Scholl, Sophie (1921–1943)

German student and member of the White Rose resistance movement who was executed with her brother Hans because of their opposition to Hitler's Nazi regime. Born Sophia Scholl on May 9, 1921, in Forchtenberg, Germany; executed with brother Hans on February 22, 1943, at Gestapo headquarters near Munich; daughter of Robert Scholl (mayor of Forchtenberg) and Magdalene (Müller) Scholl (a deaconess in the local church); graduate of the gymnasium and attended University of Munich; never married: no children.

Arrested by the Gestapo because of her brother's activities (1937); finished high school and labor service required by the Third Reich before entering the University of Munich (1942); served as a courier for the White Rose, a small circle of anti-Nazi activists distributing leaflets calling for the overthrow of the Third Reich until arrest at the university on February 18 (1943).

A shower of leaflets rained down on the courtyard of the University of Munich that afternoon in February 1943. More were scattered in the stairways, on window seats and ledges, all denouncing Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime. As lecture hall doors opened and students and professors poured into the corridors, the young woman and man who had been distributing the forbidden material dashed toward the stairs, but were stopped suddenly by a janitor shouting, "You are under arrest!" With remarkable composure, the pair halted, appearing resigned. In a short time, the "janitor" had delivered them to the building superintendent, who turned them over to the president of the university, Professor Walther Wüst, who was also an SS-Oberführer in the much-feared German secret police. With all exits barred, the students in the building were ordered to assemble in the courtyard, where they witnessed their fellow students Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans being loaded into a car, headed for the local Gestapo headquarters. Four days later, the two would be executed as traitors to the Third Reich.

The roots of the Scholls' heroism were nurtured in a warm family life. Sophie Scholl was born in Forchtenberg, Germany, on the Kocher River in Baden-Württemberg, on May 9, 1921, three years after her brother Hans. She also had two older sisters, Inge and Elisabeth , and a younger brother, Werner. Their father Robert Scholl was mayor of Forchtenberg, and their mother Magdalene Müller Scholl was a deaconess in the local church. Sophie's parents were well respected in the community as virtuous people with high ideals. Her father was a progressive mayor who worked to bring improvements to his small city, and her mother helped the sick and the poor.

In summer, the Scholl children, especially Sophie, enjoyed swimming in the Kocher. She also loved playing with her dolls. Like her brothers and sisters, Scholl was a good student. She was also gifted as an artist and a writer, producing texts she would illustrate herself. A quiet person who was sometimes withdrawn, she could also be daring, scaling rocks and cliffs that no one else wanted to attempt.

Sophie's parents created a sheltered island for their children in a time when their country endured great unrest. After World War I ended in 1918, Germany had been required to pay reparations for its role in the conflict, and Kaiser Wilhelm II had been forced to abdicate. A democratically elected government had been installed, but a worldwide depression, followed by rampant inflation, had helped to keep Germany unstable. In the 1920s, an Austrian-born veteran named Adolf Hitler formed a new political party which he called National Socialism. Jews and Communists, he said, were responsible for all of Germany's woes. The Nazi Party found sympathizers among many of the country's frustrated, desperate and angry citizens, and the movement gradually gained momentum.

In 1930, Sophie was nine years old when her father was voted out of office. The family moved to Ludwigsburg, and then to Ulm in 1932, where he practiced accounting. A pacifist who had served as a medical orderly in World War I, Robert Scholl now feared the dangerous political currents swirling in Germany. The children, however, remained mostly unaware of the abyss awaiting their generation. Like most German youngsters of the period, they joined the Hitler Youth, perceived at the time as an organization much like the Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts with emphasis on hiking expeditions and camping trips. Everyone could join, except, of course, Jews, leftists, and other "undesirables." The Scholls met the standards of the "racially pure" Germans that Hitler so often spoke about, and although the elder Scholls had reservations about the Hitler Youth, they let their children determine their own activities. They trusted that their example would ultimately be more important than an organization determined to shape the minds of Germany's youth.

While her brother Hans rose quickly in the ranks of the Hitler Youth, Sophie was less carried away with the organization. Angered when two Jewish girls in her class were not allowed to join, she posed the essential question that many Germans in those years neglected to ask: "Why can't Luise, with her fair hair and blue eyes, be a member, while I with my dark hair and dark eyes am a member?" And when Hans and her father argued the issues of Nazi politics, Sophie listened.

