On February 22, 1943, Hans, Sophie and Probst were found guilty of treason and sentenced to death.

 On February 22, 1943, Hans, Sophie and Probst were found guilty of treason and sentenced to death.

The White Rose (German: die Weiße Rose) 

Hans Scholl, Sophie Scholl, and Christoph Probst, Munich 1942.

Hans Scholl and his younger sister, Sophie, both became committed anti-Nazis. 

As war broke out, Hans was studying medicine in Munich, and Sophie joined him there to study biology and philosophy in 1941. 

Her boyfriend, Fritz Hartnagel, was an officer in the Wehrmacht fighting on the eastern front. 

Through extensive letter exchanges between Fritz and Sophie, historians have been able to piece together Sophie’s growing pacifism and Fritz’s alarm over the participation of German soldiers in mass killings of Jews and other atrocities.

Meanwhile, Hans and two other students began a pacifist resistance movement called the White Rose, where they co-authored six anti-Nazi leaflets.

 When Sophie learned of her brother’s activities, she joined the group, which would grow to about a dozen members. 

As a woman, she was much less likely to be stopped by police while carrying stacks of leaflets to be distributed in several cities and through the post.

In the summer of 1942, Hans and some of the other members of the White Rose was deployed to the Eastern Front to act as medics during the university’s summer break. 

When they returned, the group resumed its leafleting campaign, producing between 6,000 and 9,000 copies of their fifth leaflet, written by Hans and titled “A Call to All Germans!“, using a hand-cranked duplicating machine.

The leaflet warned that Hitler was leading Germany to ruin and urged the people to join the struggle for “freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and protection of the individual citizen from the arbitrary action of criminal dictator-states.” 

The sixth leaflet was written by Christoph Probst after the German defeat at Stalingrad, and announced that the day of reckoning was about to come for “the most contemptible tyrant our people has ever endured.” 

It was while the group was dumping thousands of those leaflets around the University of Munich that a custodian spotted Hans and Sophie. 

They were arrested and interrogated, along with several other members of the group. 

On February 22, 1943, Hans, Sophie and Probst were found guilty of treason and sentenced to death.

The sentence was carried out that very same day by guillotine at Stadelheim Prison. Sophie was first to be executed. 

Before the blade fell, she shouted, “The sun is still shining!” Hans’s last words were “Es lebe die Freiheit!” 

— Long live freedom! Over the next few weeks, other White Rose members were rounded up and were either executed or sent to prison camps. But the last word would be left for the White Rose itself. 

Copies of that last leaflet were smuggled out of Germany and handed to the Allies, who then air-dropped millions of copies all over Germany, ensuring that the White Rose would remain an unforgettable part of German history.