On June 28, 1940, four days after the fall of France, the German Sophie Scholl wrote a letter to her boyfriend Fritz Hartnagel, an officer in the Wehrmacht. Scholl, whose bitter disillusionment with Nazi misrule had hardened into firm opposition to it, expressed her despair at the onward march of Hitler’s forces and his stranglehold on power. “If I didn’t know that I’ll probably outlive many older people,” she wrote, “then I’d be overcome with horror at the spirit that’s dominating history today.”
But Scholl wasn’t outliving older people for long. Less than three years later, her life was tragically, and barbarically, cut short. As a member of the underground resistance movement Die Weiße Rose, she was caught and found guilty of preparing and distributing “seditious pamphlets” containing “attacks on National Socialism and on its cultural-political policies.” The price for high treason was death. At five o’clock in the afternoon on February 22, 1943, just three hours after the end of her show trial, Scholl was guillotined at Stadelheim prison in Munich. She was twenty-one years old.
Despite the odds, Scholl insisted on facing up to a Goliath-type foe.
Had Scholl eluded her murderers, survived the war, and lived on until today, she would have just turned one hundred. But back then the odds were stacked too firmly against her and the other members of the White Rose. The group was predominantly made up of a small band of students who, though wily
