Members of White Rose executed / Zitkála-Šá born - Feb. 22

On this day in 1943, White rose members Sophie Scholl, Hans Scholl, and Christoph Probst were executed for passing out anti-Nazi pamphlets. / On this day in 1876, Native American writer and activist Zitkála-Šá was born.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everyone, Technically you're getting two days in history today
because we're running two episodes from the History Vault. I
hope you enjoy. Welcome to this day in history class,
where history waits for no one. The day was February nineteen.

(00:24):
German student and anti Nazi activists Sophie Shoal, her brother Hans,
and their friend Christoph Prost were on trial for treason
at the People's Court in the Munich Palace of Justice.
Just four days prior, they had been arrested and indicted
for treason after they were caught passing out pamphlets at

(00:45):
the University of Munich that condemned the Nazi regime. So
on February, the infamous Nazi judge Roland Freisler found all
three of them guilty and sentenced them to death. The
verdict came down quote that the accused heaven time of war,

(01:06):
by means of leaflets, called for the sabotage of the
war effort and armaments, and for the overthrow of the
national socialist way of life of our people, have propagated
defeatist ideas and have most vulgarly defamed the furor, thereby
giving aid to the enemy of the Reich and weakening

(01:26):
the armed security of the nation. On this account, they
are to be punished by death. Their honor and rights
as citizens are forfeited for all time. At five PM,
just a few hours later, executioner Johann Reichart beheaded Sophie
at the guillotine, followed by Christophe then Hans. The shows

(01:52):
Improvs were members of the non violent political resistance group
called White Rose, which formed in Nazi Germany in nineteen
forty two. The group wrote and distributed leaflets and put
up graffiti that denounced Nazi policies and encouraged people to
resist the Nazi regime. But Sophie had not always been

(02:14):
so fervently anti Nazi. Sophie's parents, Magdalena and Robert Shoal,
opposed Hitler in the Nazi regime. Robert was even imprisoned
in nineteen forty two after telling his secretary the war
it is already lost. This Hitler is God's scourge on mankind,

(02:34):
and if the war doesn't end soon, the Russians will
be sitting in Berlin. But early on the Shoal siblings
had bought into Nazi ideology, believing that Hitler would improve
the country. As children, Hans and his brother Werner joined
the Hitler Youth, the youth organization of the Nazi Party

(02:56):
that was designed to indoctrinate children with Nazi idiology and
to train members to fight for the Nazis as soldiers.
Sophie and her sisters joined the League of German Girls,
a branch of the Hitler Youth movement that aimed to
train Nazee girls and not see ideology and motherhood. But
as they grew older, the Shul siblings grew disillusioned with

(03:20):
Nazi views. After realizing how much Nazi propaganda they were
learning in school, how much their views were being suppressed,
and how many of their Jewish classmates were being forced
to leave school, the siblings changed their tune. Hans had
even served on the Eastern Front as a medic, where

(03:41):
he saw the abuse of Jewish laborers and heard rumors
of the mass murder of Jewish people. So Sophie, Hans
and other disillusion University of Munich students, including Christoph Prost,
Alexander Schmorell, and Billy Groff, began reading anti Nazi sermons.

(04:01):
They also attended classes taught by psychology and philosophy professor
Kurt Huber, whose lectures included bill criticisms of the Nazi regime,
and in June of nineteen forty two, they decided to
take action by sending out pamphlets outing Nazi atrocities and
urging people to reject Nazi ideology and rebel against the regime.

(04:26):
The movement gained ground as they mailed out leaflets to
random people, left them at stairwells on campus, placed them
in phone booths, and took them by train to other
cities outside of Munich. But the Gestapo Nazi Germany's political
police were looking to silence any dissenting voices, and the

(04:46):
creators of the White Rose pamphlets were one of their targets.
So on February nineteen forty three, Hans and Sophie took
a suitcase full of copies of White Roses sixth pamphlet
to the University of Munich, throwing some out into a courtyard,
but a custodian caught them in the act and reported

(05:08):
them to the Gestapo, who proceeded to interrogate Hans, Sophie
and other White Roads members. The Gestapo ended up finding
a leaflet drafted by Kristof probst on Hans Shul incriminating
his collaborator. So Sophie, Hans and Kristoff stood trial on

(05:28):
February twenty two, but the so called People's Court that
held the trial was just a vehicle for the Third
Reich to hand out a ton of death sentences for
supposed political crimes, and the trial was really just a
show trial as there were no witnesses or evidence presented.
The three were sentenced to death, but were surprisingly courageous

(05:53):
in the face of their executions, which were set to
occur that very afternoon in Stotleheim Prison. Just before he
was beheaded, Hans cried, long Live Freedom. Many other White
Rose members were tried and executed later that year. I'm Eaves,

