Recalling September 11

From The Earth To The Moon . . . and Now on to Heaven

For most of man's technological accomplishments, I should think that the Almighty God is probably fairly ho-hum about it, given that He created the entire Universe. But when man stepped foot on the Moon, I have to believe that He was beaming with pride, saying "them's my boys!"




From the HBO miniseries, "From the Earth to the Moon."

The landing of Eagle, a Lunar Module that was really not much more than a tin can wrapped with foil, actually very came near to ending in disaster, what with the expected landing area being filled with boulders and then coming within mere seconds of running out of fuel. But thanks to the skill of mission commander Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, man's greatest technological achievement in history was accomplished.

Earlier, Armstrong had served as Command pilot on Gemini 8, which also nearly ended in catastrophic disaster, but was saved by Armstrong's skill and calm demeanor under pressure.



Now that he has landed at Heaven's Tranquility Base, let us say, "Thank you Neil Armstrong!"

To fight for the right, Without question or pause

To dream the impossible dream
To fight the unbeatable foe
To bear with unbearable sorrow
To run where the brave dare not go

To right the unrightable wrong
To love pure and chaste from afar
To try when your arms are too weary
To reach the unreachable star

This is my quest
To follow that star
No matter how hopeless
No matter how far

To fight for the right
Without question or pause
To be willing to march into Hell
For a heavenly cause

And I know if I'll only be true
To this glorious quest
That my heart will lie peaceful and calm
When I'm laid to my rest

And the world will be better for this
That one man, scorned and covered with scars
Still strove with his last ounce of courage
To reach the unreachable star

"The Day of Reckoning has Come"The Sixth Leaflet of the White Rose

Two major events were to precede the publication and distribution of the sixth leaflet of the White Rose -- an inflammatory, misogynistic speech given to students of the University of Munich by the Gauleiter (Nazi district leader) of Bavaria, and the devastating defeat of German forces in the Battle of Stalingrad. And one major series of events was to immediately follow the distribution of the leaflet -- the arrest, trial, and execution of Han and Sophie Scholl, and fellow White Rose member, Christoph Probst.

On January 13, 1943, in observance of the 470th anniversary of the University, Gauleiter Paul Giesler addressed all university students at a special assembly at the German Museum in Munich. Giesler harshly criticized the women, saying that they had no right to waste time and money by being students, and they instead had an obligation to do their duty to the Führer by producing a son for Germany. He even offered them the services of certain men if the women could not attract one themselves. Several women protested and got up to leave, but they were then detained at Giesler's direction. At this, some of the men rushed the podium, beat the Nazi student leader, and held him until all women were released. This event was the first demonstration against the Nazis by the Munich students, and it encouraged the White Rose to appeal more directly to the student population.

Meanwhile, the German offensive to capture Stalingrad, which had begun in August 1942, was ending in disaster for the Wehrmacht, which was suffering from starvation and extreme cold due to the harsh winter and an inability to be resupplied or reinforced. A Soviet counter-offensive ended on February 2, 1943, with the destruction of the German Sixth Army and attached forces, with an estimated 750,000 killed, missing, or wounded, and 91,000 men captured. Hitler's arrogance and belief in the "power of the will" had resulted in an ocean of blood.

When news of the defeat reached the homeland, the White Rose struck with a graffiti campaign in Munich, and then set upon composing the sixth leaflet. Believing that the students were receptive to the message, Hans and Sophie decided to personally distribute copies at the University, in addition to mailing them anonymously to strangers. While classes were in session, when the hallways were empty, they spread copies wherever they could, on the floor outside classrooms, on ledges, and on benches. But they still had some leaflets remaining, so they took them up the stairs above an indoor courtyard and flung them down moments before students came streaming into the hallways.

The Sixth Leaflet
Distributed February 16-18, 1943

Fellow Fighters in the Resistance!

Shaken and broken, our people behold the loss of the men of Stalingrad. Three hundred and thirty thousand German men have been senselessly and irresponsibly driven to death and destruction by the inspired strategy of our World War I Private First Class. Führer, we thank you!

The German people are in ferment. Will we continue to entrust the fate of our armies to a dilettante? Do we want to sacrifice the rest of German youth to the base ambitions of a Party clique? No, never!

