Retelling, Reliving the White Rose : Stage: Survivor George Wittenstein will be in the audience tonight at the preview of Lillian Garrett’s play on the execution of five young Germans who defied the Nazis.

Playwright Lillian Garrett had a remarkable story to tell: how five young Germans defied the Nazis in 1943, and how the Munich Gestapo had them executed for it. She was calling her script “The White Rose,” using the name the dissident students chose, and her goal was to shine a dramatist’s light on the strange moral landscape of those times.

But, before she finished, Garrett wanted to test her idea of moral courage against the real thing. So she did what others have done before her. One day in 1989, she went knocking on George Wittenstein’s door.

Wittenstein was the dissenters’ friend and confederate. Though he is not portrayed in the play, he edited and circulated resistance leaflets, demonstrated publicly and escaped his own Gestapo summons 48 years ago. Now a 71-year-old, semi-retired heart surgeon, he lives here on a bluff over the ocean and discusses that war with only the most earnest visitors.

“When I got there,” Garrett recalled recently, “I was so impressed with him, I didn’t know what to ask that wasn’t impertinent.”

Nevertheless, her visit lasted more than two hours.

And now comes Wittenstein’s turn to step onto Garrett’s ground: San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre, where the world premiere production of “The White Rose” will run through Feb. 24. Tonight, at a special preview before Thursday’s formal opening, Wittenstein will compare his memory with Garrett’s search for psychological truth.

“I’ll really be going with two different minds,” Wittenstein said. “As long as I can think, I’m a theater buff. I have many good friends in the theater and have even done some myself. So I’ll be going with one eye looking at this as a play, and how it affects me as a play. The other will be a critical eye, as a member of the White Rose. And I may come up with two completely different conclusions.”

Wittenstein has been in positions like this before. The White Rose movement is discussed in a dozen or more books. In Germany, the students’ story has been told on film through a historical drama and a documentary, for which Wittenstein was interviewed. In 1988, the Long Beach Opera produced Udo Zimmermann’s “White Rose,” an opera based on the incident. Wittenstein was invited.

“Both my wife and I were very impressed by the opera,” Wittenstein said. “We were greatly concerned, when we first learned about it, that just two people sitting in their cells before their execution would be a very static and therefore not a very appealing opera.” Instead, Wittenstein said, the director employed the “brilliant idea” of using voiceless actors who shared the stage with the singers, acting as a sort of silent but demonstrative Greek chorus.

The difference in this treatment of the White Rose story is that Garrett’s play looks beyond the young heroes, siblings Sophie and Hans Scholl, to examine the moral compromises made by Robert Mohr, the unimposing, sometimes decent-seeming man who is their Gestapo interrogator.

Fearful for his own family, Mohr condemns the students through his own inaction. His one effort to save Sophie, in whom he takes a fatherly interest, fails.

“The captives, fantastic as they were and are, are not psychologically interesting. They decided to do this, and they did it. They never wavered,” explained Garrett.

Garrett, an actress, director and writer who refuses to give her age, was born and raised in Argentina and moved to the United States in 1963. She first heard about the White Rose from her father, an Austrian. She began her script in 1988, about the time Zimmermann’s opera was running in Los Angeles, she said, and took a break from writing it to direct the Globe’s production of “The Granny” last year.

When she looked at the agents of evil in Hitler’s Germany, Garrett said, she found that “a lot of them were banal, pudgy, bald little creatures. . . . And those people to me are much more frightening” than mythic Nazi supermen. “Those terrible things that were done--we’re all capable of them, by constant compromise.”

Garrett quickly acknowledges that biographies are best suited to the printed page, and just as quickly points out that all her play’s psychology, and some of its plot elements, are her invention. Though her version suggests simultaneous executions of the five dissident students, for instance, the actual killings took place over several months.

So far, the playwright’s inventions have been enough to earn “The White Rose” a run at the Globe under Executive Producer Craig Noel’s direction and to win its selection for underwriting through AT&T;’s prestigious “New Plays for the Nineties” project. In addition, Garrett has sold feature film rights to independent producer Bruce Kerner.

“I’m very intrigued by Robert Mohr,” Kerner said. “I see tremendous parallels to some corporate executives I know.”

Wittenstein may find other resonances. He has so far seen only an early draft of the script, he said, but he and his wife were “very impressed” with Garrett’s view of the psychology of complicity.

That issue, Wittenstein confessed, is one he has never considered closely.

“I have chosen not to pursue it, primarily because I have personally very little sympathy for Nazi functionaries,” he said. “You never know whether some of these people were just bureaucrats afraid to lose their jobs. . . . Mr. Mohr may have just felt pity (for Sophie Scholl) because she was a girl. Who knows? Maybe he was truly, in his heart, dissatisfied with the Nazi regime. Who knows?”

Wittenstein’s acquaintance with the characters of “The White Rose” goes back to 1939, when he remembers speaking with classmate Alex Schmorell “about how to combat Nazi propaganda.” The two were medical students at the University of Munich, as were all the executed White Rose members but Sophie Scholl, whose specialty was biology.

“She got in the picture relatively late,” Wittenstein said. “Her brother didn’t want her to have any part of it--he didn’t want her to run the risk. But she resisted.”

In 1942, after they had already begun producing protest pamphlets, dissidents Hans Scholl, Schmorell and Wittenstein were among the Munich medical students assigned to serve three months with the German Army on the Russian front. When they returned, their resolve against the war was strengthened.

From that time, Wittenstein remembers Hans Scholl giving his entire tobacco allocation to a Jew in a forced labor gang; Alex Schmorell risking court-martial to intercede against the bloody beating of a Russian, and, in February, 1943, Hans and Sophie Scholl climbing a staircase at the university to release scores of anti-Nazi pamphlets, which fluttered to earth in public view.

“As they reached the bottom of the stairs,” recalled Wittenstein, “they were arrested.” Five days later, they were dead.

In Garrett’s story, told through a series of flashbacks, the release of the leaflets closes Act I. The young men’s reluctance to include Sophie Scholl comes through, but the Russian front essentially vanishes. Flashbacks show Schmorell arriving with his new mimeograph machine, the dissenters in a moment of self-doubt, and a dangerous outdoor graffiti-painting mission.

Garrett notes that the slogans scrawled on her sets--”Down With Hitler” and “Hitler Mass Murderer”--are taken from historical accounts.

Garrett’s story ends at Gestapo headquarters, just after the killings.

Wittenstein’s story, of course, has further chapters. He evaded the secret police himself in 1944, he said, by arranging for the army to transfer him to Italy and out of Gestapo jurisdiction.

“I knew that if I were at the front, I would be safe,” he said, no hint of irony in his voice.

Once the war was over, he moved to England, and in 1948 came to the United States. He moved to the West Coast in 1960, and now is married to Christel Bejenke Wittenstein, an anesthesiologist who grew up in postwar Nuremburg, hearing tales of the brave White Rose students.

“These were my heroes,” Bejenke Wittenstein said recently, looking across the living room to her husband.