By February 1943, the White Rose had been operating out of Munich University for seven months. The organization — barely an organization, really, more a group of friends who shared a moral conviction — had distributed six leaflets printed on a duplicating machine and mailed or left in phone booths, doctors' offices, and public places across Munich and other German cities. The leaflets argued, in language that was educated and specific, that Nazi Germany was immoral and that Germans bore responsibility for what was being done in their name.
The core members: Hans Scholl, 24, a medical student and former Hitler Youth leader who had become disillusioned; Sophie Scholl, 21, his sister, philosophy and biology student; Christoph Probst, 23, the only married member, father of three children; Alexander Schmorell, 25; and Willi Graf, 25. Their faculty advisor, Professor Kurt Huber, a musicologist, had helped draft the last leaflets.
The Balcony
On the morning of February 18, 1943, Hans and Sophie Scholl arrived at Ludwig Maximilian University with a large suitcase containing several hundred copies of their sixth leaflet: a call for German students to resist the Nazi regime in the wake of the German catastrophe at Stalingrad. They distributed stacks of leaflets outside classroom doors, relying on the university's standard morning routine — students would find them on their way into lecture.
Whether by miscalculation or impulse, Sophie Scholl — or possibly Hans, accounts differ — pushed the remaining stack of leaflets off a third-floor balcony into the atrium below. The leaflets scattered and drifted down.
A university maintenance worker named Jakob Schmid witnessed this. He reported it. Hans and Sophie were arrested while waiting at the building exit.
The Trial
The trial took place four days later, on February 22, 1943, before the People's Court — the Nazi show tribunal presided over by Roland Freisler, a judge of extraordinary cruelty who was known for screaming theatrically at defendants during proceedings. Christoph Probst was charged alongside Hans and Sophie Scholl.
Freisler began berating Sophie during her testimony. She listened calmly.
Her statement, as reconstructed from notes taken by a court official who was later troubled by what he had witnessed: "Somebody had to make a start. What we wrote and said is what many people believe, only they don't dare say it out loud."
The verdicts were delivered by noon. All three were sentenced to death. The executions were carried out at Stadelheim Prison at 5:00 p.m. the same afternoon — hours after the verdict, a speed that was itself a political statement by the Nazi regime about the seriousness of what they considered the crime.
The Last Hours
The chaplain who visited the condemned prisoners in their final hours, Friedrich Heinlein, later recorded their last conversations. Sophie spoke with him while she ate half of a prison meal — she gave the other half to a prisoner who had not received food (it was a standard rationing problem; prisoners facing execution received no food; she received food by administrative error).
She said to him: "I am sure I am doing the right thing." When he asked her how she felt, she said she felt fine. When he expressed pain at what was happening, she told him not to feel that. She was, he reported, entirely composed.
Her last words to him: "How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause? Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go. But what does my death matter, if through us thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?"
She was guillotined at 5:00 p.m., four months before her twenty-second birthday.
The Nazis intended the swift and public execution of the White Rose members to serve as a deterrent. The copies of the sixth leaflet that had scattered in the university atrium were collected by individual students who had picked them up. Some were preserved. One copy made its way to Britain, where it was reproduced by the British government and dropped from aircraft over Germany in a print run of approximately one million copies.
Sources & Further Reading
Inge Scholl, "The White Rose: Munich 1942-1943" (Wesleyan University Press, 1983); Frank McDonough, "Sophie Scholl: The Real Story of the Woman who Defied Hitler" (History Press, 2010); Bundesarchiv, summary court records NS 6/424.
