St. Alexander Schmorell
Born: September 16, 1917
Died: July 13, 1943
Feast day: July 13
In the spring of 1942, while a medical student at Munich’s Maximilian University, Alexander Schmorell co-founded an anti-Nazi group that christened itself the White Rose. The inspiration was a passage in Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, in which a white rose serves as a symbol of resurrection. The founders’ inspiration was their Christian faith. Schmorell belonged to the Russian Orthodox Church; the other two founders were Lutheran (Hans Scholl) and Catholic (Willi Graf). It was high-wire ecumenism in the midst of war.
Before long several others joined—Christoph Probst, Kurt Huber, and Hans Scholl’s 21-year-old sister, Sophie. Today it would be hard to find a German over the age of 12 who wouldn’t recognize the names of the six core members of the White Rose. Schmorell is the first to be formally named a saint.
What the White Rose members did was simple but astonishingly dangerous: They wrote, mimeographed, and distributed a series of leaflets that called on ordinary people to resist Nazism.
More about Alexander Schmorell:
Alexander Schmorell, freed from the tyranny of fear
Under the noses of the Gestapo, Alexander Schmorell used a simple mimeograph machine to attack the evil that was engulfing Germany.
Image: Flickr cc via Jim Forest
