Introduction 1 It is obvious that the defects in the critical thinking process will cause the rising power of tyrants. If people play the role as the followers who do not have their own critical thinking and share a common identity and support for dictators, they will lead to the serious consequence of tyranny. Followers believe that they are participants in any movements and they are integrating themselves into the collective. This sense of solidarity and subordination is an important component of the dictatorship. These characteristics are reflected in the process of a large number of dictatorships, such as the Third Reich. In Hitler’s Germany, Hitler makes people believe that they have the responsibility to contribute to the rising of the nation, and narrow self-interest should give way to the great goal. The fundamental reason why people voluntarily obey orders is that they have been brainwashed and trained in this way for a long time, which leads to another consequence, that is, people tend to become cowardly and obedient under the rule of tyrants. They lose their ability to think about the behaviors of tyrants in a critical way. However, the White Rose Group in Hitler’s Germany is different from other obedient people. The group members oppose the Nazism, and their behaviors also cause a negative influence on Hitler’s Nazi rule. Therefore, people have the responsibility to think critically and act ethically. The Analysis of the White Rose Group The White Rose Group was a patriotic underground resistance organization founded at the University of Munich in Germany during World War II. Its members were mostly students of the University of Munich, led by brother and sister- Hans Scholl and Sophie Scholl (Toby 06). In addition, there were many other members who also contributed to the development of the group, such as the professor of philosophy Kurt Huber, soldier Willi Graf, Christoph Probst, Alexander Schmorell and so on (Simon 42). They came together for their opposition to Nazi Germany's brutal rule and evil war. The members of the group fought against the Nazis mainly by issuing leaflets to arouse the German anti-war spirit ideologically. There were films about White Rose Group in Germany, such as “Sophie Scholl: The Final Days” in 2005. The spirit of the two young people was as beautiful and lofty as a white rose and became a symbol of hope in the darkness. In 1943, shortly after the White Rose Group was founded, the group was informed by Nazis in the school when they operated a secret leaflet dissemination action. The brother and sister were captured by Gestapo. Five members of the group were arrested one after another. Finally, they were willing to awaken the numb soul of the Germans with their own death and sacrifice bravely. The White Rose Group took measures to oppose the rule of the Nazis with their critical thinking and took ethical action instead of violence. But they found that the whole society did not think about Naz ...

1. Introduction
1
It is obvious that the defects in the critical thinking process will
cause the rising power of tyrants. If people play the role as the
followers who do not have their own critical thinking and share
a common identity and support for dictators, they will lead to
the serious consequence of tyranny. Followers believe that they
are participants in any movements and they are integrating
themselves into the collective. This sense of solidarity and
subordination is an important component of the dictatorship.
These characteristics are reflected in the process of a large
number of dictatorships, such as the Third Reich. In Hitler’s
Germany, Hitler makes people believe that they have the
responsibility to contribute to the rising of the nation, and
narrow self-interest should give way to the great goal. The
fundamental reason why people voluntarily obey orders is that
they have been brainwashed and trained in this way for a long
time, which leads to another consequence, that is, people tend to
become cowardly and obedient under the rule of tyrants. They
lose their ability to think about the behaviors of tyrants in a
critical way. However, the White Rose Group in Hitler’s
Germany is different from other obedient people. The group
members oppose the Nazism, and their behaviors also cause a
negative influence on Hitler’s Nazi rule. Therefore, people have
the responsibility to think critically and act ethically.
The Analysis of the White Rose Group
The White Rose Group was a patriotic underground resistance

