The execution of Hans and Sophie Scholl

On 22 February 1943 the People’s Court, brought specially from Berlin, convened in the Palace of Justice in Munich. In the dock sat the 24-year-old medical student Hans Scholl; his sister Sophie Scholl, not quite three years younger, a student of biology and philosophy; and the 23-year-old medical student Christoph Probst. The trial lasted a few hours. The president of the court, Roland Freisler, sentenced all three to death, and at around 5 p.m. that same day the executioner Johann Reichhart beheaded them on the guillotine in Stadelheim Prison. Only four days had passed between the siblings’ arrest at the university and their execution. So ended the activity of the most famous German student resistance group against Nazism – the White Rose (Weiße Rose).

It is often said that the Nazis arrested the members of the White Rose on 18 February. More precisely, Hans and Sophie Scholl were seized on 18 February, and that evening Willi Graf and his sister as well; Probst was arrested two or three days later, and Alexander Schmorell and Professor Kurt Huber only at the end of February. The destruction of the group was thus a process spread over several weeks rather than a single round-up.

A circle of friends in Munich

The core of the White Rose consisted of five students of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and one professor. Hans Scholl, the son of a former mayor of Forchtenberg in Württemberg, raised in a liberal Protestant home, had been an enthusiastic member of the Hitler Youth as a teenager, but in the second half of the 1930s he turned away from the regime; at the end of 1937 he was detained for belonging to a banned youth organisation of the bündisch movement. In Munich, where he studied medicine, he became friends with Alexander Schmorell, the son of a German doctor and a Russian mother, born in Orenburg and brought up in Russian culture. Through Schmorell he met Christoph Probst, and in 1942 the circle was joined by Willi Graf, a Catholic from the banned Catholic youth associations, and by Sophie, who came to Munich to study in May 1942.

The oldest member of the group was Kurt Huber, a 49-year-old professor of philosophy and musicology and a conservative patriot whose lectures on Leibniz attracted students critical of the regime. Around the core were several dozen friends, helpers and confidants – in Munich, Ulm, Stuttgart, Berlin and Hamburg, where a separate group of students distributing leaflets came into being.

What united them was a humanist education, Christian faith (Protestant, Catholic and, in Schmorell’s case, Orthodox) and the experience of the bündisch youth movement. They rebelled not out of party-political motives but moral ones: they rejected dictatorship, enforced conformity of thought, and the crimes of which they knew more and more. An important impulse came from the sermons preached in the summer of 1941 by the Bishop of Münster, Clemens August von Galen, against the killing of the sick, which circulated in copies throughout Germany.

Six leaflets

In June 1942 Hans Scholl and Alexander Schmorell decided that discussion and reading were no longer enough. On a borrowed portable Remington typewriter they wrote, between the end of June and mid-July, four leaflets headed “The White Rose”, which were run off in batches of about a hundred copies and sent anonymously by post to professors, doctors, booksellers and students in the Munich area. The texts were full of quotations from the Bible, Aristotle, Novalis, Goethe and Schiller – the authors were addressing the educated middle classes, convinced that they too would be moved by moral arguments. They called for passive resistance and sabotage, and the second leaflet spoke openly of the crimes in occupied Poland: of the murder of 300,000 Jews since the country’s conquest, and of the deportation of the sons of Polish noble families to concentration camps. Few German documents of 1942 named these things so plainly.

From 23 July to 30 October 1942 Hans Scholl, Schmorell and Graf served as medical orderlies with a student medical company on the Eastern Front. What they saw – the misery of the population, the abuse of Jews, stories of mass executions – confirmed them in their decision. On their return the group grew to include Sophie, who had discovered in the autumn who was writing the leaflets and insisted on being admitted to the conspiracy, Willi Graf and, at the end of 1942, Professor Huber.

