Last survivor of Anti- Hitler group in Germany dies at 103

Traute Lafrenz, the last survivor of the White Rose, a resistance movement in Nazi Germany whose opposition to Adolf Hitler led to swift and ferocious Gestapo repression and the beheading of its leaders, died on Monday at her home in Meggett, S. C., near Charleston. She was 103.

Her son Michael Page confirmed the death.

The White Rose was shortlived and never counted more than a few dozen members, most of whom were young and idealistic. Lafrenz ( who later in life went by the name Traute Lafrenz Page) carried political leaflets and helped the group gain access to ink, paper and envelopes to produce and disseminate its anti- Hitler tracts, and to urge Germans to turn against the Nazis.

But the response to its activities, peaceful as they were, seemed to betoken the profound intolerance displayed by the Third Reich to any hint of opposition among Germans, even as it pursued the extermination of European Jewry and what it called “total war” against its adversaries.

As the German army faced crushing losses at Stalingrad in 1942 and 1943, the White Rose sensed mistakenly that military reverses would turn Germans against Hitler. The group’s flyers, quoting from Goethe, Schiller, Aristotle, Lao Tzu and the Bible, urged passive resistance and sabotage of the Nazi project.

Under cover of darkness, some members of the group also painted slogans like “Down with Hitler” on Munich’s thoroughfares.

Given the public mood in Germany after years of Nazi propaganda and the nation’s early successes in World War II, it might seem unlikely that a group of middle- class students with a liking for literary soirees and long walks could coalesce into a dissident group committed to the overthrow of one of history’s most dictatorial regimes.

While Lafrenz was a medical student in Hamburg, she met Alexander Schmorell, a central player in the White Rose, who introduced her to the leaders of the group, the siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl, when she moved to Munich to continue her medical studies in the early 1940s.

The White Rose’s leaflets began appearing in the summer of 1942, but the project faltered in February 1943 with the arrest of Sophie and Hans Scholl, who were distributing flyers in a university building in Munich when Jakob Schmid, a janitor, spotted them and tipped off the Gestapo. Four days after their arrest, on Feb. 18, 1943, they were executed. Lafrenz attended her friends’ funeral, even though it was conducted under Gestapo surveillance.

Other members of the White Rose followed the grisly trail to execution; they were among an estimated 5,000 people beheaded under a revival of the use of the guillotine ordered by Hitler.

Lafrenz, inevitably, was arrested in March 1943. She spent the rest of the war either in prison, under investigation or trying to dodge the Nazis as the Allies pushed into Germany. But as late as April 1945, Lafrenz and others were set to go on trial in the prison at Bayreuth, in southern Germany.

“They were at risk of the death penalty,” the Germany tabloid Bild Zeitung reported after interviewing Lafrenz in August 2018. Days before the trial was set to start the U. S. Army liberated the prison and she was saved.

After World War II, Lafrenz completed her medical studies before emigrating to the United States, where she married Vernon Page, an eye doctor. They had four children.

In the postwar era, Lafrenz remained stubbornly reticent about her activities. “I was a contemporary witness,” she told Bild Zeitung in 2018. “Given the fates of the others, I am not allowed to complain.”

Her daughter only learned of her mother’s war actions in 1970.