A founder of the anti-Nazi resistance movement inspired partly by the writings of Blessed John Henry Newman has been made a saint in the Russian Orthodox Church.
Alexander Schmorell (pictured left) co-founded the White Rose movement with Hans Scholl in wartime Germany in an attempt to overthrow Adolf Hitler. German historians have discovered that the movement was inspired partly by Blessed John Henry’s “theology of conscience”.
Schmorell, who was born in Russia, was guillotined, aged 25 years, on 13 July 1943 – four months after Scholl and his sister, Sophie, flooded Munich University with leaflets urging students to rise up against “Nazi terror”.
Because his mother was Russian and because his actions were informed by his Christian faith, Schmorell will be “glorified” as a “new martyr” and “saint” at a weekend-long ceremony in the Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Munich, during which an icon of him was also unveiled in his honour.
Archpriest Nikolai Artemoff, who worked toward Schmorell’s canonisation since 1993, told German media that the new Orthodox saint “took a very important stance, rejecting both Bolshevism as well as National Socialism”.
Alexa Busch, Schmorell’s niece, said: “His faith was surely one of the reasons he was so free and independent.”
‘Moral duty’ to defy Hitler
Jakob Knab, a German historian who helped to discover evidence of the influence of Newman on the White Rose, described Schmorell’s canonisation as a “truly joyous occasion”.
“Now he gets true recognition for his brave stance against racist Nazi ideology,” said Mr Knab.
“His basic beliefs were deeply rooted in his Orthodox faith,” Mr Knab said, saying such a motivation was demonstrated in Schmorell’s final letter before his execution, in which he wrote: “Vergesst Gott nicht!” (Do not forget God!).
Mr Knab, a Bavarian Catholic whose book Die Starkeren im Geiste (The Stronger of Spirit), on the religious motivations of the White Rose was published in Germany last month, said he hoped Schmorell’s canonisation would prompt the Catholic Church to open the causes for sainthood of two of the key Catholic members of the White Rose – Christoph Probst and Willi Graf – who were also beheaded.
A third Catholic member of the group, Philosophy Professor Kurt Huber, lamented shortly before his execution with Schmorell that he would have been a happier man if only he had followed the Catholic faith of his childhood more closely.
The White Rose was a mixture of mostly young Lutheran, Catholic and agnostic intellectuals who found Newman’s theology of conscience to be deeply relevant to their situation in Nazi Germany.
Cardinal Newman (right), who died in Birmingham in 1890, taught that conscience was an echo of the voice of God enlightening each person to moral truth in concrete situations.
He taught that true conscience was informed by the Ten Commandments, which he said, were inscribed into the nature of every human being.
This “natural moral law” has been a constant theme of the papacy of Pope Benedict XVI, another German heavily influenced by Newman and who fulfilled a personal wish when he beatified him in Cofton Park, Birmingham, in September 2010, moving him just one step away from sainthood.
The member of the White Rose most deeply influenced by Newman’s writings, however, was not Schmorell, who was arguably the most politically-motivated of the movement, but Sophie Scholl.
Today she is Germany’s most revered heroine and was the subject of an award-winning 2005 film, Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, starring Julia Jentsch.
Sophie, a Lutheran, was introduced to Newman by Theodor Haecker, a Catholic scholar banned from publishing by the Nazis but who continued to translate Newman’s works from their original English.
He considered Nazism to be symptomatic of the “German Apostasy” of the 19202 and 1930s under which Germany had rejected its Christian heritage.
Baptised at the point of death
The group was also heavily influenced by the intervention of Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen of Munster against Hitler’s euthanasia programme.
The White Rose movement began to oppose Nazism by circulating thousands of anonymous leaflets, the contents of some of which directly echoed Newman’s teachings, telling Germans they had a “moral duty” to defy Hitler, the “messenger of Anti-Christ”.
The leaflets also condemned the Nazi persecution of the Jews as the “most frightful crime against human dignity, a crime that is unparalleled in the whole of history”.
Sophie (above centre) was just 21 years old when she was beheaded in Munich along with her brother (left) and Probst (right) on 22 February 1943.
Probst, an agnostic medical student, converted to the Catholic faith in articulo mortis – at the point of death – telling the priest who baptised him and heard his confession that “now my death will be easy and joyful”.
The youngest child of Probst, a father of three, was just four weeks old at the time he was beheaded.
Schmorell was arrested two days after the three executions after a woman recognised him hiding in a Munich air-raid shelter and called the Gestapo. He was guillotined after the second wave of White Rose trials in April 1943.
In his final letter to his parents he said he had no regrets about opposing Hitler and was at peace with his fate.
The Catholic Truth Society in January published Sophie Scholl and the White Rose: Resistance to the Nazis.
The authors of the booklet, Ethel Tolansky and Helena Scott, acknowledge the role of Cardinal Newman in shaping the ideas of the movement.