2. organization founded at the University of Munich in Germany
during World War II. Its members were mostly students of the
University of Munich, led by brother and sister- Hans Scholl
and Sophie Scholl (Toby 06). In addition, there were many other
members who also contributed to the development of the group,
such as the professor of philosophy Kurt Huber, soldier Willi
Graf, Christoph Probst, Alexander Schmorell and so on (Simon
42). They came together for their opposition to Nazi Germany's
brutal rule and evil war. The members of the group fought
against the Nazis mainly by issuing leaflets to arouse the
German anti-war spirit ideologically. There were films about
White Rose Group in Germany, such as “Sophie Scholl: The
Final Days” in 2005. The spirit of the two young people was as
beautiful and lofty as a white rose and became a symbol of hope
in the darkness. In 1943, shortly after the White Rose Group
was founded, the group was informed by Nazis in the school
when they operated a secret leaflet dissemination action. The
brother and sister were captured by Gestapo. Five members of
the group were arrested one after another. Finally, they were
willing to awaken the numb soul of the Germans with their own
death and sacrifice bravely.
The White Rose Group took measures to oppose the rule of the
Nazis with their critical thinking and took ethical action instead
of violence. But they found that the whole society did not think
about Nazism critically. They chose to obey it and contributed
to tyranny to a certain extent. They refused to support the
actions of the White Rose Group. In the film, Hans made an
analysis of this phenomenon. Many people just felt isolated and
helpless, so they dared not take the leaflets, let alone read them.
Some students quickly discard leaflets as if they were
electrocuted. This inner fear was real, and the psychological
effect pursued by Nazism was to form this fear. It not only
caused superficial obedience but also forcibly deprived people’s
right to think freely. It made the public become the war machine
of the Nazi government. After World War II, the German

3. government and people had a deep and multi-faceted reflection
on the Nazi and the silence of citizens in the war. There was no
doubt that the dual crime of war and dictatorship should be
borne by Hitler himself, as well as by the Nazi Party and the
Nazi Government, but the individual who was the victim should
also bear the responsibility of lack of supervision and critical
thinking. Under the great pressure of power, silence had easily
evolved into a kind of indulgence, even encouragement. It was
this narrow and unawakened thinking that formed the ruling
basis of Nazi power politics.
Some of the young people in the White Rose Group used to be
the members of Hilter Youth, but their mindsets and attitudes
changed obviously at last. So they established the White Rose
Group to awaken the people who indulged in Nazi thoughts. It
was not an easy process. At that time, the silence of the citizens
could be understood as the fear of them. In the beginning, the
young members of the group doubted about the ability and the
guiding thoughts of the group. Some of them were even in the
group of Hitler Youth. For example, in the beginning, Professor
Huber liked the silent majority, raised his own concerns that
what could the small leaflet change in such a difficult situation
and what was the point of doing this. Hans, who had
participated in the Hitler Youth League, answered the questions
very concisely: awaken people. Huber’s doubts were right. A
piece of paper could not really change anything, even the
illusory hearts of people. However, it not only expressed the
dissatisfaction of the civilians with the Nazi government but
also showed people’s opposed attitude toward the war of
aggression. Huber changed his thoughts liked other young
members at last. He began to contradict Nazi authorities’
teaching meetings, encouraged his students to think critically
and freely in class, offered paper for the printing of leaflets,
and eventually joined the White Rose Group lastly. He realized
that the way of disseminating ideas was more suitable for
Germany. He supported the main thought of the group to

4. awaken people, liked a movement to inspire people’s wisdom.
Although the White Rose Group had the critical thinking, they
still acted ethically. They did not use the violence to express
their dissatisfaction. They wanted to awaken people by
changing their thoughts. In the film, there was an argument
between Huber and Hans. Faced the ideological restraint of the
Nazi, Hans thought that he would oppose the Nazi government
by violence. Huber thought it was not only dangerous but also
inappropriate. Because distributing leaflets was within the
scope of the Constitution, while violence was terrorist activity.
Christoph, a member of the White Rose Group, also opposed
violence. He thought that they should defeat the Nazis with
spirit. Counterviolence could only be exchanged for more
dangerous violence. Therefore, the behaviors of the White Rose
Group were remembered by the people. They did not break the
ethical principles of the society but held a critical attitude
toward the Nazism.
Although the group had caused the influence on the Nazis to
some extent at that time, they did not escape the tragic end
because of their weak power. They wanted to shake the tyranny
of Hitler and the Third Reich, but they were killed by Nazis
cruelly. On February 18, 1943, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi
propaganda minister, summoned the German people to support
the general war in his Sportpalast speech. On the same day,
Hans Scholl and Sophie Scholl arrived at the University of
Munich with a lot of leaflets. They put a bunch of leaflets into
the empty courtyard hastily, hoping that other students would
find them when they came out of the lecture hall. They were
supposed to leave before class, but when they left, they found
that some of the leaflets were still in the suitcase. They decided
to send them all. So they returned to the atrium and climbed up
the stairs to the top floor. Sophie scattered all the remaining
leaflets into the air, which was seen by Jakob Schmid who was
the campus administrator at that time. So the police came to the
campus and took the brother and sister away and handed them to

