Não nos calaremos, somos a sua consciência pesada; a Rosa Branca não os deixará em paz: a Rosa Branca e sua resistência ao nazismo (1942-1943)

Abstract

The White Rose was a group of non-violent resistance that emerged in Munich, in Hitlers Germany between 1942 and 1943. Its members were students from the University of Munich Hans and Sophie Scholl, Alexander Schmorell, Christoph Probst, Willi Graf and university professor Kurt Huber. They distributed leaflets as a way of spreading resistance to National-Socialism, and all were executed by the Gestapo for a crime of high treason. The pamphleteering took place in two phases: the first, in 1942, called White Rose Leaflets, and the second, in 1943, called the Leaflets of the Resistance Movement in Germany. While in the first phase these young men preached a non-violent resistance based on the principle of sabotage of all the mechanisms of the Nazi Party, the second phase sought a more active and integrated resistance with other resistant groups in Germany. There is a radicalization in the intentions of action between 1942 and 1943 and one of the objectives of this dissertation is precisely to detail more deeply the nuances of this change of thought. Therefore, the present work seeks an analysis of the resistance proposed by the White Rose in its two phases of performance and the main concepts present in its writings: freedom, resistance and guilt. The theories of Hannah Arendt, Zygmunt Bauman and Tzvetan Todorov are articulated in the reflection on the totalitarian state and the possibilities of action in its duration, as well as of resistance to it. The memory of the White Rose that was created after the war will be observed to understand the dynamics of resisting during a totalitarian government. In addition, the goal is also to tell a story about the lives of these students and the road to resistance.