The day of reckoning has come - the reckoning of German youth with the most abominable tyrant our people have ever been forced to endure. In the name of German youth we demand restitution by Adolf Hitler's state of our personal freedom, the most precious treasure we have, out of which he has swindled us in the most miserable way.

We grew up in a state in which all free expression of opinion is unscrupulously suppressed. The Hitler Youth, the SA, the SS have tried to drug us, to revolutionize us, to regiment us in the most promising young years of our lives. "Philosophical training" is the name given to the despicable method by which our budding intellectual development is muffled in a fog of empty phrases. A system of selection of leaders at once unimaginably devilish and narrow-minded trains up its future party bigwigs in the "Castles of the Knightly Order" to become Godless, impudent, and conscienceless exploiters and executioners - blind, stupid hangers-on of the Führer. We "Intellectual Workers" are the ones who should put obstacles in the path of this caste of overlords. Soldiers at the front are regimented like schoolboys by student leaders and trainees for the post of Gauleiter, and the lewd jokes of the Gauleiters insult the honor of the women students. German women students at the university in Munich have given a dignified reply to the besmirching of their honor, and German students have defended the women in the universities and have stood firm.... That is a beginning of the struggle for our free self-determination - without which intellectual and spiritual values cannot be created. We thank the brave comrades, both men and women, who have set us brilliant examples.

For us there is but one slogan: fight against the party! Get out of the party organization, which are used to keep our mouths sealed and hold us in political bondage! Get out of the lecture rooms of the SS corporals and sergeants and the party bootlickers! We want genuine learning and real freedom of opinion. No threat can terrorize us, not even the shutting down of the institutions of higher learning. This is the struggle of each and every one of us for our future, our freedom, and our honor under a regime conscious of its moral responsibility.

Freedom and honor! For ten long years Hitler and his coadjutor have manhandled, squeezed, twisted, and debased these two splendid German words to the point of nausea, as only dilettantes can, casting the highest values of a nation before swine. They have sufficiently demonstrated in the ten years of destruction of all material and intellectual freedom, of all moral substance among the German people, what they understand by freedom and honor. The frightful bloodbath has opened the eyes of even the stupidest German - it is a slaughter which they arranged in the name of "freedom and honor of the German nation" throughout Europe, and which they daily start anew. The name of Germany is dishonored for all time if German youth does not finally rise, take revenge, and atone, smash its tormentors, and set up a new Europe of the spirit.

Students! Students! The German people look to us. As in 1813 the people expected us to shake off the Napoleonic yoke, so in 1943 they look to us to break the National Socialist terror through the power of the spirit.

Beresina and Stalingrad are burning in the East. The dead of Stalingrad implore us to take action.

"Up, up, my people, let smoke and flame be our sign!"
Our people stand ready to rebel against the Nationals Socialist enslavement of Europe in a fervent new breakthrough of freedom and honor.

Hans and Sophie thought that they had gone undetected, but a sycophantic janitor by the name of Jakob Schmid ran over and detained them. After being first taken to offices at the university, Hans and Sophie were transported to Gestapo headquarters for questioning.

For several hours, Sophie denied any involvement with the leaflets when questioned by Gestapo interrogator Robert Mohr. She nearly had him convinced, but after incriminating evidence began to mount, Sophie defiantly took full responsibility, seeking to protect the others. She then put her interrogator to shame with her fearless and eloquent exposition on freedom, conscience, God, and the dignity of human life.
.

"We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace!"

The White Rose, whose members included Hans and Sophie Scholl, was a German resistance group that fought for the overthrow of the Nazi regime. But they did not fight with guns or bombs. Inspired in part by the words of Blessed John Henry Newman on the conscience, their only weapons were words -- words of truth, words of conscience. In making speaking out their weapon of choice, they had been encouraged by the example of Blessed Clemens August von Galen, the Catholic bishop of Münster, whose anti-Nazi sermons had been secretly circulated, causing a great stir. As such, the White Rose were greatly feared by the Nazi officials, who had long sought to suppress freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of conscience.

From June 1942 until February 1943, the White Rose published and distributed six leaflets, seeking to awaken the slumbering conscience of the German people and stir them to overcome their fears for their personal security and resist. Because open personal distribution of their words to the public was too dangerous, they distributed their leaflets by leaving copies in public places and anonymously mailing copies to people throughout Germany. However, for the sixth leaflet, it was decided that they would be distributed by leaving copies in the hallways of the University of Munich. A draft of a seventh leaflet was found in the possession of Hans Scholl at the time of his arrest at the University.

