The White Rose: Germany’s Young Martyrs of Conscience

“I only want you to go through life upright and free, even when it is difficult,” Robert Scholl often said to his children. It was the 1930s and life in Nazi Germany was becoming more difficult by the day for liberal thinkers of Scholl’s ilk. Scholl, a proud and determined local politician and entrepreneur of high moral principles, never hid his anti-Nazi views. He lived the way he thought and raised his five children in an open spirit. But Robert Scholl paid the highest price a father can pay for his free-thinking and principled approach, which was taken most seriously by his son Hans and daughter Sophie.

On the twenty-second of February 1943, Hans and Sophie were brutally executed in Munich’s notorious Stadelheim prison. Together with their friend Christoph Probst, they were charged with high treason for spreading anti-Nazi propaganda just hours before their deaths. At the time of her death, Sophie was only 21, Christoph 23 and Hans 24.

All three were members of the White Rose, an underground resistance movement in Munich which wrote, printed and distributed anti-regime leaflets, among other things calling on their compatriots to revolt and warning them of the criminal nature of National Socialism. These young people became and remain for Germans a symbol of boundless courage and an island of humanity in a sea of terror, indifference and cruelty that permeated not only the Party’s top echelons, but also the everyday lives of ordinary people. They consciously risked their young lives to resist Nazism, first passively and then actively.

The White Rose movement brought together a handful of young German students, at first without clear plans, but strongly united in the conviction that the war was pointless and the murderous Nazi regime barbaric and in complete contradiction to the tradition of humanism and freedom that the German nation was supposed to follow.

Hans Scholl was, with Alexander Schmorel, the mastermind of a group whose followers grew more numerous with each passing month of the war. Like most Germans, and especially young people, they were initially blinded by the Nazi ideology, with its emphasis on patriotism and community, and were even proud members of Hitler‘s youth. But while most Germans were still unwilling to face the truth during the war, Hans, Sophie and friends quickly shook off their blindness. What’s more, they rebelled, calling on their compatriots to rebel and knocking on their consciences.

First, four leaflets were produced, typed on cheap paper, too dense, without spaces and generally without a clear structure and a simple message. It was the concentrated rage of young students who had grown up in the intellectual, academic and literary world, with no experience of the everyday life of ordinary people, no knowledge of their language and no sense of how to address them. But they slowly realised this, and began to link up with other resistance movements, notably the much better known Red Orchestra, and to expand their activities beyond the borders of Munich and south-west Germany.

They professionalised their activities, both logistically and in terms of content. In order to cover their tracks, they developed, among other things, an original way of distributing leaflets. They travelled from Munich in rucksacks and suitcases to various German towns and cities and sent leaflets to addresses outside those towns, thus weaving a web that even the Gestapo was unable to unravel.

After the successful distribution of the first four leaflets, the boys were forced to spend a few months as doctors on the Russian front in the summer of 1942. They were exempted from active military service as medical students. The Russian experience only reinforced their conviction that they had to do more than write and distribute leaflets. Only an immediate end to the war and the overthrow of the regime headed by Hitler could save Germany and the German people.

As they grew bolder, the noose around their necks was slowly tightening. The leading Nazis were becoming more and more furious. In the winter of 1943, the German army suffered one of the worst defeats in German history, the Battle of Stalingrad. Wounded national pride had led to popular discontent with the regime, and the authorities to search even harder for those who had stirred up rebellion.

The members of the White Rose were elated, convinced that an Allied invasion was imminent and that the war could be ended more quickly with their help.

It was with these thoughts in mind that Hans and Sophie left home on 18 February 1943, heading for the university. Hans was carrying a large suitcase full of leaflets. But as his brother and sister scattered them from the top of the staircase across the huge empty lobby of the university, a regime-loyal janitor saw them. A few hours later, they were in front of experienced interrogators. Four days later, their lives ended under the guillotine.

Shortly before his death, their father Robert told them that he was proud of them and that they would go down in history forever. The approval of their father, who had set the moral guidelines for them throughout their lives, was the only guidance they wanted in their last moments.