In 1936, Adolf Hitler had been in power for three years when Hans attended the Nüremberg rallies, an impressive event of the kind the chancellor used effectively to garner support. For Hans, however, the Nazi political agenda became clear at Nüremberg, and he gradually began to withdraw from the Hitler Youth, becoming involved instead with the German Boys' League of the First of November, known as "d.j.1.11," which had no particular political agenda.

In the meantime, the Nazi regime was moving inexorably toward accomplishing its terrifying goals. At first Hitler's strategy was not directed exclusively toward the Jews, although they were increasingly denied the rights of other citizens. In the early days, the Nazis also targeted fellow Germans, including leftists, Communists, socialists, pacifists, and individuals considered to be "artistically liberal," as well as the mentally defective and Gypsies (Roma), who were exterminated as "racially defective." It is estimated that from 1933 to 1945 approximately a quarter of a million Germans were taken into custody every year, in what proved to be a highly effective means of coercing other Germans into toeing the party line. The dreaded knock on the door was a fear shared by all Germans.

One early morning in November 1937, the Gestapo called at the Scholls' apartment. Magdalene Scholl's response, upon opening the door, was to grab up a basket. "Excuse me gentlemen," she said, "I am in a hurry to get something from the bakery." Leaving the room, she instead went to the apartment's top floor, where she picked up any materials in her two sons' room that she thought might be suspicious, and left on her errand with the materials in her basket. All youth organizations had by this time been banned except for the Hitler Youth, and Sophie, Werner, and Hans were all arrested for Hans' continued activities in the outlawed German Boys' League. Taken into custody, the three were driven from Ulm to Stuttgart, 50 miles in an open truck without warm clothes, on a route that took them through a snowstorm in the windswept mountains. Sophie was released after a day, but Werner was kept for one week and Hans for five weeks. If fellow members of the Hitler Youth had not vouched for him, he might have been sent to a concentration camp.

Following their arrest, Hans and Sophie, then aged 16 and 19, were bound together more closely than ever before. Hans and their sister Inge broke with National Socialism for good, but Sophie, who was often subjected to interrogation by school administrators, officially dropped out later. While such arrests generally accomplished their goal of terrifying the populace, Sophie's self-confidence seemed to be strengthened. She shared the attitude voiced by Hans: "We must bear it in a different spirit from other people. This is a distinction." Coming around to their parents' attitude toward the Hitler regime, brother and sister also felt the support of the elder Scholls who remained an island of moral calm.

Don't we all know, no matter in which times we live, that at a moment's notice God can call us into account?

—Sophie Scholl

On September 1, 1939, Hitler's armies invaded Poland, setting off World War II. As the Germans swept across much of Western Europe and then turned on the Soviet Union, the country began to claim the young for its purposes. Hans was drafted into the army, and Sophie, after receiving her diploma from a German gymnasium (high school), was required to put on a uniform and report to the Krauchenwies labor camp near Sigmaringen on the upper Danube to perform labor service for the Third Reich. Writing, "We live like prisoners," she hoped to complete her service by August 1941, but was instead required to serve another six months in the War Auxiliary Service. Trained as a kindergarten teacher, she then reported to a nursery school in Blumberg, a small town near the Swiss border, where her work proved less onerous.

Hans was sent to the Eastern front, where the Germans' cruelty against the Russians was even greater than their cruelty in Western Europe. Sophie corresponded meanwhile with another young soldier, Fritz Hartnagel, a friend since about age 16; the two had enjoyed hiking and outdoor activities together. Sophie's letters to Fritz, which document her growing determination to resist the Nazis, argue against Fritz's desire to be a good soldier. "I cannot comprehend it," she wrote him, "human beings constantly putting other human beings into mortal danger, over and over again. I will never understand it; I think it is horrible. Do not say it is for the Fatherland."

Hans, more opposed than ever to the evil engulfing Europe, decided to become a medical doctor in the hope of being exempted from combat. On May 9, 1942, Sophie took the train 95 miles from Ulm to join her brother, who had entered the University of Munich. That night they celebrated in his rooms with wine and cake, and she was soon introduced to his friends Alexander Schmorell, Christoph Probst, and Willi Graf, and to a professor, Kurt Huber. All were members of a small, intimate circle who shared an opposition to the Nazis on the grounds of deeply held Christian convictions. The members called themselves the White Rose, a name the origins of which are uncertain, although it may have come from the title of a novel. Committed to action, the youths had secretly acquired mimeograph machines, ink, paper, and other necessities for printing leaflets to carry their message against the Third Reich.

