An Unhappy Anniversary
By DR. CHRISTOPHER MANION
Eighty-two years ago, Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans, both students at the University of Munich, were found guilty of sedition by a Nazi court and sent to the guillotine the same afternoon.
The Scholls were members of the White Rose, a peace movement that anonymously distributed flyers in universities throughout the country.
Nazi prosecutors reportedly offered her a reduced sentence if she would testify against her brother. She refused.
“Sie werden stehen wo ich stehe,” the 23-year-old Sophie told Judge Roland Freisler, when he announced the death sentence.
“You will be standing where I’m standing.”
That prediction was fulfilled in every detail.
After the Reichstag fire in 1933, Adolf Hitler had formed “The People’s Court” and put Freisler, state secretary of the Reich Ministry of Justice at the time, in charge. By 1943, Freisler had sent some 5,000 “enemies of the Reich” to their deaths.
Most notorious of his victims were the conspirators in the July 1944 plot against Hitler. Hitler had insisted that Freisler conduct the trial.
“You will be standing where I’m standing,” Sophie Scholl told Freisler at her trial.
Well, he didn’t have to — he was killed on Feb. 3, 1945 by American bombers. He had reportedly run back to his office to retrieve the files on trial of Fabian von Schlabrendorff, the last of the July conspirators, whom he was hoping to send to his death that very afternoon.
Freisler was found crushed to death by a fallen column while clutching the case files in the anteroom of the judicial chamber in which he had convicted the Scholls.
“It is God’s verdict,” one hospital worker reportedly said when Freisler’s body was brought in.
Fabian von Schlabrendorff was later sent to a concentration camp; after liberation, he served on the prosecution staff at the Nuremberg trials and eventually became a member of Germany’s highest constitutional court.
While Sophie and Hans Scholl were gone, their message lived on. Word of the pamphlets made its way back to Britain, and the Royal Air Force began reproducing them and dropped White Rose flyers all over Germany.
Even in death, Hans Scholl and Sophie Scholl could not be silenced.
“How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause,” Sophie Scholl asked just before her sentence was carried out. “Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us, thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?”
And a curious historical footnote: In 2005, a documentary appeared in Germany describing the life of Traudl Junge, whose typing skills had qualified her for the job of Adolf Hitler’s stenographer in 1943. She stayed on the job until Hitler’s April 1945 death in “The Bunker.” In the movie, Junge recalls how, after the war, she passed a statue near her home in Munich erected to the memory of a young student.
That student was Sophie Scholl. Traudl realized that she and Sophie were the same age in 1943 when she began working for Hitler, and Freisler was conducting Sophie’s trial. The film depicted Junge as completely clueless for her entire life until that moment. “I really sensed it was no excuse to be young and that it might have been possible to find out what was going on,” she said.
Bishops Stand Firm Against IVF
On Feb. 18, President Trump signed an executive order authorizing a policy review which, “to support American families,” would “ensure reliable access to In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) treatment, including by easing unnecessary statutory or regulatory burdens to make IVF treatment drastically more affordable.”
In both domestic and foreign policy, Donald Trump has firmly established his position as the most pro-life president in history. In January, just six days after Trump’s inauguration, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) had broken its rule of silence, somehow imposed during the Biden years, to welcome Trump’s cancellation of all abortion funding, as well as his renewal and expansion of the Mexico City Policy restricting international funding, first proclaimed in 1984 by President Ronald Reagan.
Good for the bishops. While saluting Trump’s pro-life policies, we must bluntly condemn this executive order. It is not pro-life, and we have the duty both to oppose it and to educate the public and the Trump administration on what IVF actually does to human life. And our bishops did so formally last week.
On Feb. 20, USCCB Committee on Pro-Life Activities Chairman Bishop Daniel E. Thomas and Committee for Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth Chairman Bishop Robert E. Barron issued a statement spelling out the dangers of IVF.
“As pastors, we see the suffering of so many couples experiencing infertility and know their deep desire to have children is both good and admirable; yet the Administration’s push for IVF, which ends countless human lives and treats persons like property, cannot be the answer,” they wrote.
“The IVF industry treats human beings like products and freezes or kills millions of children who are not selected for transfer to a womb or do not survive. Tuesday’s (Feb. 18) executive order promoting IVF is thus fatally flawed and stands in regrettable contrast to the promising pro-life actions of the Administration last month.
“Every human person is a precious gift with infinite dignity and worth, no matter how that person was conceived. People born as a result of IVF have no less dignity than anyone else. It is our moral responsibility to uphold the dignity of their brothers and sisters who are never given the chance to be born.
“For the sake of couples trying to bring precious new life into the world, we look forward to working with the Administration to expand support for restorative reproductive medicine that can help ethically treat often-overlooked root causes of infertility. However, we will strongly oppose any policy that expands destruction of human life, or forces others to subsidize the cost,” they wrote.
Supporting this stance will not win any popularity contests in coming months, but it is our duty to make clear the fact that countless innocent unborn lives are allowed to die in IVF procedures.
And let’s face it: Among the medical profession and the industry that supports it, IVF is recognized as a cash cow feeding on parents longing to bear a child. The bishops recognize that desire, but they don’t mention the financial dimension that Trump’s executive order faces squarely: While sparing any condemnation of the exorbitant IVF industry, he wants to make the process “drastically more affordable.”
Our bishops want to seek moral alternatives to the procedure altogether — a goal that might well gain the attention of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the newly-confirmed secretary of Health and Human Services.
Fertility rates have dropped worldwide in the past 50 years, but the rate of infertility among those couples seeking to have another child has increased in similar proportion. Many proposals have been made — tax exemptions for large families, “Children are the Future” campaigns, and the like. Perhaps we should seek effective ways to identify the causes of infertility and encourage programs that help couples without resorting to IVF.
(Dr. Manion’s new book, Charity for Sale: Has The American Church Become “Just Another NGO”? will debut on March 7, the Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas. It is now available on pre-order from Catholics For Catholics. Order online at https://cforc.com/product/charityforsale/)