The fifth leaflet, “An Appeal to All Germans!”, was produced in January 1943 on a hand-operated duplicator in an edition of 6,000 to 9,000 copies (estimates vary). Between 27 and 29 January members and helpers of the group carried it to other cities – copies turned up in Stuttgart, Cologne, Saarbrücken, Freiburg, Chemnitz, Vienna, Innsbruck, Hamburg and Berlin, among other places – and posted it from there to mislead the investigators. Now signed “The Resistance Movement in Germany”, it was written more simply and more sharply: “Hitler cannot win the war, he can only prolong it.” It called on Germans to break with National Socialism and envisaged a federal post-war Europe founded on freedom of speech, freedom of religion and the protection of the citizen against a criminal state.

The final impulse came from two events in January 1943. On 13 January, at a ceremony marking the university’s anniversary, Gauleiter Paul Giesler insulted the students, calling the men who had not been sent to the front shirkers and suggesting to the women students that instead of studying they should “present the Führer with a son”; the hall witnessed a protest of a kind rare in the Third Reich. Two weeks later the Battle of Stalingrad ended and the regime had to admit defeat. Professor Huber then wrote the sixth leaflet, “Fellow Students!” (Kommilitoninnen! Kommilitonen!), revised by Scholl and Schmorell: “Our nation stands shaken by the destruction of the men of Stalingrad. Three hundred and thirty thousand German men have been senselessly and irresponsibly driven to death and ruin by the brilliant strategy of a World War lance corporal.” More patriotic in tone than its predecessors, the leaflet called on students to settle accounts with “the most contemptible tyrant” the German nation had ever endured, and ended with the words: “The dead of Stalingrad implore us!”

During the nights of 3–4, 8–9 and 15–16 February, Hans Scholl, Schmorell and Graf used a stencil and tar paint to daub the words “Freedom”, “Down with Hitler” and “Hitler mass murderer”, along with crossed-out swastikas, on the walls of the university and in the city centre. The Gestapo, which had been running a special investigation since the end of January under the officer Robert Mohr, offered a reward for the capture of the perpetrators; an expert report in mid-February pointed to an academic author.

Thursday 18 February

The sixth leaflet was printed in several thousand copies; most were sent by post, and during the night of 15–16 February the group scattered another 800–1,200 copies around Munich. Quite a few were left over. On the morning of Thursday 18 February, at around 10.45 a.m., Hans and Sophie entered the main university building by the front entrance carrying a suitcase and a briefcase full of leaflets. Before the lectures ended they laid them out in piles outside the closed lecture halls and in the corridors. They had already reached the rear exit when they turned back to get rid of the rest: from the second floor Sophie tipped the last sheets over the balustrade into the covered atrium (Lichthof).

This was seen by the porter Jakob Schmid, a member of the SA. He detained the siblings and took them to the rector, Professor Walther Wüst, an SS officer, who summoned the Gestapo. The officers took the Scholls to Gestapo headquarters in the Wittelsbach Palace. Hans had on him a handwritten draft of a further leaflet, written by Christoph Probst; he tried to tear it up and swallow it, but the investigators pieced the scraps together and compared the handwriting. That same day Willi Graf and his sister Anneliese were arrested.

On the evening of the same 18 February, the Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels delivered his total war speech in Berlin’s Sportpalast, rewarded with the cheers of a carefully selected audience. The coincidence of dates is telling: the White Rose hoped that the defeat at Stalingrad would open the Germans’ eyes, while the regime used it to mobilise society for an even greater effort.

The investigation

The interrogations were conducted by Robert Mohr. At first Sophie convincingly played the part of a student who had happened to be near the leaflets by chance, and Mohr was reportedly inclined to release her. But when the search of the flat and the physical evidence settled the matter, and Hans admitted authorship, the two of them took all the blame upon themselves, trying to protect their friends. Christoph Probst, the father of three small children (the youngest born a few weeks earlier), who was serving in a Luftwaffe student company in Innsbruck, was arrested on 20 February (some accounts give 21 February). Alexander Schmorell tried to escape to Switzerland; after a few days he returned to Munich, where on 24 February he was recognised in an air-raid shelter and denounced. Professor Huber was arrested on 27 February.

The authorities wanted a quick case that would serve as a deterrent. The indictment was drawn up within a day, and the defendants met their court-appointed defence counsel only just before the hearing.

Trial and execution

The trial took place on Monday 22 February in the Palace of Justice. It was presided over by Roland Freisler, President since August 1942 of the People’s Court – a special court set up in 1934 for cases of high treason, against whose verdicts there was no appeal. Freisler had succeeded Otto Thierack, who was appointed Minister of Justice when Hitler, empowered by the Reichstag to remove any judge without due process, demanded harsher sentences from the judiciary. Freisler had come from Berlin specially for the case. The charges were high treason, aiding the enemy and undermining the nation’s defensive strength (Wehrkraftzersetzung).

The hearing was a spectacle rather than a trial. Freisler shouted at the defendants and interrupted them; the defence counsel said nothing. According to witnesses, Sophie Scholl told the judge that what they had written and said was what many people thought, only they did not dare to say it. Probst pleaded for mercy for the sake of his wife and children – in vain. After a few hours all three were sentenced to death. The Scholls’ parents, who had learned of the trial and come from Ulm, tried to get into the courtroom; their father was removed when he began to protest. The plea for clemency was rejected by Minister Thierack, who happened to be in Munich.

In the afternoon the condemned were taken to Stadelheim. The warders, breaking the rules, allowed all three to meet for a few minutes before the execution; Hans and Sophie were also able to say goodbye to their parents, whereas Probst saw no one from his family again and, shortly before his death, was baptised into the Catholic Church. At around 5 p.m. Sophie went first to the guillotine, followed by Hans and Christoph. According to witnesses, Hans cried out before he died: “Long live freedom!” The executioner Reichhart later said that he had never seen anyone die as bravely as Sophie Scholl. They were buried in the neighbouring Perlacher Forst cemetery.

After the execution

On the evening of 22 February, when the execution was announced, the university authorities and the Nazi students’ league called a meeting in the main hall at which many students condemned “the traitors in our own ranks” and gave the porter Schmid an ovation. On 23 February the Völkischer Beobachter and the Munich press reported briefly that several “degenerate loners” had been executed. The repression was only beginning. On 19 April 1943, in a second trial before Freisler, Kurt Huber, Alexander Schmorell and Willi Graf were sentenced to death and eleven people from their circle of friends to prison terms; Huber and Schmorell were guillotined at Stadelheim on 13 July, and Graf – whom the Gestapo tormented for months in vain for further names – on 12 October 1943. Later trials dealt with members of the Hamburg group and with people who had collected money for Huber’s family; the chemistry student Hans Leipelt, whose mother was Jewish, was executed in January 1945.

News of the White Rose quickly crossed the borders of the Reich. The text of the sixth leaflet was carried via Scandinavia to Britain by Helmuth James von Moltke of the opposition Kreisau Circle. In the summer of 1943 RAF aircraft dropped it over Berlin, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Dortmund, Münster and Weimar as “A German Leaflet”, subtitled “Manifesto of the Munich Students” – in millions of copies, according to the leaflet’s own text. In June 1943 Thomas Mann paid tribute to the courage of the Munich students in a BBC broadcast to German listeners, and the American press reported the executions.

Place in the history of the war

Militarily the White Rose counted for nothing: a few thousand leaflets and slogans on walls could not shake a state that was just then switching over to total war – and Adolf Hitler’s regime responded to them as it did to every sign of dissent, with investigation, summary justice and the guillotine. The students’ hope that the defeat at Stalingrad would stir the Germans was not fulfilled; SD reports did note “considerable unease” caused by rumours of the leaflets, but there was no open resistance. The soldiers and members of the old elites who tried to kill Hitler more than a year later acted separately and by other methods.

The significance of the White Rose is moral. A group of young Christians and humanists, without political backing and without weapons, called by their name the crimes being committed in their nation’s name, including the murder of the Jews in Poland, and paid for it with their lives. After the war its members became in Germany a symbol of the “other Germany” and of civic courage: hundreds of schools and streets bear their names, the square in front of the Munich university was named Geschwister-Scholl-Platz, and in 1998 the Bundestag formally annulled all the sentences passed on members of the group. Sophie Scholl, who died at the age of 21, became one of the best-known figures of the German resistance.