Hans Scholl, Sophie Scholl, and Christoph Probst were students at the University of Munich in the winter of 1942. They were young -- Hans was 24, Sophie was 21, Probst was 23. They had grown up in Nazi Germany, joined the Hitler Youth, believed in the promise of national renewal. What they had witnessed by 1942 had changed all of that. The mass murders in the occupied territories, the persecution of the Jews, the grinding slaughter on the Eastern Front -- it had shattered their faith in the regime. And unlike most of their contemporaries who had arrived at the same conclusions privately, they decided to do something about it.
Between June 1942 and February 1943, the White Rose group -- which also included Willi Graf, Kurt Huber, and several others -- produced and distributed six pamphlets calling for the nonviolent overthrow of the Nazi regime. They called their movement the White Rose. They were inspired by the non-violent resistance of Gandhi and by the writings of German philosophers who had emphasized individual conscience over state loyalty. They typed the pamphlets on a copying machine -- a slow, laborious process -- and then distributed them in public places: in phone books left in telephone booths, in mailboxes, in university hallways.
The pamphlets were extraordinary documents. They cited statistics -- the death toll on the Eastern Front, the number of Jews murdered in occupied Poland -- with a precision that the regime's own propaganda carefully avoided. They appealed to reason, to morality, to the German intellectual tradition. The fifth pamphlet, distributed in January 1943, contained the sentence: "We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace."
Sophie Scholl was arrested on February 18, 1943, after a janitor at the university saw her dropping pamphlets from the third floor of the main building during a class break. She was interrogated by the Gestapo for four days. She did not break. Her brother Hans was arrested the same day. Christoph Probst, who was married with three young children, was arrested the following day. The trial took place on February 22, 1943. All three were convicted of treason and executed by guillotine within hours of the verdict. Sophie Scholl was 21 years old.
The White Rose pamphlets, smuggled out of Germany by a sympathetic contact, eventually reached the United States, where they were dropped over German cities by Allied aircraft. The words of the Scholls and their friends, intended for a handful of German readers, found their way to thousands.
Sophie Scholl's last words, addressed to the executioner, were: "How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is no one willing to stand up and forego himself?"