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RIP, Traute Lafrenz, last surviving White Rose member, 103 [1]

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Date: 2023-03-10

Rachel's Tweet.

Sometimes we get news that causes us genuine pain. That was my experience tonight upon reading a Rachel Maddow tweet. Traute Lafrenz has died at age 103.

x “She is a heroine of freedom and humanity.”https://t.co/RB21o2buG3 — Rachel Maddow MSNBC (@maddow) March 10, 2023

As Rachel Maddow noted, the NYT reported that the last surviving member of the famed WW II resistance movement in Germany, the White Rose, died on Monday.

Traute Lafrenz, who lived in my state for the last years of her life, was the last person alive (to the best of my knowledge) who knew Hans and Sophie Scholl as personal friends.

I wrote about her, myself, in a Top Comments diary in 2019, and I mentioned her again in a diary about Miep Gies, shortly thereafter.

I wrote about Sophie and Hans, too, about their courageous fight against the Nazi regime, a fight they paid for with their lives. They were beheaded immediately after sham trials. Lafrenz was imprisoned, herself, for her affiliation with the White Rose, but managed to be liberated by the US Army just before a trial that would have sealed her fate.

Please do read the NYT article honoring this woman. If one values the study of political heroes, she should have a place in the collection. The legacy she and the other members of the White Rose left will never be forgotten. Perhaps it takes on added meaning as fascist elements exist so prominently in our present day society.

Finally, I cannot close without including this quotation (which I found here) about the members of the White Rose. (She referenced five, but I think the number is slightly higher, and I don’t know to which five she was referring. The wikipedia article lists six: Willi Graf, Kurt Huber, Christoph Probst, Alexander Schmorrell, and the Scholl siblings, but they also list 28 others who helped support the group, and Traute Lafrenz’s place must be at the top of those, if not in the original six, from the reading I have conducted. All six of those on the original list were executed during the war.)

It is possibly the most spectacular moment of resistance that I can think of in the 20th Century... The fact that five little kids, in the mouth of the wolf, where it really counted, had the tremendous courage to do what they did, is spectacular to me. Lillian Garrett-Groag in Newsday (22 February 1993)

Rest in peace, Traute Lafrenz.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/3/10/2157446/-RIP-Traute-Lafrenz-last-surviving-White-Rose-member-103

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