this guy is a guy who was just doing his job and he really was just trying to save her life.

Robyn 39:23

And then I went and went back to find it to translate it from German. Um, because one of the things that um that is in the podcast that we've talked about, and I'm sure we'll talk about in the future is translation and transcription. And it really does matter like who's translating, who's transcribing. Thad and I talk a lot about, you know, the different versions of the Bibles. There's King James, NIV, Good News Bible.

Thad 39:50

And they're all conveying the same message, but they use different words, and some of them are easier to understand than others, and some of them flow flow differently. And so the choice of words is important to conveying the sense of what you're trying to get across.

Robyn 40:04

So I went back to the German memorandum, I think is what it's called, that he wrote to him and found it online, found it, and uh, and this woman, Ruth Hannesocks, had translated it, and she had the German there and the English there, and had very like meticulously footnoted things to the point of like, you know, Moore was wrong. This guy was on the phone with this other person or was interviewed by another person. So you're reading it and you're like, okay, well, it was a few years after the fact. Maybe he could have gotten those things mixed up. You know, you you're giving someone the benefit of the doubt for this. But then it gets to um Shoal being in prison, and Moore was the one that kept him in in prison, in solitary confinement. And so you see that, and I was just like, I just can't. I can't I can't with this guy, and when the whole episode has fallen apart, and it's just horrible. And then I stopped and I was like, it took me a few days, but then I was just like, Well, we can't do this episode on the white rose that I really want to do.

Thad 41:17

At least not the way that we want to do it.

Robyn 41:19

Um there's lots of information. Um, the White Rose Foundation has a great website for you to go to to learn more about the White Rose. I really wish we could have brought you that episode um in the way that we'd envisioned it. Yeah, that we'd envisioned it.

Thad 41:33

And maybe at some point we we can tell a story of the White Rose if we if that if that's our story to tell. And but the thing is, and something that we have we've discovered in the process of bringing these stories from from different people in different places is the understanding that, you know, like we said before, we're all in on this. We all need to be looking at and telling each other these different stories. And not all stories are for us. There are so, so, so many out here that we're we we can't do it all. And we're we there we can't even do even a little bit of it. We're just we there are a few stories that are our stories to tell, and uncountably more stories that are for someone else to tell.

Robyn 42:19

And yeah, so the whole White Rose episode fell apart. I was devastated. I knew it was the thing to do to not publish, you know, these things that we couldn't verify and weren't, you know. We I didn't feel comfortable bringing out if we couldn't verify that they were absolutely true.

Thad 42:40

There were things that were dramatic and emotional and interesting, but they presented a skewed perspective of what we think is reality. Yes. Yeah. So, you know, dealing with this existential crisis, there's a question, what what is the truth? How do we know it? How do we know everybody's not lying to us?

Robyn 42:59

And we do a lot of research to bring a full account of it. And you have to uh eventually realize that everything is colored. It's all messy, right? People are messy, history's messy. That's why we call ourselves messy history.

Thad 43:16

Why we're messy history because we're trying to make sense of the messiness, but that's it. So because we weren't able to do the episode, uh, we are going to read the first leaflet from the White Rose.

Robyn 43:32

Nothing is worse than a civilized nation allowing itself to be governed by a clique of rulers that is irresponsible and corrupt. Is it not true that every honest German is ashamed of his government today? And who can fathom the extent of the disgrace we will feel when the veil is finally lifted and our children see what we have allowed to happen? If the German people have become so corrupted and decayed in their very essence that they surrender free will, if we have become so devoid of individuality, become mindless and cowardly, then yes, we deserve our downfall. Germans appear more like a shallow, willless herd of followers, drained of their inner substance and stripped of their core, ready to be driven to their own destruction. Every single individual has been cast into their own prison. And only when they laid in their chains did they realize what had happened because they had allowed this government to continue. The fate of these individuals remains to be discussed. If everyone waits for someone else to begin, then nothing will change. Therefore, in this final hour, every single person must be aware of their responsibility as a member of Western civilization. Each must resist to the best of their ability and work against fascism and any similar system of the absolute state. We offer passive resistance, resistance, wherever you may be. Halt the momentum of this government before it's too late, before the last cities fall. Do not forget that every people deserves the government it tolerates.