Eighty years ago this week a handful of young German idealists defy the Nazi regime

 

The catastrophe at Stalingrad had overwhelmed any thought of commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Nazi Machtergreifung (seizure of power), traditionally the most important date in the Nazi calendar, but Goebbels filled the gap with a speech at the Berlin Sportpalast in which he addressed the German people with "total frankness." They were offered the choice between domination by Bolshevism or resistance to the end in a total war. In practice Germany's leaders had chosen destruction as the national goal and destiny.

Three students in Munich belonging to a loosely organised movement, the White Rose, were caught after scattering  tracts calling for the removal of Hitler in the central lobby of the university. The movement was religous and intellectual in tone, but male members had served on the Eastern Front and learned of the extermination of the Jews. This was the sixth pamphlet to be distributed and group had also put up grafitti. Sister and brother Sophie and Hans Scholl and Christoph Probst were sentenced to death for treason by the Nazi Volksgerichthof (people's court) and swiftly guillotined. Hans called out "Long live freedom" before the blade fell. White Rose failed to arouse any broader protest, but copies of its leaflets found their way to Britain by the spring and were embodied in propaganda leaflets dropped on Germany. 

King George VI announced that the "Warrior City" of Stalingrad was to be presented with a Sword of Honour made in Britain to mark its resistance to Nazism. By some measures, this was the high point of British Sovophilia.

Emboldened by its success at Stalingrad, the Red Army launched a major offensive in the Ukraine. The city of Kharkiv (Kharkov in the Russian spelling then standard) was retaken, but the Germans retreated in reasonable order. 

Soong Mayling, or Madame Chiang Kai-shek as she was generally called, visited the US as her husband's representative. The high point of her tour was addresses to each House of Congress, the first by a private citizen and only the second by a woman. US-educated and very westernized, she made an immensely positive impression. It fell in with President Roosevelt's strategy of building counter-weights to Britain (and more distantly France), as traditional colonialist powers, to promote Chiang's  nationalist China as a co-equal ally in the struggle against the Axis. Unwittingly this helped burden the US foreign policy debate with a ludicrously positive valuation of the Chiang regime.