5. Gestapo for detention (Elder 89). Other members of the White
Rose Group were arrested soon, and all the organizations and
individuals associated with them were arrested and interrogated.
On 22 February 1943, Hans Scholl, Sophie Scholl, and
Christoph Probst were sentenced to death for treason by the
court, and they were sent to the guillotine on the same day to
execute the death penalty. Alexander Schmorell and Kurt Huber
were also beheaded on 13 July 1943, while Willi Graf was
beheaded on 12 October 1943. The friends, classmates, and
colleagues of White Rose members, those who had helped to
prepare or send leaflets and subsidized money for the group
were also sentenced to six to ten years’ imprisonment.
Therefore, the White Rose Group was destroyed by Hitler’s
government thoroughly at last.
Conclusion
During the period of World War II, Hitler and his Third Reich
ruled the people with Nazism. They controlled people’s minds
by killing and genocide. They made people felt fear and choose
to obey the Nazis. People lost their ability of critical thinking,
and they became the accomplices and tools to the rising of
tyrants. Although the White Rose Group did not achieve their
goal, at last, they still aroused the young people’s critical
thinking on the Nazi rule. Many people supported their actions
and got the inspiration from them. Therefore, the group made
the people understand their responsibility to think critically and
act ethically.
2
How the White Rose Refused to be Tainted by Nazism’s Thirst

6. for Blood
Hitler’s use of propaganda may have indoctrinated several
Germans into a philosophy and outlook that wholeheartedly
supports Nazism. However, not all Germans were blinded to the
truth, even though they may have served in some of the
excursions that saw firsthand the invasion of different areas.
Some of them were able to see beyond the crafty tactics and
schemes of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels to truly
witness, understand, and reject the horrors and violence done by
Hitler’s regime, enough to make them take arms and fight back
for Germany by opening the eyes of other Germans.
Thi was the common thread of the stories of the White Rose
members. The White Rose is often attributed to the group of
young German students who took arms not using violence or
guns but the mightier pen and words. Some of them had
experienced being a Hitler Youth, serving time in Hitler’s army
and taking part in invasions and the war, which crushed the
blinders of propaganda to lead them to their true calling of
heroism. They spoke out against the Nazis through their own
idealism for the country and disseminated them through
pamphlets that they hope would encourage others to understand.
Hans Scholl was one of the main founders of the White Rose.
He grew up with his sister Sophie, who would also become a
key member of the White Rose, outside of Munich under the
care of their father, who had strong morals and worldviews
hinged on religion. While Hans joined the Hitler Youth, he saw
the constraints that were red flags to freedom and the right thing
(Hurowitz). Pursuing his goal of becoming a doctor, he
remained a medic during his excursion to France and pursued
medicine in the University of Munich after his drafting. There,
he met individuals with the same ideals, including Alexander
Schmorell, Willi Graf, and Christoph Probst.