(06:14):
Jeff Coote, and hopefully you know a little more about
history today than you did yesterday. If you'd like to
learn more about the White Rose group, you can listen
to the stuff you missed in history class classic episode
called the White Rose in Nazi Germany. Get more Notes
from History on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook at T d

(06:36):
i h C podcast. Thank you for joining me today.
See you same place, same time tomorrow. Hey, I'm Eats

(06:58):
and you're listening to This Day and Street Class, a
podcast where we bring you a slice of history every
day m h. The day was February twenty two, eighteen
seventy six. Native American activist and writer Zikala Shaw, also

(07:19):
known as Gertrude Simmons Bonnen, was born on the Yanktin
Reservation in South Dakota. Zitkala Shaw's mother, named Reaches for
the Wind, was a Yankdin Sioux. Her father was a
white man named Felker, but Felker abandoned the family early on,
and Zikala Shaw's mother eventually married another man named John

(07:40):
Hastings Simmons. Zikala Shaw gave herself her name, which means
red bird in the Lakota language. Zitkala Shaw spent her
early childhood on the reservation. There, she listened to traditional
stories with characters that she would later include in her
first book, But when she was around eight years old,

(08:01):
she left the reservation to go to a Quaker missionary
school in Indiana. Collishaw's mother did not support her attending
this school because she did not trust the missionaries to
educate Native American children. Did. Collishaw returned to South Dakota
after three years of study, but four years later she
left the reservation again to go back to school. One

(08:23):
of the schools she went to in the following years
was Earlham College in Indiana. While there, she got second
place in a statewide oratory contest, which resulted in her
first publication. She also studied music and played the violin.
This led her to study at the New England Conservatory
of Music in Boston and teach at the Carlisle Indian

(08:44):
School in Pennsylvania. She did not really care for the
time she spent at Carlisle, and she disagreed with the
school's founder, Richard Henry Pratt, who supported teaching Native American
students a grarian and domestic skills rather than academics objects.
Around this time that college, Shaw began publishing her work

(09:04):
in magazines like Harper's and Atlantic Monthly. In nineteen oh one,
the publisher Gin and Company released her first full length book,
Old Indian Legends. That year, when she visited her mother,
she met another Yanktons who named Raymond Bonnen. They got married,
had a child, and moved to her reservation in Utah.

(09:26):
Collishaw worked as a clerk and teacher. Her musical and
writing careers took a backseat to the rest of her work,
though she did collaborate with composer William Hanson on an
opera called Sun Dance that premiered in Utah and nineteen thirteen.
At this point that Collishaw was turning more toward activism.
She became involved with the Society of American Indians or

(09:48):
s AI, a reform organization formed at Ohio State University
in nineteen eleven. The group was run by Native Americans,
and it aimed to preserve their way of life while
advocating full American citizenship. It focused on government reforms as
well as activities like increasing Native American employment in the

(10:09):
American Indian Service, which was the agency that managed Native
American affairs that Collishaw wrote a poem that was published
in the Society's quarterly magazine, and in nineteen sixteen she
was elected secretary of the organization, a position she held
until nineteen nineteen did Collishaw and her family moved to Washington,

(10:30):
d c. There, she became involved with many other organizations
concerned with Native American rights and reforms. She served as
editor of essayi's publication, American Indian Magazine, writing essays about
issues such as land retention and self determination. She lobbied
lawmakers and toured across the US in support of Native

(10:53):
American citizenship. She spoke out on the conditions of poverty
on reservations, detailing how food was scarce and opportunities for
education and employment were few. But because she had one
foot in white society and the other in Native American communities,
she did garner the distrust of some Native Americans. After

(11:15):
the SAI disbanded and the Indian Citizenship Act past said,
Collishaw and her husband founded the National Council of American Indians.
Its goal was to make a quote constructive effort to
better the Red race and make its members better citizens
of the United States. It promoted pay an Indianism as
opposed to tribalism, so the organization foundered that Collishaw continued

(11:39):
to lecture on Native American reforms and rites. She died
in ninety eight. Her writing is noted for describing the
tension between her Native American roots and her white education.
Her advocacy has been criticized by some people who note
the impact of assimilation on cultural identity, but she is
considered an influence activists in Native American history as she

(12:02):
advocated for Native American civil rights, women's rights, education, and
the preservation of Native American culture. I'm Eve Steffcote and
hopefully you know a little more about history today than
you did yesterday. If you haven't gotten your fill of
history yet, you can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and
Instagram at t d i h C podcast And if

(12:28):
you would like to write me a letter, you can
scan it, turn it into a PDF, and send it
to us via email at this day at I heeart
media dot com. I hope you liked this show. We'll
be back tomorrow with another episode. For more podcasts from

(12:54):
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