Sophie Scholl‘s youth under the Nazi regime

In May 1942, a few days before her 21st birthday, Sophie Scholl was contemplating her future on a train from Ulm to Munich, some 150 kilometres away. She was finally back on the path she had mapped out many years before. She would become a student and join her beloved older brother Hans in Germany’s second largest university city. This was a great achievement, as the quota for girls was only ten percent of the total student places available. And since her high school teachers had already warned her that she was not very enthusiastic about National Socialism, she was all the more pleased.

There was nothing special about her outward appearance. She was a simple, slender girl, in a knitted skirt and jumper, with short dark hair and deep penetrating dark brown eyes. She was not a typical German girl, however, and she showed her individuality most of all by her rebelliously short, almost boyish hairstyle, instead of the typical kit-girls of the time.

She was the fourth youngest of five children in the loving and caring, relatively well-off Scholl family. Before settling in Ulm, her father was mayor of several small towns in Swabia. The mother, ten years older than the father, was completely devoted to her family and children and lived according to a strict Protestant ethic.

Sophie was a deep-thinking girl who sought solace and inner peace in nature and literature. At the age of 16, she had a fiancé four years her senior, Fritz Hartnagel. Her many surviving letters to Fritz and her siblings, as well as her diary entries, are full of descriptions of nature, which was particularly characteristic of young people from the 19th century onwards. They were surrounded by an increasingly restrictive world and, especially in the cities, industrialisation was leading to anonymity, formlessness and individualism. In search of freedom, young people therefore joined together in groups and spent their weekends hiking in the hills and mountains, camping by rivers and lakes, singing folk songs and reading rich German poetry and prose.

The shelves of the Scholl family’s bookshop were full of books by world-renowned German and foreign writers, philosophers and theologians – Stefan Zweig, Thomas Mann, Blaise Pascal, Paul Claudel. For the children who had read them from a very young age, the poet Heinrich Heine‘s chilling warning “Where they burn books, they will burn people in the end” was vividly etched in their memories.

And in 1933, with the Nazis coming to power, this was indeed the case. Books by ‘inappropriate’ authors, mainly of Jewish origin, were burnt to the screams of students. The political climate was becoming more intense by the day, and the Scholl family felt it first-hand.

The father despised the new regime from the very beginning and maintained his contacts with Jewish and artistic circles, but above all he could not keep his opinions to himself and publicly expressed his liberal, pacifist and anti-Nazi views. This cost him his mayoralty and he turned to tax consultancy. He was denounced several times, once by his long-serving secretary. The family lived in constant fear ever since.

The Nazis also very cleverly exploited the existence of youth associations and movements and founded Hitler’s Youth on similar foundations. Initially, many young people were so excited to join the Youth Youth, as it fostered a sense of belonging and national pride. Much to the chagrin of their parents, Scholl’s children also joined the Hitler Youth (boys) and the League of German Girls (girls). In 1933, there were 100,000 members; by 1935, there were already four million! Few founded alternative organisations, and even these were soon banned and had to operate underground.

For the first few years, Hans and Sophie, as well as their sisters and brother, Elisabeth, Inge and Werner, were enthusiastic about the environment offered by Hitler’s youth. Love of country, comradeship, community, fatherhood, these were the values on which it was based at first sight. He and his father were constantly at loggerheads about this. This was the case in many German homes, where the parents were immune to Nazi propaganda and the children were enthusiastic about it. Cordial conversations were replaced by suspicious glances, and there was a grave silence around the table. Many a child went so far as to denounce his own parents if they dared to question the regime.

At first it was the same with the Scholls, for example, and the children asked their father whether he was really sure that Hitler knew about the existence of the concentration camps. But their own experience soon made them see how the Nazi machine really worked, designed to produce like-minded, loyal and unprincipled individuals.

They were constantly exposed to propaganda that glorified the Aryan race. Forced to watch films such as the one entitled Youth of Iron and Steel, in which young people march through fields and hills singing excitedly “When Jewish blood spurts from under the knife, everything will be better”, they were quickly outraged by National Socialism.