7. Alexander Schmorell, who had been canonized in 2012 for his
actions in the White Rose, had also started out as part of the
Nazi troops. He as a combat medic on the Eastern front, he had
his firsthand experience of the war when he was drafted; there
he saw killings and the loss of human dignity for those outside
the Nazi party. He had convinced his childhood friend Christoph
Probst, and together with Scholl and Graf, they created the anti -
Nazism group.
Willi Graf’s story was a little different. As opposed to the other
members’ story of disillusionment following their own
experiences of the war, he was supposedly already against
Nazism at the start. He was a Catholic who had was a member
of the Gray Order association built by Fritz Leist that allowed
him to go on camps and trips (“Willi Graf”). He also trained as
a medical orderly at the Wehrmacht in 1940, deployed in France
and Belgium, and transferred to the Soviet front before he was
able to get leave in 1942 to pursue medicine. From here on, he
met with and formed the White Rose group with its other
founders. Between 1942 to 1943, Graf tried to convince old
friends to the right cause.
The stories of enlightenment of most of the main founders of
the White Rose were very similar of the story of the freed
prisoner in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. In Plato’s narrative,
prisoners live their lives in a cave where all they know are what
is presented of them. Because of this, freedom meant knowing
the difference between reality and the shadows that were
reflected back to the unthinking masses. Freedom also meant
being able to question what one once believed in, and whether
or not it is the reality or a propaganda constructed by another.
Beyond self-realization, this freedom also led to enlightenment;
one becomes more knowledgeable about the world as he steps
out of the cave and into the light. One sees that the cave was a
fraction of the world, and that the shadows they saw were
incomparable truths to the “real objects” that can be found

8. outdoors. The free man explores and reflects about the truth he
now sees. He thinks of new ideas and possibilities, ones that he
can juxtapose with the old outlook he had to evaluate the kind
of life he lived. The question now pertains to whether or not the
free man is responsible for exercising critical thought, act
according to the dictates of ethics, and go back to the cave to
bring enlightenment back to the trapped prisoners.
This was the exact same journey that the White Rose members
had to endure. It started with the inconvenience and discomfort
in being blinded by the truth, in the same way that Scholl was
disturbed by what he saw in the war and in the Nuremberg
rallies. Like the freed prisoner, he saw the disconnect between
the propaganda fed by Hitler’s party and the reality of the
situation. He saw that what was fed to them were hidden in lies
and deception, and that the suffering of others were the cruel
reminder of the twisted ideologies that he was made to believe.
This triggered the goal of bringing back enlightenment to the
people, in the form of the six leaflets the White Rose distributed
to Germans in the campus.
The series of the leaflets, also known as the Leaflets of the
Resistance were published beginning June 1942. Given the vast
knowledge and familiarity of the group’s members with the
likes of Frierich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, they
injected ideologies into the essays (Ray). In the course of eight
months following the first release, five more were drafted and
disseminated to more Germans, which had become a sore point
for the Gestapo and Hitler’s army. The pamphlets were the
group’s way of saying “engage in passive resistance, reject Nazi
philosophy, sabotage the war effort, and break through their
apathy” (Blakemore). One could argue that their time at the
forefront of the war became a great breaking point for their
ideals to truly shatter. In one account, it is said that following
Hans’ time at the Eastern Front as a medic, he was able to see
not just the war’s consequences but also additional inhumane

