White Rose Resistance (1942–1943): Sophie and Hans Scholl

The White Rose (Weiße Rose) was a small resistance group in Munich that wrote and secretly distributed leaflets against the Nazi regime between June 1942 and February 1943. Led by students including the siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl, it called on Germans to resist Hitler and denounced the murder of Jews and Poles. Its members were caught, tried and executed in 1943, and they became among the best-known symbols of German resistance to Nazism.

Background

By 1942 open opposition inside Germany was almost impossible. Since Hitler became chancellor in 1933, the regime had banned other parties, imprisoned opponents and built a dense network of informers. Criticising the war or the Führer could lead to a concentration camp or a death sentence.

Hans Scholl and Alexander Schmorell were medical students at the University of Munich. Both had been conscripted and studied in a student medical company of the army, which allowed them to continue their courses. Influenced by Christian faith, literature and philosophy, and by what they had heard about crimes in occupied Poland and the Soviet Union, they decided to act.

The leaflets

In June and July 1942 Hans Scholl and Alexander Schmorell wrote the first four “Leaflets of the White Rose”. Typed and copied on a duplicating machine, a few hundred copies of each were mailed to academics, writers, booksellers and other educated readers in and around Munich. The texts quoted German classics and the Bible, condemned the regime as a “dictatorship of evil” and stated that some 300,000 Jews had been murdered in Poland.

From July to November 1942 Hans, Schmorell and their friend Willi Graf served as medical orderlies on the Eastern Front. What they saw there strengthened their resolve. Back in Munich they widened the circle, which by then included Sophie Scholl, who had begun studying biology and philosophy in May 1942, Christoph Probst, a married medical student with young children, and Kurt Huber, a professor of philosophy and musicology.

The fifth leaflet, “Leaflet of the Resistance Movement in Germany”, appeared in January 1943. Several thousand copies were produced and distributed in Munich and taken by members to other cities, including Stuttgart, Augsburg, Frankfurt, Salzburg and Vienna. It predicted that Germany would lose the war and called for a federal, democratic Europe.

After the German defeat at Stalingrad in early February 1943, Huber drafted a sixth leaflet addressed to students. In the same weeks, members painted slogans such as “Down with Hitler” and “Freedom” on walls in Munich at night.

Arrest and trials

On the morning of 18 February 1943 Hans and Sophie Scholl carried a suitcase of sixth leaflets into the university’s main building and left piles outside lecture halls. Sophie pushed the remaining copies from an upper floor into the atrium. The university caretaker, Jakob Schmid, saw them and detained them until the Gestapo came.

A draft of a seventh leaflet written by Christoph Probst was found on Hans, and Probst was arrested soon afterwards. After days of interrogation, the three were tried on 22 February 1943 before the People’s Court (Volksgerichtshof), the regime’s political court, presided over by Roland Freisler, who had come from Berlin for the case. All three were sentenced to death and executed by guillotine at Stadelheim Prison that afternoon. Hans Scholl is reported to have called out “Long live freedom!” before he died.

A second trial on 19 April 1943 sentenced Alexander Schmorell, Kurt Huber and Willi Graf to death. Schmorell and Huber were executed on 13 July 1943 and Graf on 12 October 1943, after months of interrogation in which he refused to name others. Most of the other defendants received prison terms, and one was acquitted. In Hamburg, students connected with the group were arrested later; Hans Leipelt was executed in January 1945.

Consequences

The White Rose did not shake the regime, and few Germans responded to its appeals. Yet its message reached far beyond Munich. A copy of the sixth leaflet was smuggled out of Germany through Scandinavia to Britain, and in 1943 the Royal Air Force dropped large numbers of copies over German cities under the title “A German Leaflet”, with an introduction about the students’ fate.

Legacy

After the war the Scholls and their friends were honoured as moral heroes. The square in front of the University of Munich’s main building is named Geschwister-Scholl-Platz, after the Scholl siblings, and hundreds of German schools and streets bear their names. A memorial set into the pavement there reproduces the leaflets in stone. Films including Sophie Scholl: The Final Days (2005) brought the story to international audiences, and in 2012 the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia canonised Alexander Schmorell as a saint.

Historians also stress that the White Rose was one strand among many: communist, socialist, church and military resistance groups also opposed Nazism, notably those behind the July 20 plot of 1944.

Timeline

• 1942, June–July: The first four White Rose leaflets are written and mailed.
• 1942, July–November: Hans Scholl, Schmorell and Graf serve on the Eastern Front.
• 1943, January: The fifth leaflet is distributed in several German and Austrian cities.
• 1943, 3–15 February: Anti-Hitler slogans are painted on Munich walls.
• 1943, 18 February: Hans and Sophie Scholl are arrested at the university.
• 1943, 22 February: Hans and Sophie Scholl and Christoph Probst are tried and executed.
• 1943, 19 April: Second trial; death sentences for Huber, Schmorell and Graf.
• 1943, 13 July and 12 October: Schmorell, Huber and Graf are executed.

Why it matters

The White Rose showed that even under total dictatorship some people chose to speak out, knowing the likely cost. Its leaflets remain a powerful statement of individual conscience, and the group’s story is widely taught in Germany as an example of civic courage.