Sliding into war

The closer the war got, the more worried Sophie became. As difficult as life was becoming for her, she was aware that many were suffering even more. In her diary she wrote: “I want to share the suffering, compassion is empty and insincere if we do not feel the pain ourselves.”

The last years of secondary school were very difficult for her, as she felt increasingly alienated from most of her classmates and often felt that she was the only one thinking with her own head.

But after graduation and before she was allowed to go to university, she first had to do community service. To avoid the factory, she trained as a kindergarten teacher. But since Germany was already at war at that time, she also had to work in a labour camp, as the mobilisation soon led to a shortage of labour. Occasionally, Fritz, who was already an officer and temporarily in the country to train young soldiers, would brighten her days. But Sophie and Fritz, who came from a conservative background and considered it a great honour to serve in the German army, were often on opposite sides of the fate of Germany.

This made her miss the company of her older brother Hans, a medical student in Munich, even more. Hans had a very strong personality and was the most like his father of all the children, just as principled, stubborn and convinced of what was right. He was very handsome and always stood out from the crowd with his strong leadership skills. Thus, even during his membership of the Hitler Youth, he became the head of the local section and was at the head of 150 boys. He was even chosen to carry the banner of the Ulm section of the Hitler Youth at one of the famous party rallies in Nuremberg, immortalised so convincingly in the film Triumph of the Will by the controversial Leni Riefenstahl.

But it was precisely this experience that was decisive in his ultimate transformation into an opponent of National Socialism. He was shocked by the spectacle of the display of German greatness in a giant arena specially erected for the purpose outside the city. The neo-roman style of the arena, designed by the architect Albert Speer and capable of accommodating 400,000 people, could be seen as far away as Frankfurt.

Hans, naturally non-conformist, could not be part of such an impersonal machine. He wrote to his sister Inge that they had no time at all to talk or read. Soon he was stripped of his managerial position anyway, for a number of unacceptable ‘offences’. Among other things, he was alleged to have encouraged individualism and to have read forbidden literature – he was once caught with a book by Stefan Zweig and had it ripped out of his hands, saying that the author was Jewish.

In 1937, he joined an alternative group of young boys whose activities were reminiscent of the idealistic Weimar Bauhaus school. They revered the humanist German tradition and history, but not in the spirit of nationalism. The Gestapo soon banned such groups and arrested many of their members. This landed Hans in prison, along with his sister Inge and brother Werner. Since they could not prove anything concrete, they were quickly released, but the whole family was further stigmatised.

When the war started, Hans was already studying medicine. In 1940, he had spent some time as a doctor on the French front, and although he had hardly seen any fighting, it became clear to him what war looked like. He hated his own army. On the day his sister Sophie was on her way to Munich, also frustrated by the rapid surrender of the French troops, a plan had already been hatched that would seal the fate of both. But Hans never intended to involve Sophie.

Munich

One of the first friends Sophie met in person, after reading a lot about him in her brother’s letters, was Alexander Schmorell, also a medical student. Schurik, as he was called, was a gentle and gentle soul, German by father and Russian by mother. Throughout his life he was torn between his two identities and his two nations, and it was during his growing up that this relationship was most turbulent.

Alex introduced Hans to his childhood friend, the fair-haired and statuesque Christoph Probst, also from a middle-class intellectual family – he lived among books and his parents were friends with famous artists such as Paul Klee. Christoph, also known as Christel, was an unusually mature and devoted family man for his age, and his wife was expecting their third child. He decided to study medicine as a protest against the Nazi sterilisation programme.

As the boys were studying medicine, their contribution to society was important in itself, and they were exempted from active military service. They were only required to take part in military activities occasionally, mainly during the summer holidays, and they were also required to spend a few hours each day helping out at a nearby military hospital. Otherwise, their life was surprisingly casual and relaxed for those times.

In the evenings, while studying, they went to concerts, played various instruments, practiced sabre fencing, but above all they socialised and talked. They welcomed the serious and uncompromising Willy Graf into their inner circle and the core of the White Rose was formed.

