Traute Lafrenz

Traute Lafrenz was a German-American physician best known as a member of the White Rose resistance group that distributed anti-Nazi leaflets in Munich during the Second World War. Arrested by the Gestapo in 1943, she survived imprisonment while several fellow members were executed. After immigrating to the United States in 1947 she completed her medical studies and ran a practice in California alongside her husband, an ophthalmologist, before later heading a therapeutic school for children in Chicago. She remained active in the anthroposophical movement for more than fifty years and, on her hundredth birthday in 2019, received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. She died in 2023 as the last surviving member of the White Rose.