On February 18, 1943, a university janitor named Jakob Schmid looked up from the atrium of the main building of the University of Munich and saw two students dropping a suitcase full of leaflets over the railing. They drifted down into the entrance hall, meant for the students flooding out of their lecture rooms. Schmid, a loyal member of the Nazi Party, did not hesitate. He reported what he had seen to the Gestapo, and within minutes, Hans and Sophie Scholl were seized.

The two siblings were barely given time to understand what had happened before they were in Gestapo custody. Neither knew that this single act, the last public gesture of a small resistance circle, would cost them their lives within four days. Sophie Scholl was born on May 9, 1921, in Forchtenberg, a small town in the Weimar Republic, into an upper middle class Lutheran family. Her father, Robert Scholl, served as mayor of Forchtenberg in the northeastern state of Württemberg.

She was the fourth of six children, raised alongside her siblings Inge, Hans, Elisabeth, and Werner in a home where Christian values mattered deeply. Sophie loved nature, reading, and painting, and she grew up in a household that took its moral bearings seriously. In 1930, when Sophie was ten, the family moved to Ludwigsburg, and two years later they moved again to Ulm, where her father worked as a tax consultant. By then, Germany’s politics had been transformed.

Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933, and the Scholl children, like countless other young Germans, embraced the Nazi movement with enthusiasm. At twelve, Sophie joined the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the League of German Girls, the female counterpart to the Hitler Youth, and she eventually became a group leader. Her brother Hans joined the Hitler Youth. Their parents, especially their father, disapproved.

Robert Scholl had been a staunch opponent of Hitler and the Nazi Party from the very beginning and did not hide his dislike of his children’s participation in Nazi youth groups. But it was Hans who changed first. The boy who had eagerly taken part in Hitler’s programs became completely disillusioned with the Nazi Party. Sophie, who was very close to her brother, followed him into doubt and then into open questioning of the Nazi government’s policies.

The reality of life under Nazi rule was impossible to ignore. They saw that no one could read what they wanted or sing certain songs. Jewish classmates had to leave school. During a group trip, a fifteen-year-old girl said, “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. But some of the girls were not satisfied with that answer. Teachers who did not support the Nazi Party had been sacked. Others had to pretend to be nurses just to keep their jobs, because most of them had families who depended on them.

The Nazification of everyday life pressed in from every direction, and more and more people quietly resented it. Hans Scholl and some of his friends decided to form their own youth organization. It promoted a love of nature, outdoor adventure, music, art, and the literature of German romanticism. At first, many saw this as compatible with Nazi ideology, which also celebrated the outdoors and German culture.

But these alternative groups gradually dissolved and were finally banned by 1936. Hans remained active in one of them. By 1937, the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police, had taken notice. After six months of national labor service, Hans was drafted into the German army.

He had always loved horses, and in 1937 he volunteered and was accepted into a cavalry unit. But a few months later, he was arrested by the Gestapo, together 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 released a week later.

Hans was eventually let go only after his commanding officer assured the police that he was a good and loyal soldier. The arrest left a strong impression on Sophie. It began the process that eventually turned her from a happy supporter of the Nazi Party into an active resistance fighter, but that transformation took years. On September 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland.

Two days later, France and Britain declared war on Germany. Hans and his brothers were sent to the front. As the war ground on, Sophie’s disillusionment deepened. Elisabeth Scholl later recalled a conversation with Sophie from just before the war.

On the day before England declared war in 1939, Elisabeth said, “Hope there will be no war. ” Sophie replied, “Yes, I hope there will be. Hopefully, someone will stand up to Hitler. ”

When Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hans and Sophie’s boyfriend Fritz Hartnagel were sent to fight on the Eastern Front.

During their time in Poland and the Soviet Union, they witnessed atrocities committed by the German army. Reports came back of mass deportations, the killings of Jews, and Soviet prisoners of war being shot into mass graves. And in August 1942, Sophie’s father Robert Scholl was arrested by the Gestapo for speaking out against Hitler at work. Sophie completed her high school education in the spring of 1940 and wanted to study biology and philosophy.

To gain admission to university, a student had 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 alternative service and satisfy the requirement. It did not. In 1941, she began a six-month stint in auxiliary war service as a nursery teacher in Blumberg.

After six months in the National Labor Service in May 1942, she finally enrolled at the University of Munich to study biology and philosophy. Hans fought in France in 1940 but was later allowed to study medicine at the University of Munich. There he befriended other students who were initially drawn together by a shared love of art, music, literature, and philosophy, but who also questioned the principles and policies of the Nazi regime. Eventually they adopted a strategy of passive resistance: writing and publishing leaflets that called for the toppling of Nazism.

In 1942, this group took the name the White Rose. Sophie learned of the leaflets. Her brother and his friends told her about the White Rose and their resistance campaign, and she decided to join them. The group was small: originally founded by Hans and his friend Alexander Schmorell, they were joined by Sophie, Christoph Probst, Willi Graf, and one of their professors, Kurt Huber.

Together they printed and distributed leaflets denouncing the murder of Jewish people, encouraging citizens to resist the Nazi regime, and demanding an end to the war. Over the course of their campaign, they published and distributed six leaflets. The sixth and final one appeared in early 1943, with a warning: “The German name is forever damaged if the German youth does not finally rise up. ”

By February 1943, the group knew the risks.

They had been distributing leaflets across Munich and other cities, mailing them to addresses drawn from phone books and leaving them in public places. But their most daring action was planned for February 18, 1943. Sophie and Hans Scholl arrived at the main building of the University of Munich carrying a suitcase full of leaflets. They went up to the top floor and dropped copies into the entrance hall below, intending for students to find them as they left their lecture rooms.

It was then that the janitor Jakob Schmid saw them. He reported them to the Gestapo, and both were arrested on the spot. The police found a handwritten draft of a seventh leaflet, written by Christoph Probst, in Hans Scholl’s possession. Hans tried to destroy it by tearing it apart and attempting to swallow the pieces.

The Gestapo recovered enough of it to match the handwriting, and that led to the arrest of Christoph Probst as well. After interrogation, all three were charged with treason. The main Gestapo interrogator was Robert Mohr, who initially believed Sophie was innocent. But after Hans confessed, Sophie took full responsibility in an attempt to protect the other members of the White Rose.

Her confession did nothing to spare them. On February 22, 1943, 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.

”

On the same day, February 22, 1943, Sophie Scholl, Hans Scholl, and Christoph Probst were found guilty of treason and condemned to death. They were all beheaded by guillotine that same day in Munich’s Stadelheim Prison. Prison officials were impressed by the condemned prisoners’ bravery and allowed them to smoke cigarettes together before they were executed. After the execution, a pro-Nazi rally was held at their university.

Jakob Schmid, the janitor who had reported them, was given a standing ovation. The White Rose was crushed. Its other members were hunted down, tried, and executed in the months that followed, and Kurt Huber, the professor who had lent his voice to the leaflets, was beheaded in July 1943. After the end of the war, Jakob Schmid was arrested and sentenced to five years in a labor camp.

Sophie Scholl was twenty-one years old when she died. She left behind the record of her stand in the People’s Court, and the leaflets she helped write and scatter, which called on Germans to think for themselves. Her final day in court, where she faced down Roland Freisler without retreating, became part of the historical record of the only large-scale organized resistance inside Nazi Germany.

In the decades since, she has been remembered as a symbol of resistance against the Nazi regime, not because her movement won, but because she refused to accept what she knew was wrong.