The last white rose of resistance to the Nazis has withered

Traute Lafrenz, who was once part of the student group against Hitler, has died in the United States at the age of 103.

Columbia / Munich. The White Rose Foundation announced this week that the last survivor of the White Rose student resistance group, Traute Lafrenz, died March 6 at the age of 103 in Charleston County, South Carolina.

The anti-NS Christian-humanist group around the siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl and Alexander Schmorell emerged in Munich in the early 1940s. Lafrenz (b. 1919 Hamburg) moved there from Hamburg as a medical student in 1941, met Hans Scholl and was with him. Among other things, I brought leaflets to Hamburg for the White Rose. After Schulz and their comrade-in-arms Christoph Probst were arrested and executed in February 1943, Laverens was targeted and sentenced to a year in prison in April for complicity. Two weeks after her release in 1944, she was arrested again. In April 1945, American soldiers released them from Bayreuth Prison. Three other members of the White Rose were executed and more than a dozen were sentenced to prison terms.

career in the United States

In 1947, Laverins moved to the USA, completed his studies, married doctor Vernon Page, and ran a school for mentally handicapped children in Chicago from 1972 to 1994. The couple moved to South Carolina, and Vernon died in 1995. She has four children – And only in 2019 was she awarded the Federal Order of Merit.

(“Die Presse,” print edition, March 11, 2023)