Always under the threat of discovery by the Gestapo, the White Rose began to print and distribute its leaflets through a network of students throughout the country. A courier traveling by train would deposit a bag of materials in a train compartment at the beginning of the trip, sit in another compartment to avoid being caught with the materials, and retrieve them a few minutes before disembarking. Sophie was often such a courier, shuttling between Augsburg, Stuttgart, and Ulm, and White Rose leaflets eventually appeared in Frankfurt, Berlin, Hamburg, Freiburg, Saarbrücken, and even in Salzburg and Vienna; some turned up as far away as Norway, England, and Sweden.

The Gestapo, meanwhile, was growing extremely alarmed, because for the first time in the war, German troops were showing signs of losing. In the fall of 1942, the Red Army showed its mettle, defying Allied predictions that the Soviet Union would fall like ripe fruit. German troops, unprepared for the harsh rigors of a Russian winter, began to bog down, and the Soviet military, guerrillas, and populace fought extremely well, until the two armies became locked in hand-to-hand combat at Stalingrad. After horrifying casualties on both sides, the Soviet armies surrounded and defeated the Nazis, in a turning point of the war.

At the start of 1943, Sophie and Hans returned to Munich after spending Christmas with their family in Ulm. Morale at the university was rapidly deteriorating as students grew tired of being fed into the voracious war machine. When a Nazi leader speaking at a commemorative assembly demanded that the women students "give the Führer a child" rather than hang about the university, some young women rushed for the exits, furious at the insult, and were arrested by the SS. The male students beat up the speaker and held him hostage in exchange for the women. After this incident, more White Rose leaflets appeared and slogans were painted on the walls around Munich, enraging the local Gestapo, which set up a special commission to exterminate the resistance group.

By February, Hans and Sophie Scholl knew that the Gestapo was closing in. With their arrest imminent, they decided to distribute leaflets at the university one more time, provoking their capture on February 18, 1943. Soon after they were taken to Gestapo headquarters, other members of the White Rose were rounded up, until some 80 people had ultimately been captured throughout Germany. A prisoner forced to work at Gestapo headquarters wrote a secret account of the dignity maintained by the sister and brother during the last four days of their lives. A short trial was held, Sophie and Hans were allowed a brief time with their parents for goodbyes, and they were executed, along with Christoph Probst, by guillotine in the late afternoon of February 22, 1943. Shortly before the execution, Probst summed up their attitude: "I didn't know dying could be so easy. In a few minutes we meet again in eternity."

Hopes that the White Rose would spark a revolt against the Third Reich proved futile. The University of Munich in fact sponsored large demonstrations against the underground group, and the Gestapo worked relentlessly to annihilate all opposition. The entire Scholl family was sent to prison, except for Werner who was sent back to the Eastern front. Military service there was an almost certain death sentence, as it proved to be in his case.

The Nazis, in an attempt to discredit the White Rose movement, described its members as "typical loners, [who] had transgressed shame-lessly against the defensive strength and the spirit of the German nation by smearing house walls with subversive incitements and disseminating fliers fomenting high treason." Their efforts, they said, must be consigned to the flames. The flame which endured, however, was the white, hot flame of truth, which ultimately consumed Adolf Hitler and his minions and reduced the Third Reich to ashes. Sophie Scholl's gift to the world is now ours to tend.

sources:

Die Weisse Rose: Der Widerstand von Studeten gegen Hitler München 1942–43.

Hanser, Richard. A Noble Treason: The Revolt of the Munich Students Against Hitler. NY: Putnam, 1979.

Jens, Inge, ed. At the Heart of the White Rose: Letters and Diaries of Hans and Sophie Scholl. NY: Harper and Row, 1987.

"The Nazi Student Trial," in The Nation. Vol. 156. May 29, 1943, p. 779.

Neuman, Alfred. Six of Them. NY: Macmillan, 1946.

Schneider, Michael C. and Winfried Süss. Keine Volksgenossen: Studentischer Widerstand der Weissen Rose. Munich: Rektoratkollegium der Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München, 1993 (exhibition catalog).

Scholl, Inge. Students Against Tyranny: The Resistance of the White Rose, Munich, 1942–1943. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1970.

Stern, J.P. "The White Rose," in The Heart of Europe. Essays on Literature and Ideology. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.

Vinke, Hermann. The Short Life of Sophie Scholl. NY: Harper and Row, 1984.

Wittenstein, George J. "The White Rose: German Youth Resistance to Hitler, 1939–1942," in Soundings: Collections of the University Library. Vol. XXII, no. 28, 1991, pp. 61–74.

John Haag , Associate Professor of History, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia