The Last Days of Sophie Scholl is one of the best movies I've ever seen. "It was a cold winter's day in 1943 when three students threw a pamphlet into the stairwell at Munich's Ludwig Maximillian university, the last of six they had distributed decrying Nazism. The young activists wanted to call attention to the crimes being committed in Russia in their name - the mass shootings of Jews, the burning of villages, the barbarity of the war Hitler proclaimed to be 'without rules' in his bid to crush the Slavic 'subhumans.' And their writings recounted the heavily suppressed story of how the Wehrmacht had been stunningly defeated at Stalingrad a month earlier - a battle which proved the turning point of the war. But, unbeknownst to them, a janitor at the university spotted their surreptitious leaflet drop and reported them to the Gestapo, the Hitler regime's feared secret police. Twenty-four hours later, they were under arrest and, within days Sophie Scholl, her brother Hans, 24, and their friend Christoph Probst, also 24, were all beheaded for treason. Now, 71 years later, the guillotine used to carry out the gruesome sentence has been found gathering dust in the basement of a Munich museum, triggering a debate in Germany about whether it should go on show, or remain locked out of sight forever. For one elderly woman in particular it has pulled into sharp focus all the pain, anguish and terror she experienced over seven decades ago when her younger sister and elder brother went bravely to their deaths. Elisabeth Hartnagel-Scholl is the last surviving sibling of Hans and Sophie Scholl, two of the young martyrs who dared to challenge the world's most sinister tyranny and paid the ultimate price in doing so. Now a 93-year-old widow, she lives alone in Stuttgart, but she clearly remembers the day that she discovered her brother and sister had died beneath the flashing blade of the guillotine." http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2541753/Nazis-slaughtered-brother-sister-guillotine-German-woman-93-tells-siblings-defied-Hitler-death-treason-1943.html#ixzz2qoL4s1n2
Mighty brave lads and lass. I wonder what I would have done in the same situation. I suspect that I would not have been so bold.
I have just recently watched it and it was excellent. It captured the time period. The reactions of the German citizens, along with the trial acting was brilliant.
The Daily Mail can always be relied upon to confuse a story, even one of which it presumably approves. The university was named Ludwig Maximilian, not Ludwig Maximillian. The account refers initially to "a pamphlet" and later a "leaflet drop" without explaining why the two apparently different documents. In fact, there never was a pamphlet. The White Rose group, to cite the name adopted by Hans Scholl and his friends, in which Sophie joined when she later came to the university to study, published a series of leaflets at roughly monthly intervals from May 1942, distributing them widely in various places. On 20 February 1943 Hans and Sophie left piles of the sixth leaflet outside the lecture rooms at the university, to be picked up by students when they came out of lectures. Sophie found that she had a bundle left over, so she went to the top floor and threw some over the landing railings into the atrium below, and others out of the window into the courtyard. So the action was hardly secret. The janitor did not report them to the Gestapo. He reported them to the local ordinary police, who then called in the Gestapo. Hans and Sophie Scholl and Christoph Probst were tried by the so-called 'People's Court' on the morning of 22 February and beheaded that afternoon in Stadelheim Prison, Munich. Four more White Rose members were later also beheaded - Kurt Huber and Alexander Schmorell on 13 July 1943, Willi Graf on 12 October 1943, and Hans-Karl Leipelt in 1945. Two women in Hamburg were still under sentence of death when the city was liberated in 1945. Others were imprisoned for various periods, and more, up to eighty, including the Scholl parents and siblings, were detained for a while. Sophie questioned, "What does my death matter, if by our action thousands are awakened and stirred into action". Let us honour them all.
Good to remeber those that swam against the tide. She knew the dangers and still acted...as much a soldier of ww2 as any in uniform.
When I saw the photo of august landmesser it touched me somewhere deep. He had many, many good reasons NOT to salute!
