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“I just distributed leaflets”

10 Mar 2023

With the passing of Traute Lafrenz-Page, the last surviving member of the White Rose has left us.

Traute Lafrenz around 1942 | © privat

Traute Lafrenz-Page, born May 3, 1919, died in South Carolina at the age of 103 on March 6, 2023. In her obituary notice, her family recalls her as a doctor, a resistance fighter, a prisoner of the Nazi regime, and a committed anthroposophist. Traute Lafrenz discovered the White Rose at LMU Munich, where in 1941 she was continuing the medical studies she had begun in Hamburg. From 1942, she took part in the leaflet campaigns of the resistance group. One month after the arrest and execution of the Scholl siblings in February 1943, she too was arrested and sentenced for her role as a confidante.

Shortly after her release from prison, having served her one-year sentence, the Nazis arrested her again. Until freed by US troops on April 14, 1945, the Hamburg native had spent a total of almost two years in various German prisons. After the war, she completed her medical studies in Munich and emigrated to the United States in 1947. There she worked initially as a doctor, before starting a family with her husband Vernon Page, which produced four children, seven grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren. More recently, she headed a therapeutic school for children with developmental disabilities in South Carolina.

On her hundredth birthday, she received the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. However, she never saw herself as a hero: “I just distributed leaflets,” she said in an interview. Traute Lafrenz-Page was a member of the White Rose Foundation (Weiße Rose Stiftung e.V.).

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