Here are excerpts from the leaflets distributed by the White Rose (with pdf copies of the originals available at the individual links) --

The First Leaflet

Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized nation as allowing itself to be "governed" without opposition by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct. It is certain that today every honest German is ashamed of his government. Who among us has any conception of the dimensions of shame that will befall us and our children when one day the veil has fallen from our eyes and the most horrible of crimes - crimes that infinitely outdistance every human measure - reach the light of day?

If the German people are already so corrupted and spiritually crushed that they do not raise a hand, frivolously trusting in a questionable faith in lawful order in history; if they surrender man's highest principle, that which raises him above all other God's creatures, his free will; if they abandon the will to take decisive action and turn the wheel of history and thus subject it to their own rational decision; if they are so devoid of all individuality, have already gone so far along the road toward turning into a spiritless and cowardly mass - then, yes, they deserve their downfall.

Goethe speaks of the Germans as a tragic people, like the Jews and the Greeks, but today it would appear rather that they are a spineless, will-less herd of hangers-on, who now - the marrow sucked out of their bones, robbed of their center of stability - are waiting to be hounded to their destruction. So it seems - but it is not so. Rather, by means of a gradual, treacherous, systematic abuse, the system has put every man into a spiritual prison. Only now, finding himself lying in fetters, has he become aware of his fate.

Only a few recognized the threat of ruin, and the reward for their heroic warning was death. We will have more to say about the fate of these persons. If everyone waits until the other man makes a start, the messengers of avenging Nemesis will come steadily closer; then even the last victim will have been cast senselessly into the maw of the insatiable demon.

Therefore every individual, conscious of his responsibility as a member of Christian and Western civilization, must defend himself against the scourges of mankind, against fascism and any similar system of totalitarianism. Offer passive resistance - resistance - wherever you may be, forestall the spread of this atheistic war machine before it is too late, before the last cities, like Cologne, have been reduced to rubble, and before the nation's last young man has given his blood on some battlefield for the hubris of a sub-human. Do not forget that every people deserves the regime it is willing to endure. . . .

The Second Leaflet

Now the end is at hand. Now it is our task to find one another again, to spread information from person to person, to keep a steady purpose, and to allow ourselves no rest until the last man in persuaded of the urgent need of his struggle against this system. When thus a wave of unrest goes through the land, when "it is in the air", when many join the cause, then in a great final effort this system can be shaken off. After all, and end in terror is preferable to terror without end. . . . since the conquest of Poland three hundred thousand Jews have been murdered in this country in the most bestial way. Here we see the most frightful crime against human dignity, a crime that is unparalleled in the whole of history. . . .

Why tell you these things, since you are fully aware of them - or if not of these, then of other equally grave crimes committed by this frightful sub-humanity? Because here we touch on a problem which involves us deeply and forces us all to take thought. Why do the German people behave so apathetically in the face of all these abominable crimes, crimes so unworthy of the human race? . . .

The Third Leaflet

Every individual human being has a claim to a useful and just state, a state which secures the freedom of the individual as well as the good of the whole. For, according to God's will, man is intended to pursue his natural goal, his earthly happiness, in self-reliance and self-chosen activity, freely and independently within the community of life and work of the nation.

But our present "state" is the dictatorship of evil. "Oh, we've known that for a long time," I hear you object, "and it isn't necessary to bring that to our attention again." But, I ask you, if you know that, why do you not bestir yourselves, why do you allow these men who are in power to rob you step by step, openly and in secret, of one domain of your rights after another, until one day nothing, nothing at all will be left but a mechanized state system presided over by criminals and drunks? Is your spirit already so crushed by abuse that you forget it is your right - or rather, your moral duty - to eliminate this system?

But if a man no longer can summon the strength to demand his right, then it is absolutely certain that he will perish. . . . Do not hide your cowardice behind a cloak of expediency, for with every new day that you hesitate, failing to oppose this offspring of Hell, your guilt, as in a parabolic curve, grows higher and higher. . . .

We have no great number of choices as to these means. The only one available is passive resistance. The meaning and the goal of passive resistance is to topple National Socialism, and in this struggle we must not recoil from any course, any action, whatever its nature. At all points we must oppose National Socialism, wherever it is open to attack. We must soon bring this monster of a state to an end. . . .

