Alexander Schmorell

Alexander Schmorell was born on 16 September 1917 in Orenburg, then in the Russian Empire, the son of Hugo Schmorell, a German-born physician, and Natalia Vvedenskaya, a Russian woman whose father was a Russian Orthodox priest. His mother died of typhus when he was about two years old. His father later married Elisabeth Hoffmann, a German woman. In 1921, during the Russian Civil War, the family left Russia and settled in Munich. Schmorell grew up bilingual in German and Russian and was raised in the Russian Orthodox Church, remaining attached to Russian language, culture, and Orthodox Christianity for the rest of his life. Friends and later commemorators often noted that he regarded himself as both German and Russian and never fully identified with National Socialist ideology.

After secondary school in Munich he began medical studies and was conscripted into German military service as a medical student. He served as a medic in connection with the Anschluss and the occupation of Czechoslovakia, and later on the Eastern Front after the invasion of the Soviet Union. Service in Russia affected him deeply: he identified with the Russian civilian population and was appalled by the conduct of the war and by Nazi crimes. In Munich he became close to fellow medical students Hans Scholl and Willi Graf. With Hans and Sophie Scholl, Christoph Probst, Willi Graf, and the university professor Kurt Huber, he formed the inner circle of the White Rose, a small non-violent resistance group that from 1942 produced and circulated leaflets denouncing the Nazi regime, the persecution of Jews, and the continuation of the war, and calling on Germans to resist.

Schmorell helped draft and distribute several of the White Rose leaflets and, in February 1943, took part in painting anti-Nazi slogans on walls in Munich. After Hans and Sophie Scholl were arrested on 18 February 1943 while distributing leaflets at the University of Munich, he went into hiding and tried to flee toward Switzerland. The attempt failed. He was recognized and arrested in Munich on 24 February 1943. On 19 April 1943 he was tried before the Volksgerichtshof under Roland Freisler, together with Willi Graf and Kurt Huber, and sentenced to death for high treason and related charges.

He was executed by guillotine on 13 July 1943 at Stadelheim Prison in Munich, at the age of twenty-five. He was buried at the Friedhof am Perlacher Forst in Munich, near other members of the White Rose. A layman and medical student rather than a cleric or monk, he was later venerated in the Orthodox Church as a confessor who had opposed tyranny from Christian conscience. On 4–5 February 2012 the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia glorified him as a New Martyr and Passion-Bearer at services in Munich; he is known as Saint Alexander of Munich, with feast day 13 July. His life is documented in trial records, the White Rose leaflets, and the memoirs and letters of surviving friends, and he is commemorated both as a German resistance figure and as an Orthodox saint.