Sophie Scholl
1921 – 1943 · Germany
Known for: Student of the White Rose who resisted the Nazis
“The sun is still shining.”
Biography
Sophie Scholl was born in 1921 in Forchtenberg am Kocher, the fourth of six children of Robert Scholl, a liberal politician who was then the town's mayor and an outspoken critic of National Socialism, and of Magdalena Scholl. The family later moved to Ludwigsburg and then to Ulm. Raised in the Lutheran church, she remained a devout Christian all her life, read widely, drew and painted, and was drawn early to philosophy and theology. At twelve she joined the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the girls' branch of the Hitler Youth, as most of her classmates did, and her first enthusiasm slowly gave way to doubt. The arrest of her brothers and friends in 1937 for their part in an independent youth movement settled the question for her.
After finishing secondary school in 1940 she worked as a kindergarten teacher at the Fröbel Institute in Ulm and served six months in the National Labour Service, whose near military discipline sharpened her political judgement. In May 1942 she enrolled at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich to study biology and philosophy. Her brother Hans, a medical student there, introduced her to his friends, among them Alexander Schmorell, Willi Graf and Christoph Probst, a circle held together by music, art and literature before it was held together by politics. Through Carl Muth and Theodor Haecker she returned again and again to a single question: how a person must act under a dictatorship. The answer the group arrived at was the White Rose, a series of anonymous leaflets arguing on ethical and religious grounds for opposition to the Nazi state, duplicated in secret, posted to addresses across Germany and left where strangers would find them.
On 18 February 1943 Sophie and Hans Scholl carried a case of leaflets into the main building of the university and sent the last copies down into the atrium from the upper floor. They were seized, handed to the Gestapo and interrogated, and four days later stood before Roland Freisler in the People's Court, which convicted them of high treason. Sophie Scholl was executed by guillotine on 22 February 1943, together with her brother and Christoph Probst. She was twenty one. Allied aircraft later dropped copies of the final White Rose leaflet over Germany, and in the decades since, schools, squares and streets across the country have been named for her and for Hans: a resistance of paper and argument, remembered far longer than the regime it refused.