The Fourth Leaflet

Every word that comes from Hitler's mouth is a lie. When he says peace, he means war, and when he blasphemously uses the name of the Almighty, he means the power of evil, the fallen angel, Satan. His mouth is the foul-smelling maw of Hell, and his might is at bottom accursed. True, we must conduct a struggle against the National Socialist terrorist state with rational means; but whoever today still doubts the reality, the existence of demonic powers, has failed by a wide margin to understand the metaphysical background of this war. Behind the concrete, the visible events, behind all objective, logical considerations, we find the irrational element: The struggle against the demon, against the servants of the Antichrist. Everywhere and at all times demons have been lurking in the dark, waiting for the moment when man is weak; when of his own volition he leaves his place in the order of Creation as founded for him by God in freedom; when he yields to the force of evil, separates himself from the powers of a higher order; and after voluntarily taking the first step, he is driven on to the next and the next at a furiously accelerating rate. Everywhere and at all times of greatest trial men have appeared, prophets and saints who cherished their freedom, who preached the One God and who His help brought the people to a reversal of their downward course. Man is free, to be sure, but without the true God he is defenseless against the principle of evil. He is a like rudderless ship, at the mercy of the storm, an infant without his mother, a cloud dissolving into thin air.

I ask you, you as a Christian wrestling for the preservation of your greatest treasure, whether you hesitate, whether you incline toward intrigue, calculation, or procrastination in the hope that someone else will raise his arm in your defense? Has God not given you the strength, the will to fight? . . .

We wish expressly to point out that the White Rose is not in the pay of any foreign power. Though we know that National Socialist power must be broken by military means, we are trying to achieve a renewal from within of the severely wounded German spirit. This rebirth must be preceded, however, by the clear recognition of all the guilt with which the German people have burdened themselves, and by an uncompromising battle against Hitler and his all too many minions, party members, Quislings, and the like. With total brutality the chasm that separates the better portion of the nation from everything that is opened wide. For Hitler and his followers there is no punishment on this Earth commensurate with their crimes. But out of love for coming generations we must make an example after the conclusion of the war, so that no one will ever again have the slightest urge to try a similar action. And do not forget the petty scoundrels in this regime; note their names, so that none will go free! They should not find it possible, having had their part in these abominable crimes, at the last minute to rally to another flag and then act as if nothing had happened! To set you at rest, we add that the addresses of the readers of the White Rose are not recorded in writing. They were picked at random from directories.

We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace!

The Fifth Leaflet

It has become a mathematical certainty that Hitler is leading the German people into the abyss. Hitler cannot win the war; he can only prolong it. The guilt of Hitler and his minions goes beyond all measure. Retribution comes closer and closer.

But what are the German people doing? They will not see and will not listen. Blindly they follow their seducers into ruin. Victory at any price! is inscribed on their banner. "I will fight to the last man," says Hitler-but in the meantime the war has already been lost.

Germans! Do you and your children want to suffer the same fate that befell the Jews? Do you want to be judged by the same standards are your traducers? Are we to be forever a nation which is hated and rejected by all mankind? No. Dissociate yourselves from National Socialist gangsterism. Prove by your deeds that you think otherwise. A new war of liberation is about to begin. The better part of the nation will fight on our side. Cast off the cloak of indifference you have wrapped around you. Make the decision before it is too late. . . .

The imperialist ideology of force, from whatever side it comes, must be shattered for all time. . . . Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the protection of individual citizens from the arbitrary will of criminal regimes of violence-these will be the bases of the New Europe.

Next: The Sixth Leaflet. Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans were arrested immediately after distributing the sixth leaflet in the corridors of the University of Munich on February 18, 1943. A copy was smuggled out of Germany and, in July 1943, copies of the leaflet were dropped over Germany by Allied planes, retitled "The Manifesto of the Students of Munich."

We Remember

Film can be a powerful medium even when you know that it pales in comparison to the real-life events. Still, it gives us an occasion to remember and to reflect upon virtues like fortitude and the bravery of those who gave up their lives to save the lives of others, as in the case of the passengers of United Flight 93.

There have been a few movies made about these heroes --

United 93

The Flight That Fought Back

See also Reflections on 9/11 and
Why I Believe, or, How I Know that God Exists
.