The city of Munich itself and its rich history also had a great influence on the students. Until the First World War, it was one of the main artistic centres of Europe, where the ideas of the fin de siècle and art nouveau periods, or the German Jugendstil, expressionism and utopianism, flowed and intersected, and where radical ideas from both the left and the right of the political spectrum flourished.

Thus, Bolsheviks with Lenin at their head frequented the cafés alongside cult figures such as Kandinsky, Klee, Mann and Rilke, and even Hitler fell in love with the city before the First World War when he wanted to indulge his excessive artistic ambitions.

At the same time, Munich has always been distinctly Catholic, and to this day some of its most beautiful buildings are its churches, built in every conceivable architectural style, from Baroque, Gothic, Neoclassical and Rococo. Catholicism also shaped the mindset and intellectual currents to which the members of the White Rose were subjected. Although most of them were not Catholics, they took much inspiration from Catholic thinkers such as St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas.

The Nazis had problems with the strong authority of the Catholic Church threatening their own, so they brutally repressed it. And when a Munich cardinal preached about the horrors of the Holocaust and stood up for all the victims of Nazism, the persecution escalated.

The nervous excitement among all the faithful was further heightened by the infamous Kristallnacht of 8 November 1938, the chilling overture to the mass extermination of the Jews. The Scholl family watched speechless and helpless as the pogrom and the crowds of humiliated, beaten and spat upon thronged the streets.

In the first years of the war, when after many military successes Germany seemed to be on the verge of victory, the Nazis also had no second thoughts about Catholicism and its symbols in the countryside, where religious fervour was on the rise. But this time they went too far. When they ordered the removal of crosses from all schools and other public buildings, there was a general revolt. In many places, portraits of Hitler flew out of windows. Some bishops and other church dignitaries courageously raised their voices against the most inhuman Nazi measures, such as euthanasia of the so-called unproductive members of society.

A copy of one such sermon once came into the hands of Hans Scholl. He exclaimed enthusiastically, “At last someone has the courage to speak out!”

He shared his enthusiasm with his friends, who were becoming more and more attached to each other. Hans was passionate in all areas of his life, including love, and at that time he had a tempestuous relationship with Traute Lafrenz, who was herself later active in spreading the revolt. In the evenings, the group increasingly discussed how to finally move from words to action. Slowly they crossed the dangerous and invisible line between passive intellectual resistance and concrete action.

It was Christoph Probst who preached most passionately and philosophically about the importance of actions that should follow words. For him, learning and knowledge only had meaning if they contributed to ethical behaviour.

Moreover, Germany’s initial military successes were slowly but steadily diluting. The German army was indeed penetrating deeper and deeper into Russia and was doing well in North Africa, but it was becoming clear that the war would last. It was intensifying and, above all, moving deeper and deeper into German territory, with constant Allied air attacks.

At the end of May, for example, more than a thousand Anglo-American planes almost completely wiped out Cologne from the face of the earth. Other cities followed, Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Lübeck, and the endless silver formations in the air over Germany became a daily scene. Hopelessness began to grip the people and life became dull and monotonous.

Apathy at university

But in the universities, which one would have expected to be the greatest hotbed of revolt, passivity and apathy reigned. Indeed, since the 19th century they have been one of the important pillars of a growing nationalism. Although they may have been appreciated worldwide for their academic quality, especially in the natural sciences, but also in philosophy and literature, and may have been imbued with a spirit of academic freedom, this did not bring with it objectivity, universalism and tolerance of other peoples and other points of view.

The main source of this attitude is to be found in developments in the 18th and 19th centuries. Before the unification into a single state under the Iron Chancellor Bismarck in 1871, there was a multitude of German states of different sizes, united above all by their hatred of Napoleon, whose troops had swept through Europe, long and wide, leaving devastation and wounded pride in their wake. There was a growing desire for a common political identity and, after unification and victory in the Franco-German War, a strong national consciousness.

