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Denise Elaine Heap's avatar

Jennifer, thank you so much for this post. It came at a good time when I needed a bit of encouragement.

White Rose scholarship has been damaged first by our own Marshall-McCloy funding that was willing to overlook Nazi backgrounds if people would take our money and teach democracy. Inge Scholl and Jürgen Wittenstein both excelled at that grift. We paid both of them to reinvent themselves.

Next, what had been the Deutsche Akademie (founded in 1925) was simply rebranded as Goethe Institut after the war. Its first five directors had all been high-ranking Nazis. That means that the Goethe Institut was headed by people who never recanted their Nazi ideology until 1972! That means when I was in high school, the films and newsletters we received from GI had all been published by unrepentant Nazis. Same situation for Institut für Zeitgschichte, the contemporary history organization based in Munich.

It was almost a quid pro quo with Inge Scholl and Wittenstein. They kept one another's secrets. Did you know that the GI distributes Inge's legend-ary WR book free of charge to US schools and universities? Sigh.

It feels like an uphill battle, not one that many people are willing to join. I am very grateful for you, for your voice, for your Presence in righting the historical record.

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