Sophie Scholl

Sophia Magdalena Scholl, known as Sophie Scholl, was the only woman in the inner circle of the Munich resistance group the White Rose. Brought up in a liberal Protestant home, she passed through the Nazi youth organisations as a teenager, and within a few years – through reading, faith and what she saw of the war – came to reject the regime completely. In the winter of 1942/1943 she helped produce the group’s last two leaflets; on 18 February 1943 she was arrested with her brother Hans at the University of Munich, and four days later she was sentenced by the People’s Court and beheaded. She was 21. In post-war Germany she became the best-known face of civilian resistance to Nazism.

Childhood in Forchtenberg and Ulm

She was born on 9 May 1921 in Forchtenberg in Württemberg, the fourth of the six children of Robert Scholl, mayor of the small town from 1919 to 1930, and Magdalena, née Müller, a former deaconess. She had three older siblings – Inge, Hans and Elisabeth – and a younger brother, Werner; the youngest sister, Thilde, died in infancy. Her father was a liberal and a pacifist, her mother a devout Protestant; the children were brought up as Christians but with considerable freedom of thought. In 1930 the family moved to Ludwigsburg and in 1932 to Ulm, where Robert Scholl ran a tax and business consultancy.

In the League of German Girls

After Adolf Hitler came to power, Sophie, like her older siblings, was carried away by the communal enthusiasm of the new state. In 1934 she joined the League of German Girls (Bund Deutscher Mädel), the female branch of the Hitler Youth, and in 1936 became the leader of a group of younger girls – against the wishes of her father, who warned his children against the party’s organisations but left the choice to them. Disillusionment came gradually: through Hans she came into contact with Eberhard Koebel’s banned youth movement (d.j.1.11), read books that were not on the recommended reading lists and made friends with artists the regime had branded “degenerate”. A shock came in the autumn of 1937, when she and her siblings were briefly detained by the Gestapo in an investigation into members of banned youth groups; at the end of the year Hans, who was by then doing his military service, was arrested for the same reason.

In 1937 she met Fritz Hartnagel, an officer cadet in the Wehrmacht four years her senior. Their six-year relationship survives in hundreds of letters. When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Sophie wrote to him that she could not understand how people could constantly put the lives of others at risk, and argued with him about the meaning of the soldier’s oath.

School, service and conversion

In March 1940 she passed her school-leaving examination at the girls’ secondary school in Ulm and began training as a kindergarten teacher at the Protestant seminary in Ulm-Söflingen, hoping that this would exempt her from the Reich Labour Service. It did not: in the spring of 1941 she had to serve six months in a Labour Service camp at Krauchenwies near Sigmaringen, and from October 1941 to the end of March 1942 auxiliary war service as a nursery teacher in Blumberg in Baden – a condition of admission to university. The barrack-room discipline and ideological lectures reinforced her aversion to the regime; towards those around her she adopted an attitude of passive resistance.

At the same time she underwent a religious turn. In the labour camp she secretly read Augustine of Hippo, which drew mockery from her companions; she was moved by The Diary of a Country Priest by Georges Bernanos. The strongest influence on her spiritual development was the Catholic Otl Aicher, a family friend and later the husband of her sister Inge. In her letters and diary Sophie repeatedly returned to a sentence of Jacques Maritain: “One must have a tough mind and a tender heart.” Her faith ceased to be private piety and became the source of her conviction that a Christian could not remain silent in the face of evil.

Munich and the White Rose

In May 1942 she began studying biology and philosophy at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where Hans was studying medicine. Her brother introduced her to his circle of friends – Alexander Schmorell, Christoph Probst and Willi Graf – who were initially united by a shared love of literature, music, philosophy and the mountains. They visited Carl Muth, the elderly publisher of the Catholic monthly Hochland, and the writer Theodor Haecker, discussing how a person ought to act under a dictatorship. The first four White Rose leaflets were written by Hans and Schmorell in June and July 1942 without her involvement; it is not known exactly when she discovered who their authors were. According to Hartnagel’s recollections, as early as May 1942 she asked him to help her obtain a permit to buy a duplicating machine, which suggests that she knew of the plans earlier than she later stated under interrogation.

