The White Rose: Students Who Refused to Be Silent

In the summer of 1942, leaflets began appearing in mailboxes across Munich. They were typed, mimeographed, and mailed anonymously to professors, doctors, booksellers, and students whose names had been copied from the telephone directory. Their message was unlike anything else circulating in Nazi Germany. "Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized nation," the first one read, "as allowing itself to be governed without opposition by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct." The authors called themselves the White Rose.

They were a small group of university students and one professor. They had no weapons, no organization beyond a handful of friends, and no realistic hope of toppling the regime. What they had was a conviction that silence in the face of mass murder was itself a form of guilt. Within a year most of them would be dead, executed by guillotine at Stadelheim Prison. Their leaflets, however, outlived the state that killed them.

Who They Were

The core of the White Rose formed at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 1942. Hans Scholl, a medical student born in 1918, had once been an enthusiastic member of the Hitler Youth before growing disillusioned with its conformity and brutality. His younger sister Sophie, born in 1921, arrived at the university in May 1942 to study biology and philosophy. Around them gathered a circle of friends: Alexander Schmorell, son of a German doctor and a Russian mother; Christoph Probst, a married medical student with three young children; and Willi Graf, a devout Catholic who had refused to join the Hitler Youth. Kurt Huber, a professor of philosophy and musicology, became the group's intellectual mentor.

Several of the men served as medics on the Eastern Front in the summer of 1942, where they saw the misery of the Russian population, the treatment of Jews and Soviet prisoners, and mounting evidence of systematic killing. They returned to Munich in the autumn with a hardened resolve.

The Leaflets

Between June 1942 and February 1943, the White Rose produced six leaflets. The first four were written by Hans Scholl and Alexander Schmorell in the summer of 1942, each printed in perhaps a hundred copies and mailed within Munich. They were dense, literary documents, quoting Goethe, Schiller, and Aristotle, and calling on Germans to practise passive resistance and sabotage.

The second leaflet contained a passage that set the White Rose apart from nearly every other voice inside Germany. It stated plainly that since the conquest of Poland, three hundred thousand Jews had been murdered "in the most bestial way," and that this was "the most frightful crime against human dignity, a crime that is unparalleled in the whole of history." The point was that Germans knew, or could know, and that knowing carried an obligation. "Everyone wants to be exonerated of a guilt of this kind," the leaflet continued, "and then everyone goes back to sleep with the calmest, clearest conscience. But he cannot be exonerated; he is guilty, guilty, guilty!"

After the group's return from the front, the operation expanded. Sophie Scholl, who had discovered her brother's activities and insisted on joining, bought stamps and paper in small quantities from different shops to avoid suspicion. The fifth leaflet, written in January 1943, was printed in several thousand copies and carried in suitcases to Stuttgart, Cologne, Vienna, and other cities, where it was posted locally to suggest a nationwide movement. In early February, after the defeat at Stalingrad, Hans Scholl, Schmorell, and Graf painted "Freedom" and "Down with Hitler" on walls near the university at night.

18 February 1943

The sixth leaflet was written by Kurt Huber and addressed directly to students, invoking the dead of Stalingrad and calling on German youth to break with the regime. On the morning of Thursday, 18 February 1943, Hans and Sophie Scholl carried a suitcase of these leaflets into the university's main building and left stacks of them outside lecture halls while classes were in session. Before leaving, Sophie pushed the remaining copies from the top of the staircase into the atrium below.

The building custodian, Jakob Schmid, saw the leaflets fall, detained the siblings, and handed them to the Gestapo. In Hans Scholl's pocket was a draft of a seventh leaflet, written by Christoph Probst. Probst was arrested two days later.

Under four days of Gestapo interrogation, both Scholls first tried to take full responsibility to protect others, then defended their actions openly. Sophie Scholl told her interrogator that she would do the same again.

The Trial and the Executions

On 22 February 1943, Hans Scholl, Sophie Scholl, and Christoph Probst were tried before the People's Court, which had travelled from Berlin to Munich for the purpose. The presiding judge was Roland Freisler, the regime's most notorious jurist, who conducted the proceedings as a shouted denunciation. The trial lasted a few hours. There was no defence to speak of. All three were sentenced to death for high treason.

They were executed by guillotine at Stadelheim Prison that same afternoon, less than six hours after the verdict. Sophie Scholl was twenty-one years old. Hans Scholl was twenty-four. Christoph Probst was twenty-three and had never seen his youngest child, born four weeks earlier. Their parents were permitted a brief final visit. The prison guards later reported that all three went to their deaths with composure.

A second trial followed on 19 April 1943. Alexander Schmorell, Willi Graf, and Kurt Huber were sentenced to death; eleven others received prison terms. Schmorell and Huber were executed on 13 July 1943, Graf on 12 October, after months of interrogation in which he refused to name others. Later trials sent supporters in Hamburg and elsewhere to prison and, in several cases, to their deaths.

The Leaflet That Reached the World

The regime intended the executions to end the matter. Instead, a copy of the sixth leaflet was smuggled out of Germany through Scandinavia and reached Britain. In July 1943, the Royal Air Force dropped millions of copies over German cities under the title "Manifesto of the Students of Munich." The words the Gestapo had tried to destroy fell from the sky across the country.

Thomas Mann, broadcasting from exile on the BBC in June 1943, told listeners that the Munich students would not be forgotten. It took time. In the early post-war years many Germans regarded the White Rose with unease, since their example raised uncomfortable questions about what others had chosen not to do. By the 1980s the group had become central to how Germany understood its own past.

Why the White Rose Matters

The White Rose did not save a single Jewish life or slow the war by a day. Its members knew this. Their significance lies elsewhere. At a time when most of German society was complicit, indifferent, or afraid, a small group of young people concluded that the murder of the Jews was a crime for which every German who stayed silent shared responsibility, and they said so in writing, under a dictatorship, knowing the price.

Their leaflets also stand as evidence against the comforting post-war claim that ordinary Germans did not know. The second leaflet, from the summer of 1942, states the scale of the killing in Poland and treats it as common knowledge. Students in Munich knew, and chose to act on it.

Today the square in front of the University of Munich is named Geschwister-Scholl-Platz. Set into its paving stones is a memorial of scattered bronze leaflets, as if they had just fallen from the gallery above. Inside the building, a permanent exhibition, the DenkStätte Weiße Rose, tells the story to students who are now the age Sophie Scholl was when she died. The words on the last leaflet she carried remain the group's clearest statement of purpose: "We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace."