Virtue and Defiance Can Stir Even the Darkest Ideologues

Hübener and countless others died in defence of a Culture they believed was worth defending. Do we have the same conviction?

From The European Conservative

By Jonathon Van Maren

The martyred young risked and ultimately accepted death to defend a culture that they believed was worth the sacrifice.

At 8:13 PM on October 27, 1942, 17-year-old Helmuth Hübener was beheaded at Berlin’s infamous Plötzensee Prison. His mother, his lawyers, and even the Gestapo had pleaded for clemency. The Reich Ministry of Justice refused. Hübener became the youngest German condemned to death by the People’s Court, and the youngest of the 16,500 people executed by guillotine. (Bartholomäus Schink of the Edelweiss Pirates was only sixteen, but he was hanged without trial in Cologne with thirteen others, including six teens.)

During his trial, Hübener was vocally defiant in hopes of persuading the judge that he was the sole leader of the group of boys on trial for distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets around Hamburg. When his conviction for “conspiracy to commit high treason and treasonable support of the enemy” was read, Hübener calmly told the court, “Now I must die, even though I have committed no crime. So now it’s my turn, but your turn will come.” 

Truth & Treason (2025), directed by Matt Whitaker, Angel Studios

Hübener’s short life is the subject of the new Angel Studios docudrama Truth & Treason. Hübener, a Mormon, began listening to illegal BBC broadcasts in 1941 after finding his brother’s radio in a cupboard; his friends, Karl-Heinz Schnibbe (17) and Rudi Wobbe (15), soon joined him. The three began to write anti-Nazi pamphlets and distributed thousands of them throughout the city by night; they were joined later by Gerhard Düwer (17).

The boys dropped the pamphlets in the street, put them in mailboxes, and pinned them to Nazi bulletin boards. The Gestapo was certain that they were dealing with an adult resistance cell; when one of Helmuth’s co-workers reported him on February 4, 1942, the teen lasted five days under torture before finally revealing the names of his friends. The police were stunned to discover that the cell was made up entirely of boys.

Despite the Gestapo’s request for clemency, Hübener’s youth did not save him—but Schnibbe, Wobbe, and Düwer were spared death, sentenced instead to long stints in labor camps, where they remained until the end of the war. In his final moments before his execution, Hübener scribbled his thoughts in a letter to fellow Mormon Marie Sommerfeld:

I am very thankful to my Heavenly Father that this agonizing life is coming to an end this evening. I could not stand it any longer anyway! My Father in Heaven knows that I have done nothing wrong. … I know that God lives, and He will be the proper judge of this matter. Until our happy reunion in that better world!

Truth & Treason portrays Hübener’s Gestapo interrogator as convicted by his young victim’s goodness and conviction. This accurately reflects the historical record, as the Nazi secret police did ultimately recommend clemency and were reportedly impressed by their young victim. Interestingly, the idea that virtue, courage, and defiance inevitably move even the most sinister ideologues has become a popular theme in portrayals of German resistance figures.

Alone in Berlin (2016), based on Hans Fallada’s 1947 novel Every Man Dies Alone, tells the little-known story of Otto and Elise Hampel, who began writing anti-Nazi postcards and distributing them around Berlin after their son was killed in France. The film portrays the Gestapo agent tracking the couple as increasingly tormented by his task; after the couple is beheaded at Plötzensee Prison, he flings hundreds of their postcards out of his office window and shoots himself. In this case, the crisis of conscience is fictional wishful thinking; the Hampels’ real persecutor survived the war. 

In her powerful review of Sophie Scholl: The Final Days (2005), Bethel McGrew notes that Scholl’s interrogator, Police Inspector Robert Mohr, is portrayed as “fascinated by Scholl in spite of himself.” Mohr would later write to Sophie’s father that he had attempted to persuade her to renounce her ties to her brother Hans and their fellow dissidents in the White Rose in an attempt to save her life. He failed, and the siblings were beheaded by guillotine along with their friend Christoph Probst on February 22, 1943. 

The Hübener Group of Hamburg, the Hampels of Berlin, and the White Rose of Munich: all were ordinary Germans beheaded for employing the power of the pen. Their writings should remind us of what genuine dissidence looks like. Hübener quoted Scripture, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Heine in his pamphlets; the White Rose also quoted Goethe and Scripture, as well as Schiller, Augustine, Aristotle, and others. This is in stark contrast to so many of today’s nihilist digital edgelords who believe that larping as Nazis online makes them culture warriors.

The German resistance fought the Third Reich in defense of their culture, one defined by great literature, philosophy, and the Bible. The martyred young risked and ultimately accepted death to defend a culture that they believed was worth the sacrifice. They were, in short, anti-nihilists, and this is precisely why their fierce conviction created flickers in the consciences of their persecutors. For that reason alone, Truth & Treason tells a story worth remembering—now more than ever.

Pictured: Helmuth Hübener (centre), flanked by Rudolf "Rudi" Wobbe (left) and Karl-Heinz Schnibbe (right). Wobbe and Schnibbe both survived the War.