Читать книгу Blessed Peacemakers - Robin Jarrell - Страница 6

1 January 1918—12 October 1943

Silence Is Complicity

Born in the final year of World War I to Anna and Gerhard Graf, Willi Graf was one of four children. His family was devoutly Roman Catholic. By the time he was fifteen, the same year that Hitler came to power in Germany, he was a leader in a Catholic youth organization with distinctly anti-Nazi sentiments. When the Nazis outlawed all young peoples’ groups except the Hitler Youth, Graf distanced himself from friends who joined it, even refusing to associate with them. In 1934, disgusted with Nazi policies, he joined the illegal Grauer Orden, another Catholic youth group. His membership led to his arrest four years later. Luckily for him, authorities dismissed the charges as part of the national celebration of the German annexation of Austria.

Graf’s first two years of medical studies in Munich were interrupted in 1940 by his conscription into the German army. His military service took him to the Polish ghettoes in Warsaw and Lodz, whose scenes of horror he never forgot, and finally to Russia. In 1942 he returned from the eastern front convinced that his Christian faith obliged him to resist the Nazis. To his dismay, he discovered that most of his Catholic friends were unwilling to join him. Although they were as opposed to Hitler as Graf himself was, they rejected any kind of action against the Nazis as hopeless. Graf found such inaction in the face of evil unconscionable. For him, silence was complicity.

Eventually Graf discovered and joined the White Rose, an underground organization dedicated to nonviolent resistance of the Nazi regime. Launched in the summer of 1942 with the publication of four anti-Nazi pamphlets distributed from Munich throughout Germany, the White Rose grew to a sizable student movement that outwitted the Gestapo for two years. During a time when buying paper or stamps in large quantities was a risky business, the White Rose printed and disseminated flyers that declared, “We will not be silent! We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace.” Night after night, Germans awoke to find subversive slogans like “Freedom!” and “Down with Hitler!” scrawled on walls.

Graf’s main job in the White Rose was to recruit new members. But his work ended in February 1943 when the Gestapo arrested him and the organization’s leaders. Two months later he was convicted of high treason and aiding the enemy, and sentenced to death. All appeals were denied, and Graf was beheaded on 12 October. Just before his execution, he wrote a final note to his family. “On this day I’m leaving this life and entering eternity. God’s blessings on us. In Him we are and we live.”