9. atrocities such as the abuse and extermination of European
Jews. When he shared this to his friends, that was the time “the
friends’ detachment melted away in the face of their wartime
experiences and the growing Nazi terror” (Blakemore). This
became the trigger for one to act, because it was no longer
ethical or even tolerable to stand by and keep one’s beliefs to
oneself.
This saw their duty as people--not even just Germans, citizens,
or even students--to ensure that Germany break free of the
blinders of propaganda. Once they got a manual printing press,
they began to create and distribute leaflets. It went from
anonymous sending via addresses on the phone book to leaving
leaflets in classrooms for students to find, and finally to them
distributing the leaflets personally in Munich. They also
recruited other members, such as Liselotte Furst-Ramdohr, who
was brought in by Schmorell (Burns). She remembered how
Sophie Scholl, Hans’ younger sister, who was also brave enough
to follow in the footsteps of her brother despite being so scared
that she had to sleep beside him.
What fueled them on was their love for their country. The White
Rose group saw it as their moral and ethical duty to ensure that
they bring enlightenment to everyone. Regardless if this spel led
their doom, which it did. The Scholl siblings were arrested in
the campus, after Sophia was seen throwing the leaflets out of a
school window to be picked up by university students and Hans
for being fond with a leaflet in his pocket. They were tried
alongside Probst in an emergency session of the People’s Court,
found guilty, and executed by guillotine on February 22, 1943.
Schmeroll failed to escape and was reported by a former
girlfriend who saw him going into a raid shelter where he was
arrested and shortly after executed (Burns). Graf was arrested in
February 18, 1943 and sent to Munich-Stadelheim Prison where
he was murdered half a year later on October 12 (“Willi Graf”).
The rest of the White Rose were dismantled or fallen, though it

10. did inspire even those in the Hitler Youth, but remained with
the Nazi Party because of fear.
Looking at the White Rose members, they were nothing
spectacular or special. If anything, they had even been part of
the masses that were exposed to the propaganda since they were
teenagers. Their experience in the war and the openness with
which they allowed the atrocities to impress upon them
probably made the difference that allowed them to be “freed”
from Nazi ideology. As Schmorell put it in his letter: “For you
this blow, unfortunately, is heavier than for me, because I will
go there knowing that I served my profound conviction and the
truth. For all this I face the approaching hour of my death with
a peaceful conscience” (“No Country Will Replace Russia For
Me!! - Alexander Schmorell”).
It is not a stretch to imagine that each of the members of the
White Rose knew that what they were doing was dangerous.
Their mission of enlightenment came with the price of their
lives for every copy of the leaflet of resistance. Even non-
founding members like Furst-Ramdorh, who did not personally
distribute a leaflet but stored it in her cabinet, played a huge
role in pushing their anti-Nazism ideologies. Suffice it to say
that their resistance did not bring the Nazi party to a full stop
nor were they even powerful to change the minds of those in the
HItler Youth. However, their efforts were not in vain, especially
not when one considers how Hitler’s party were still shaken by
what would ideally just be called student idealists. In exchange
for their lives,they were able to make other Germans, even close
friends, families, and acquaintances, realize that HItler’s regime
was all forms of wrong. They were able to plant some sort of
seed in their minds that Germany was experiencing something
that was not good or right. The fact that executions of that kind
were held in public may have even served more like a wake-up
call for some rather than purely a warning, and even that alone
could have sparked the start of enlightenment in others' minds.

11. Just like the free man in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, the White
Rose members felt that it was their ethical duty to pursue the
truth and bring it to everyone who would listen. It did not
matter if those people may not have wanted it, but the White
Rose knew what it felt to be those same prisoners to an ideal
before they themselves were enlightened. They knew that even
with their relatively unknown and supposedly unimportant roles
in Hitler’s regime, they needed to make a stand. True enough,
years later, when the war was over and Hitler had become
condemned as one of the most evil men in history, the White
Rose is hailed as the student heroes, Germans who did
everything they could because they loved their country.
They did not need to be special; rather, they probably did not
even think of themselves as such. Six years ago, Schmorell was
canonized as a saint. Furst-Ramdorh, a friend and member of
the White Rose said of Schmorell’s canonization: “He would
have laughed out loud if he’d known. He wasn’t a saint--he was
just a normal person” (Burns). This is testament to what the real
goal of the White Rose was. It was not to become famous rebels
or be underground celebrities who did not conform with the
Third Reich. They had their eyes opened to the wrongness of
Nazism. They had the background to act and even the talent to
write about these atrocities. They exercised their gifts and their
reach even as students. And even if their actions caused their
deaths, they persevered because they knew that it was their
duty--as average men and women of Germany who loved their
country--to bring enlightenment to where it was needed.