In order to preserve it, there was a need for its own glorification, which came not from the working people, the peasants, entrepreneurs and craftsmen, but from the upper classes, intellectuals, professors, artists. The defeat in the First World War reignited passions, above all with the Treaty of Versailles, which resulted not only in the complete humiliation of Germany, reparations and demilitarisation, but also in an economic crisis that caused unemployment, inflation and, as a result, anarchy in the streets. The German people were deeply affected, and there was a growing need for revenge, which the skilful Nazis exploited to great effect.

Of course, islands of liberalism, pacifism and internationalism survived everywhere, including in the universities, but they were few and isolated. The Nazis had already seized the University of Munich in 1933, since Munich was the birthplace of the Nazi movement. When members of the White Rose became its students, it was an integral part of the Nazi machine and both the quality of studies and pluralism were a thing of the past. Its rector was a leading member of the local SS branch and one of the main experts on ‘Aryan culture’.

There was apathy among the students, who were tired of the constant Nazi propaganda. There were spies at every turn and few dared to express any opinion out loud. The same was true of the professors, although many had no problem with this and enthusiastically taught subjects such as Geography in the Service of the National Socialist State; People and Race, including Eugenics and Excursions; Backward Peoples, Primitive Races and Ancient Cultures, Sociology of War, and so on.

Many people have been excluded from international academia because of this. But there were also professors who refused to be silenced and who risked their careers and sometimes their lives by giving lectures. For example, one popular art professor claimed that Nazi art was murder of the soul and warned students not to be seduced. His lectures were packed with students. But one day he was simply gone, and his lectures were cancelled.

Under these circumstances, Hans Scholl’s coterie decided to sow doubt among intellectually and morally petrified students and other educated people about the omnipotence of the Nazi regime. By spreading information about what was really happening on the front, in the camps, about the slaughter and murder, the innocent civilian victims, the intolerance and persecution of all dissenters, while at the same time drawing attention to the legacy of the Enlightenment and humanism as the foundations of the German nation. They were born in another, progressive era, which the Germans should revive as soon as possible if they want to save their honour and return to the community of nations.

The die was cast and the White Rose Movement was born. The name remains unexplained to this day, one explanation being that Hans borrowed it from the title of a Spanish novel and that it was supposed to symbolise innocence and purity. In any case, it was more about symbolism than a political message. Leaflets were to be written and distributed calling for the overthrow of the Nazi regime.

They needed time and money to do this. With the help of Alex’s wealthy father, they equipped themselves for the mass production of leaflets and, in addition to stationery, bought a typewriter and a photocopier. They also found a suitable storage space through acquaintances.

The first leaflets

In mid-June 1942, mysterious leaflets began to appear in various locations around Munich. The very first one said, among other things: “In this last hour, every individual, as a member of Western and Christian civilisation, must consciously assume his responsibility and do everything in his power to save himself from this scourge of humanity.”

Then followed the call for resistance against fascism and all other forms of absolute state. The author, who was clearly furious, added the interesting observation that every nation gets the government it deserves! The writers were, of course, none other than Hans and Alex. After each of them had done his draft, they debated the texts, and Hans usually had the final editorial decision.

This was followed by three more similar leaflets, on which the otherwise densely typed and opaque double-sided text was far too much. There were no spaces between the lines, and the texts were also confused and disjointed in style. Literary quotations abounded, and the whole thing resembled an uncontrolled but moving emotional outpouring.

They were shared in different ways. Many were addressed to selected addressees, public figures, academics, intellectuals, but also entrepreneurs and restaurant owners. Others were left in bunches in public places. People carried them en masse to the Gestapo in fear, because anyone who read a leaflet and did not report it was in danger of being imprisoned.

The Gestapo tried to decipher the pattern of dissemination in order to trace the perpetrators as quickly as possible. They only found that the leaflets were not addressed to ordinary people, but to intellectuals.

Something the city had not witnessed since Hitler’s seizure of power. At that time, around 1933, when the Weimar Republic was in its last gasps, there was a fair amount of anti-Nazi passion, but this died down as repression increased.

