Alexander Schmorell

Life and Ministry

Alexander Schmorell was born at Orenburg in the southern Urals in AD 1917 to a Russian Orthodox mother and a Volga-German Lutheran father, lost his mother to typhus at two, and was raised by his Russian Orthodox nanny Feodosia Lapschina in the practice of the faith of his mother. The family emigrated to Munich in AD 1921 where he was educated at the Lutheran gymnasium but remained communicant in the Russian Orthodox cathedral of Saint Nicholas in Munich, where his nanny brought him weekly through his school years. Conscripted into the Wehrmacht medical corps in AD 1937 and posted as a student-medic at the University of Munich in AD 1940, he was the first of the student core that gathered around Hans and Sophie Scholl in AD 1942 to form the Munich resistance circle that became known by their pamphlets as the Weisse Rose — the White Rose.

Circumstances of Death

Schmorell was the principal co-author with Hans Scholl of the first four White Rose leaflets in the summer of AD 1942, denouncing the German conduct of the war in Russia (which he had witnessed personally as a medic on the Eastern Front) and calling for Christian conscience against the regime. He was on the Eastern Front again from July to November AD 1942 and resumed pamphleteering on his return. After the Scholls' arrest at the University of Munich on 18 February AD 1943, Schmorell attempted to escape to Switzerland, was apprehended at the Swiss border, returned to Munich, tried by the Volksgerichtshof under Roland Freisler on 19 April AD 1943, and condemned to death. He was held at Stadelheim and was beheaded by guillotine at 5 pm on 13 July AD 1943 after a final confession to the Russian Orthodox priest Alexander Lovtchy of the Munich cathedral. His last letter to his parents records: I never thought I would understand the cross. Now I understand it.

Legacy

Alexander Schmorell was glorified by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia as Saint Alexander of Munich, New Martyr and Passion-bearer, in February AD 2012. He is the first Russian Orthodox saint to be canonized in twenty-first-century Germany and is now the patron of the Munich Russian Orthodox cathedral where his icon stands. His witness is that the cross is understood at the foot of the cross: the medical student who had served on the Eastern Front and watched the killing of Soviet civilians wrote his pamphlets in the morning and met the guillotine in the afternoon, and was given understanding of the cross in the final letter. The Munich Russian church preserves his confessional cross.