On the morning of February 18, 1943, Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans climbed the stairs of the main building at the University of Munich, carrying a suitcase heavy with leaflets. They had done this before, moving quietly through corridors, leaving stacks of paper where students would find them. But this time, they chose a more audacious method. From the top floor, they tipped the suitcase over the railing and let the leaflets fall into the entrance hall below, a cascade of white paper drifting down toward the students leaving their lecture rooms.

The university maintenance man, Jakob Schmidt, watched them. Schmidt was a member of the Nazi Party. He reported what he had seen to the Gestapo. Hans and Sophie Scholl were arrested on the spot.

The war had been raging for nearly four years. Hitler had invaded Poland in September 1939, drawing France and Britain into a conflict that would consume millions of lives. By 1943, German forces were fighting deep inside the Soviet Union, and the tide had begun to turn. Yet inside Germany, open resistance remained nearly impossible.

The Gestapo, the secret state police, moved swiftly against anyone who spoke against the regime. Estimates suggest that some 800,000 Germans were arrested for resistance activities, and thousands were executed. Sophie Scholl was twenty-one years old. She had been born on May 9, 1921, in Forchtenberg, a small town in the Weimar Republic, into an upper-middle-class Lutheran family.

She was the fourth of six children, raised alongside her siblings Inge, Hans, Elisabeth, and Werner in a household where Christian values mattered deeply. She loved nature, reading, and painting. Her father, Robert Scholl, served as mayor of Forchtenberg and later worked as a tax consultant in the southwestern state of Württemberg, where the family moved when Sophie was ten, settling first in Ludwigsburg and then in Ulm. When Hitler came to power in January 1933, Sophie was eleven years old.

Like many young Germans, she was swept up in the enthusiasm of the moment. At twelve, she joined the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the League of German Girls, and eventually rose to become a group leader. Her brother Hans joined the Hitler Youth. Their father disapproved from the start.

Robert Scholl was a staunch opponent of Hitler and the Nazi Party, and he made no secret of it. But in those early years, his children did not share his misgivings. That began to change, slowly, as the reality of life under Nazi rule set in. Hans, who had once been an eager participant in the Hitler Youth, became disillusioned.

Sophie, who was very close to her brother, followed the same path. They saw what the regime was doing. People could no longer read what they wanted or sing certain songs. Jewish classmates were forced to leave school.

Teachers who did not support the Party were dismissed, and some had to pretend to be nurses just to keep their jobs, because they had families who depended on them. During a group trip, a fifteen-year-old girl spoke up: “Everything would be fine, but this thing about the Jews is something I just can’t swallow. ” The troop leader assured her that Hitler knew what he was doing and that, for the sake of the greater good, they would have to accept certain difficult and incomprehensible things. Some of the girls were not satisfied with that answer.

Hans Scholl and a group of friends decided to form their own youth organization, one that promoted a love of nature, outdoor adventure, music, art, and the literature of German Romanticism. At first, these groups were seen by many as compatible with Nazi ideology. But gradually, they dissolved, and by 1936 they were banned altogether. Hans remained active in one such group anyway.

In 1937, after six months of national labor service, Hans was drafted into the German army. He had always loved horses, and he volunteered for a cavalry unit. A few months later, the Gestapo came for him. Hans was arrested along with his siblings Sophie, Inge, and Werner for participating in activities that were not part of the Hitler Youth program.

Sophie was released the same day. Inge and Werner were held for a week. Hans was eventually released only after his commanding officer assured the police that he was a good and loyal soldier. The arrest left a deep impression on Sophie.

It was the beginning of the process that would turn her from a happy supporter of the Nazi Party into an active resistance fighter. When Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and France and Britain declared war two days later, the Scholl brothers were sent to the front. The family gathered in Ulm on the day before England declared war. Elisabeth, one of the sisters, said, “Hope there will be no war.