Sophie knew nothing about all this at the beginning. About a month after her arrival, rumours of a new movement began to spread and Sophie felt a sense of relief to know that there were others in her midst who thought like her. One day she excitedly rushed home to show Hans the leaflet she had just come across, but he was not home.

She started leafing through his books and from one of them fell the draft of the very leaflet she was holding. She immediately confronted her brother out of the blue and begged him to stop this dangerous activity, because he was endangering not only his own life, but also that of his family. But instead of persisting, she joined the movement herself. She had long had a bad conscience that she was doing nothing to end the war.

In the second leaflet, Alex and Hans drew attention to the horrors of the Holocaust and provided ominous figures: since the attack on Poland, at least 300,000 Jews are said to have been murdered in a bestial manner and the Nazis committed crimes against humanity unprecedented in history. They wondered whether the Germans might have slipped into an eternal sleep from which no one could wake them up. They called on the people of Germany to snap out of their lethargy and stand up to the gang of criminals who are leading them. They should all feel guilty for the hundreds of thousands of victims. “We are all guilty, guilty, guilty!”

In order to arouse as little suspicion as possible, the members of the White Rose tried to live a normal life along the usual lines. They attended lectures, went to concerts in the evenings, played instruments together and hiked in the mountains at weekends. But it was all just a pretence. Their underground activity made them nervous and sleepless. To avoid sleep, they took stimulants.

They decided to send a third leaflet, which, following the example of Mahatma Gandhi’s teachings, called for passive resistance, to one of the professors at the University of Munich, Karl Huber. Huber was one of the most popular professors, a lecturer in philosophy, psychology and musicology, who, because of the popularity of his lectures, had to be given the largest university hall.

His worldview was conservative, he supported German nationalism, grounded in philosophy and history, and he admired Prussia and its tradition of military strength and discipline. But he publicly declared his opposition to the war and the invasion, which is why he never got a permanent professorship. Moreover, he hated Hitler and the Nazis and failed to hide this from his students.

At a literary evening, he met Hans by chance and caught the young man’s excitement, saying: “Something must be done, and done now!”. Huber was convinced that more would have to be done than just printing leaflets: “If the blood doesn’t flow, nothing will come of it.” And so the White Rose got a new prominent member.

The fourth and last leaflet in the series was produced in July 1942, shortly before the start of the summer holidays. The last sentence best summed up their basic aim: “We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you alone.”

To Russia and Berlin

The White Rose operations were temporarily suspended as the boys had to go to the Russian front during their holidays as doctors. Sophie escorted them to the station and, not knowing what to do with herself, gazed sadly after the receding train. With nothing to keep her in Munich, she went home, where she too had to do holiday work, namely in an arms factory.

She showed her silent rebellion by working sloppily and slowly. At the same time, she watched in horror as her unfortunate female colleagues, forced labourers from Russia, were treated like cattle. They worked 70 hours a week and barely survived on a bowl of watery soup and a few crusts of bread a day.

Life became even more depressing when, not long after her arrival, her father was sentenced to four months in prison for an anti-Hitler remark. Sophie’s exhausted mother, already in poor health, feared that, like many others in similar circumstances, he would be taken to a concentration camp. Sophie played the melody of “Thoughts are Free”, a song composed during the Revolution of 1848, on the flute under her father’s prison cell.

On their way to Russia, the boys stopped in Warsaw to see the remains of the Warsaw ghetto, decimated by famine and epidemic. A few weeks earlier, the Nazis had deported most of the survivors to Auschwitz, Treblinka and Maidanek concentration camps. The next stop was the town of Gzhatsk (now Gagarin), about 100 kilometres from Moscow. Here, snow and mud stopped the Great Eastern Offensive.

The young men were as dazed as if they had been stunned, despite the harsh weather conditions and the work with the wounded. Not only because of the view across the boundless Russian steppes, but also because of the Russian people. Alex, who spoke fluent Russian, helped them break the ice in making contact with the locals, who opened their doors wide and socialised with them late into the night.