She spent the summer of 1942 in Ulm, doing compulsory work in a metal factory. In August her father was imprisoned for four months for having called Hitler a “scourge of God” in a conversation with an employee. Hans was then serving as a medical orderly on the Eastern Front; in the autumn Fritz found himself with the Sixth Army at Stalingrad.

From the autumn of 1942 Sophie was part of the conspiracy. In January 1943, after Hans, Schmorell and Graf had returned from the front, she helped write a leaflet for the first time – the fifth, “A Call to All Germans!”, run off in several thousand copies on a new duplicator. She bought paper, envelopes and stamps in different shops so as not to arouse suspicion, obtained addresses, kept the group’s funds and took leaflets by train to other cities; on 25 January in Ulm she handed 2,000 copies to a schoolboy, Hans Hirzel, for distribution in Stuttgart. The news of the Sixth Army’s capitulation brought her personal anxiety – Hartnagel, wounded and with frostbitten hands, had been flown out of the pocket in January – and the political hope that the Germans would at last see the truth. The sixth leaflet, “Fellow Students!”, was written in February by Professor Kurt Huber.

The last four days

On the morning of 18 February 1943 Sophie and Hans brought a suitcase and a briefcase containing the remaining copies of the sixth leaflet to the university. They laid them out outside the lecture halls, and when they still had some copies left they ran up to the second floor, from where Sophie threw them over the balustrade into the atrium. The caretaker, Jakob Schmid, seized the brother and sister and handed them over to the Gestapo. That same evening in Berlin Joseph Goebbels called for total war.

At Gestapo headquarters in the Wittelsbach Palace she was interrogated for three days by Robert Mohr. At first her denials were convincing, and the interrogator was inclined to believe her innocent. But once the evidence and Hans’s statements had settled the matter, she confessed, and from then on consistently presented herself and her brother as the only culprits in order to protect their friends. According to Mohr’s later account, she told him that she would do it all again, because it was not she but he who had the wrong view of the world. She shared a cell with a political prisoner, Else Gebel, whose recollections, written down after the war, are the main source for those days.

On 22 February she stood trial with Hans and Christoph Probst before the People’s Court, presided over by Roland Freisler, who had come from Berlin. According to witnesses she told the judge that what the defendants had written was what many people thought, only nobody dared to say it, and that soon he himself would be standing where they now stood. After a few hours death sentences were passed – for high treason, aiding the enemy and undermining the nation’s defensive strength. Their parents managed to see their children in Stadelheim Prison shortly before the execution. At around 5 p.m. Sophie Scholl was the first of the three to die on the guillotine – the execution of the Scholl siblings took place just four days after their arrest. The executioner, Johann Reichhart, later recalled that he had never seen anyone die so bravely.

Her last words are known only from others’ accounts. Else Gebel remembered what she said on the morning of the trial: “Such a beautiful, sunny day, and I have to go. […] What does my death matter, if through us thousands of people are stirred and awakened?”

Memory

The repression extended to her family as well: Sophie’s parents and siblings were arrested under the principle of collective responsibility, and her father spent further months in prison. Her brother Werner went missing on the Eastern Front in 1944. Fritz Hartnagel, who learned of the execution in a hospital in Lwów (Lviv), survived the war and in 1945 married Sophie’s sister Elisabeth; in the Federal Republic he became a judge and a peace activist. Her sister Inge Aicher-Scholl, in her book The White Rose (1952), fixed the image of her brother and sister in post-war German memory.

Sophie Scholl became a symbol of the “other Germany” and of civil courage. Hundreds of schools and streets in Germany and Austria bear her name, the square in front of the Munich university was named Geschwister-Scholl-Platz, and in the atrium into which she threw the leaflets stands her bust; in 2003 a bust of her was also placed in the Walhalla in Bavaria. Her story has been told in the films The White Rose by Michael Verhoeven (1982) and the Oscar-nominated Sophie Scholl – The Final Days by Marc Rothemund (2005). In 1998 the Bundestag formally annulled the sentences passed on the members of the White Rose. For the history of the war, her fate shows both the scale of German society’s conformity at the moment of the defeat at Stalingrad and the fact that even then there were people who – unarmed and with no chance of success – said out loud what the regime was doing in the nation’s name.