” Sophie answered, “Yes, I hope there will be. Hopefully, someone will stand up to Hitler. ”

When Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, Sophie’s brother and her boyfriend, Fritz Hartnagel, were sent to fight on the Eastern Front. What they witnessed there changed everything.

In Poland and the Soviet Union, they saw atrocities committed by the German army: mass deportations, the killings of Jews, Soviet prisoners of war being shot and thrown into mass graves. Hartnagel wrote to Sophie about what he had seen. There was more. In August 1942, Sophie’s father, Robert Scholl, was arrested by the Gestapo for speaking out against Hitler at work.

Sophie had completed her high school education in the spring of 1940 and wanted to study biology and philosophy. To gain admission to university, students were required to work for a period of time for the state in the National Labor Service. She began an apprenticeship to become a kindergarten teacher, hoping it would be recognized as an alternative to the labor service. It was not.

In 1941, she served six months in auxiliary war service as a nursery teacher in Blumberg. Then, after six months in the National Labor Service, she enrolled at the University of Munich in May 1942 to study biology and philosophy. Hans was there too. He had fought in France in 1940 but had been allowed to study medicine at the University of Munich.

There, he befriended other students who were drawn together by a shared love of art, music, literature, and philosophy, and who also questioned the principles and policies of the Nazi regime. They adopted a strategy of passive resistance: writing and distributing leaflets that called for the toppling of the Nazi government. They called themselves the White Rose. The group was originally founded by Hans Scholl and his friend Alexander Schmorell.

They were joined by Sophie, Christoph Probst, and Willi Graf, along with one of their professors, Kurt Huber. In leaflets printed and distributed across Munich, they denounced the murder of Jewish people, encouraged citizens to resist the Nazi regime, and demanded an end to the war. Over the course of their campaign, they published and distributed six leaflets. The sixth and final leaflet appeared in early 1943, warning that the German name would be forever damaged if the German people did not finally rise up.

Sophie learned about the White Rose from Hans and his friends. They told her about their resistance campaign, and she decided to join them. That decision led her to the staircase of the University of Munich on February 18, 1943. After the leaflets drifted down into the entrance hall, Jakob Schmidt, the maintenance man and Nazi Party member, went to the Gestapo.

Hans and Sophie were arrested. When the police searched Hans, they found a handwritten draft of a seventh leaflet, written by Christoph Probst. Hans tried to destroy the draft, tearing it apart and attempting to swallow the pieces. But the Gestapo recovered enough of it to match the handwriting, and that led to Probst’s arrest.

They were all charged with treason. The main Gestapo interrogator was Robert Mohr, who initially believed Sophie was innocent. But after Hans confessed, Sophie took full responsibility for the leaflets, in an attempt to protect the other members of the White Rose. Her confession did not save them.

On February 22, 1943, they were brought before Judge Roland Freisler in the People’s Court. Sophie Scholl was recorded as saying, “Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just don’t dare express themselves as we did.

”

Sophie Scholl, Hans Scholl, and Christoph Probst were found guilty of treason and condemned to death. They were executed by guillotine the same day at Munich’s Stadelheim Prison. Prison officials were impressed by the condemned prisoners’ bravery and allowed them to smoke cigarettes together before they were taken to the execution chamber. After the executions, a pro-Nazi rally was held at the University of Munich.

Jakob Schmidt, the maintenance man who had reported Hans and Sophie, was given a standing ovation. The war would continue for more than two more years. When it ended, Schmidt was arrested and sentenced to five years in a labor camp. Sophie Scholl’s other siblings survived.

But of the six children in the Scholl family, Sophie, Hans, and their brother Werner would not live to see the fall of the regime they had opposed. Sophie Scholl became a symbol of resistance against Nazi Germany. The leaflets of the White Rose, the ones she helped write and distribute, outlived her.

They were smuggled out of Germany, dropped by Allied planes over German cities, and remembered long after the war as proof that ordinary Germans had raised their voices against Hitler.