They sang folk songs, played the balalaika and danced. In exchange for food, the Germans brought the Russians brandy and medicine. This brief, almost mystical three-month experience was undoubtedly the highlight of their lives and reinforced their conviction that the war had to end.

On their return to university, both their anger and their courage took on new dimensions. National morale was at an all-time low as the Germans were losing the Battle of Stalingrad and the Russians were launching a massive counter-offensive. Thousands of families were receiving daily news of the death of their sons. The bombing of German cities intensified.

Despite Goebbels‘ persistent propaganda, it was clear that the German troops were exhausted. People secretly listened to the BBC and Swiss radio and heard, among other things, about the Allied landings in North Africa. The Americans stepped up arms production and there was no sign of any slackening on the Allied side. According to the members of the White Rose, the Allied invasion of the European continent was imminent.

Their double life had begun again. But this time they had greater ambitions. They wanted to extend their activities to other German cities and to encourage the All-German revolt. From foreign radio broadcasts they learned of the existence of the Red Orchestra, the best-known left-wing resistance movement, with numerous cells throughout Germany and also abroad, in Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Switzerland. The Red Orchestra had spies and members even in the highest circles of the German army. The talk of Hitler’s assassination and the putsch grew louder and louder. So the White Rose was not the only one! Its members were elated.

They wanted to get in touch with the Red Orchestra as soon as possible and to make a connection, so Alex and Hans went to Berlin. When they proudly showed their leaflets, the much more experienced members of the Red Orchestra were very critical of them, saying that they were too abstract, not punchy enough and not interesting enough for the masses. But they agreed to work together anyway.

Thus, by January 1943, the White Rose had already transformed itself into an increasingly well-organised network, spreading throughout south-western Germany and even towards Hamburg and Berlin. They wanted to set up resistance cells in all the major German universities. They professionalised and Sophie even took over as treasurer.

Highlights

It was time for the fifth leaflet. This time, Alex and Hans were assisted by Professor Huber, but the collaboration proved difficult. Alex’s draft was too pro-Communist, so he rejected it outright, while Hans’ was radically changed. For the first time, they signed their name on the leaflet not as the White Rose, but with the much more high-flown name of the Insurrectionary Movement in Germany.

The leaflet was also much more appropriate this time, without literary quotations, shorter and more punchy. It was entitled Appeal to all Germans! and spoke of basic civil rights, the right to freedom of speech, religion and protection from authoritarian government. It was far-sighted and offered a political platform for the future, mentioning the need for European nations to participate in post-war reconstruction, the elimination of centralised power and a federalist Europe. It concluded with a call for the dissemination of information and truth.

After Sophie and Traute had bravely bought paper in all the Munich bookshops – by then the Gestapo was already on their trail and had warned the sellers – they printed about 10,000 copies with a new copier. They then travelled individually to German cities and from there, in the middle of the night, sent leaflets to third cities again, mainly Stuttgart, Ulm, Frankfurt, Augsburg, but also Vienna. None of them bore a stamp from the city from which it was sent, thus giving the impression that the movement was much more widespread than it really was.

Sophie was also a diligent leaflet distributor, and once when she was home she showed one to her father, saying that she had found it in Munich. His reaction was one of admiration, just as Sophie had hoped and wished. But when her father asked, suspicious and worried, if she and Hans had anything to do with it, she vehemently denied it.

Hitler was increasingly panicked as he realised that the rebellion was spreading unchecked. In his characteristic style, he paced up and down nervously and raged. Leaflets were everywhere, in cinemas, in the lobbies of buildings, in telephone booths and on park benches.

The Munich Gestapo was therefore tasked with finding the perpetrators as soon as possible. The man in charge of the hunt was named Robert Mohr.

On 13 January 1943, another unprecedented event took place in Munich. For the first and last time, university students rose up in protest against the Third Reich. To celebrate the anniversary of the university, they were all summoned to a ceremony in the main auditorium of the Deutsches Museum. The crowds were mainly Nazi bigwigs, while the students, and especially the female students, were only allowed to sit in the balconies.

