Plight from page 44

The CIA Take
According to a recently declas-
sified 1987 Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) damage assess-
ment of the Pollard case, the
Jerusalem Post reported, then-
Chief Judge Aubrey Robinson of
the U.S. District Court for the
District of Columbia handed
down a life sentence partly
because of the defendant's viola-
tion of a plea agreement that
included not talking to the press
during the ongoing investigation
against him.
Pollard gave an unauthor-
ized pre-sentencing interview
to journalist Wolf Blitzer, then
of the Jerusalem Post, Florida-
based writer Elliot Goldenberg,
author of the 1993 book The
Spy Who Knew Too Much: The
Government Plot to Silence
Jonathan Pollard, recounted in a
Jan. 2 commentary in the Palm
Beach Jewish Journal.
Citing Blitzer's 1993 book
Territory of Lies, Goldenberg
wrote that in the government's
pre-sentencing memorandum,
prosecutors noted Blitzer's inter-
view with Pollard "as a reason to
justify Pollard receiving a harsh
sentence?'
But the overriding factor in
Robinson's sentencing decision
probably was then-Secretary of
Defense Caspar Weinberger's
46-page classified memorandum
to the judge detailing the dam-
age to U.S. national security
done by Pollard. Weinberger
sought severe punishment. His
memo is widely cited "as a major
reason" why the judge gave
Pollard life for espionage, Jewish
Virtual Library reports.

Moving Forward
The highest and best argument for
granting early release continues
to be that Jonathan Pollard has
served more than double the maxi-
mum time a person convicted of
the same crime today would get
(10 years).
Why neither President Obama
nor President George W. Bush
chose to acknowledge the dispro-
portionate treatment of Pollard is
a mystery.
Peace and security talks
with leaders in the tinderbox
Middle East must be foremost
on Obama's March agenda. But
resolving the Pollard saga amid
those talks would be a historic
and overdue plus. ❑

Commentary

Today's Lessons From Anti-Nazi Resistance

New York

T

hough Sophie Scholl and the
students of the White Rose
resistance were executed by
the Nazis 70 years ago this month,
the example they set of courage in the
face of authoritarian repression is as
relevant today as it was seven decades
ago. Their crime: Daring to rouse the
consciousness of their coun-
trymen in the face of Nazi
Germany's destruction of all
civil rights and its mass murder
of European Jews.
In 1933, when Sophie was
12 and her brother, Hans, was
15, the Scholl siblings rejected
their Lutheran upbringing
and their parents' Christian
humanism and instead
embraced Hitler's philosophy
of racial superiority, becoming
leaders in the Hitler Youth.
But when Hans was arrested and
convicted in 1938 for a same-sex rela-
tionship he had had three years earlier,
when he was 16, the Scholls' admira-
tion for Hitler quickly ended. Gradually,
they became activists against the
Nazi cause. By 1942, the siblings were
engaging in daring forms of nonviolent
resistance.
In May 1942, they dubbed them-
selves the White Rose and joined with
a handful of friends at the University
of Munich to produce what became a
staccato burst of six impassioned anti-
Nazi leaflets. Reproducing thousands
in their secret headquarters over a
nine-month period — ages before the
push-button efficiency of the Internet
—they made dangerous train trips
to distribute the leaflets throughout
Germany. They mailed them to 16 cities
—Stuttgart, Vienna, Frankfurt, Berlin

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earairr-Air

gleve@greenberg-artcom

and Hamburg among them — in a bid
to mislead the Gestapo into thinking
theirs was a broad-based movement
and not just a handful of students.
"Since the beginning of the war,"
they declared in their second leaflet in
June 1942, "300,000 Jews have been
murdered in the most bestial manner.
This is a crime unparalleled in human
history — a crime against the dignity
of Man. But why do we
tell you these things when
you already know them?
Everyone wants to be exon-
erated, but you cannot be,
because everyone is guilty,
guilty, guilty."
In their fourth leaflet,
they wrote: "We will not
be silent. We are your bad
conscience. The White
Rose will not leave you in
peace!"
On Feb.18,1943, Sophie
and Hans climbed a high gallery at the
University of Munich's vast atrium.
From there, they scattered hundreds of
their sixth leaflet down upon the heads
of astonished students below in what
was called the only public protest by
Germans against Nazism ever to be
staged.
Spotted almost immediately, they
were arrested by the Gestapo and
subjected to grueling interroga-
tion. Sophie, Hans and their comrade
Christoph Probst were tried in a show
trial in Munich by Hitler's "hanging
judge," Roland Freisler. They were con-
demned to death. Just four days after
their arrest, the three were beheaded
by guillotine. Hans was 24, Sophie 21.
But their message lived on. Their
last leaflet, smuggled out to the
West, was dropped by the tons over
Germany. Nobel laureate Thomas Mann
broadcast back
to Germany from
American exile,
praising the
"splendid young
people" who "at
the time when
Germany and
Europe were still
enveloped in the
dark of night,
knew and publicly
declared" the
ugly truth about
Nazism in an
attempt to bring
about the "dawn-
ing" of a "new
faith in freedom

The White Rose, 1942

and honor."
Today, the White Rose students are
icons in Germany. In a nationwide TV
competition to choose the Top 10 most
important Germans of all time, German
voters chose Sophie and Hans Scholl
for fourth place — beating out Goethe,
Gutenberg, Bach, Bismarck, Willy
Brandt and Albert Einstein.
A German film, Sophie Scholl: The
Final Days, was nominated for an
Academy Award in 2006, the same
time that Sophie Scholl and the White
Rose was published. Its Hebrew edition
just appeared in Israel in time for the
70th anniversary of their extraordinary
protest and executions.
Despite all this, the story of the
White Rose resistance remains barely
known by the general public outside
Germany.
But heroism like theirs is being
replicated in countries around the
world. There is Malala Yousafazai, the
now-13-year-old Pakistani children's
rights activist who was shot in the
head by the Taliban last October and
now says she's ready to fight on. There
are the gays who struggle for equal
rights in countries where they are
despised and even put to death. There
are Chinese dissidents like Liu Xiaobo,
who was awarded the Nobel Peace
Prize in October 2010, but is languish-
ing in a Chinese prison.
Given the oppression, violence and
threats such men and women face —
and the costs they often are forced to
pay — we who live in democracies owe
it to them not to stay silent.
"Somebody had to make a start,"
Sophie Scholl told Freisler, looking the
judge straight in the eye on that fateful
day in February 1943.
Seventy years on, we are still that
somebody.

❑

Jud Newborn is co-author of "Sophie Scholl

and the White Rose," just published in Hebrew

by Penn Publications. He served as founding

historian at New York's Museum of Jewish

Heritage. His website is

judnewborn.posterous.com.

February 28 • 2013

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