The Gauleiter of Bavaria’s keynote address, which was intended to boost morale for the continuation of the war, was merely an expression of his primitivism and unculturedness. Like many Nazis, he despised intellectuals, but above all he took a swipe at women, whose place was supposed to be with husband and family, not in the university. He praised students who had been at the front, while humiliating others. He culminated in the observation that women should bear a child every year for the firer, and that those who were not handsome enough to find a husband could find one for themselves. The latter would be a “glorious experience” for them, he added. The hall exploded.

Members of the White Rose, who had deliberately boycotted such meetings, were convinced that the protest was directly linked to their activities, which had encouraged the riots. They therefore immediately printed an additional 1300 leaflets. They were becoming less and less vigilant.

At the beginning of February, the radio announcement of the defeat at Stalingrad hit Germany like a bolt from the blue. The army of the famous Marshal von Paulus had been defeated and the nation was in shock at one of the greatest defeats in German history. The battle, which was to be the key to the destruction of Bolshevism, cost the Germans the lives of 300,000 men and 90,000 prisoners sent to Siberia. Most of them never came back. The people failed to see that the victory of Germany was not a historical necessity and that they were victims of Hitler’s manipulations.

For Karl Huber, too, the Battle of Stalingrad was a tragic historical moment. He decided to write the next leaflet himself.

A sad end

This was the sixth and last leaflet. Addressed simply to the students and without any mention of the White Rose or the resistance movement, it described the situation in a society in which freedom of expression had been abolished and in which making fun of women and their honour was commonplace. He called on young people to rise up against the regime, otherwise Germany would be tarnished forever.

Meanwhile, other members of the movement painted ‘Down with Hitler!’ and ‘Freedom!’ graffiti on the walls of the university and other public buildings, in some places adding a swastika and crossing it out in red. Christoph, whose wife had a severe postnatal fever after giving birth for the third time, was worried about their excessive courage. But he had written his own death warrant. He agreed to Alex’s and Hans’ last request to write the seventh leaflet.

Eighteenth February 1943 was a warm, almost spring day in Munich. At a little after ten o’clock in the morning, brother and sister Hans and Sophie Scholl left the apartment together and walked towards the university. They entered the building during lectures and slowly climbed to the top of the staircase from the huge glass-domed inner courtyard. They opened their suitcase and shook the leaflets deep inside.

They also placed a few hundred of them outside the lecture theatres. Jakob Schmid, the janitor, saw them and, despite the fact that the doors of the lecture theatres had opened at that very moment and students were pouring out, tracked them down. A short time later, as the two men, handcuffed, marched upright past the students, there was a deathly silence. Alexander Schmorell stood in the crowd, frantically forging an escape plan.

During the lengthy interrogation, they said that they were the sole culprits and had not betrayed a single friend. Hans made the fatal mistake of pulling a note out of his pocket, tearing it and trying to swallow it. The Gestapo snatched it from him and put it together. It was a draft of the seventh leaflet from the pen of Christoph Probst, which spoke of an honourable end to the war and proposed a new post-war international order under the patronage of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Christoph landed in prison the same day.

Robert Mohr interrogated Sophie and even tried to show some sympathy. If she had been willing to say more, he would even have released this well-behaved girl. But that was not in keeping with her upbringing and her convictions.

After a swift sentence of death by one of the Nazis’ most notorious judges, the condemned men had only a few hours to live. Sophie looked gloomily out of the prison window and said, “And the sun is still shining.”

Robert and Magdalena Scholl managed to visit the children one last time. Despite the immense pain, the parents were proud of them.

Sophie went to her death quietly and proudly, and Hans, just before the blade fell, shouted, “Freedom!”

When news of the deaths of Scholl and Probst spread around the world, the Allies reprinted one of the leaflets and distributed it in thousands of copies over German cities. A few months later, the Nazis massacred other members of the White Rose, executing some and sending others to prison. By then, the White Rose had become a symbol that is still alive today. Let it serve as a reminder that moral principles and humanity must be fought to preserve, whatever the cost.