This story doesn’t have a happy ending. Possibly the most tragic aspect of the White Rose group is that the executions of its members didn’t “make waves” as Sophie had expected and so badly hoped. After the trial and execution of Sophie, Hans, and Christoph on February 22, 1943, the university community—like the rest of Germany—continued to cower under Hitler’s regime. There was no revolt.
Instead, other friends were arrested for activities or association with the group. A second trial was held on April 19, 1943, resulting in prison sentences for Gisela Schertling, Traute Lafrenz, Hans Hirzel, and others, as well as death sentences for Alexander Schmorell, Willi Graf, and Kurt Huber. Alexander and Professor Huber were executed on July 13, 1943, and Willi on October 12, 1943.
The defeat of the German army at Stalingrad was the turning point of the war, but more than two long years of fighting and countless deaths still remained. Resistance within Germany might have brought about a swifter end to the war, but most people were simply too afraid for their own lives to act, especially after trials and executions like those of the White Rose members. The stakes were clear: resist, and you will be imprisoned or killed.
When I first heard about the White Rose in high school German class, I knew I wanted to learn more about its members. Sophie was the youngest and the only girl, and her courage made her a personal heroine and role model for me throughout the rest of my teen years. The more I studied the group, the more her tragically short life compelled me to tell her story. Seeing Sophie’s letters and artwork in the Scholl archive at the Institute for Contemporary History on a trip to Munich and Ulm in 2005 brought her from my history books to life. She was truly a gifted artist. But I wanted to feel more than I could from books or archives. Trying to get inside Sophie’s head that fateful day, I retraced her steps from the flat she shared with Hans on Franz-Josef-Strasse to the university, where I passed through the atrium, imagining Sophie and Hans placing stacks of leaflets outside the lecture hall doors, and headed up to the third-floor balustrade, where she stood and gave the leaflets a push. Finally, I visited Sophie’s grave in the Perlacher Forest next to Stadelheim Prison, where she, Hans, and the others were laid to rest.
I began to work in earnest on the project just after this trip, focusing on the story as nonfiction, but set the project aside, unable to find the right format. Only ten years later, when I finally began the story in verse, did everything click into place.
In telling Sophie’s story, I tried to stay as true to the known facts as possible, using details from my research in poetic interpretations of the material. Among the sources I studied were collections of letters to and from Hans, Sophie, and Fritz, the leaflets themselves, interrogation and trial paperwork, biographies of Sophie, books about the group, and published interviews with surviving family members and friends. These sources revealed not only facts about the group’s resistance activities but also the personality, emotions, and convictions that helped me give Sophie her voice.
Most of the liberties I took with the story sprang from conflicting information across sources, a lack of details in any source, or a need to omit information Sophie wouldn’t have known. These include details about Hans’s sexuality, drug use by group members, Sophie’s specific thoughts about the Holocaust, her initial involvement in the leaflet operation, and the final moments of the group before execution.
As always with historical research about deceased individuals, we don’t know what the subject might have thought or said in private, particularly in a case like this, in which she had to make every effort to keep details of her work and her life a secret. Even close family and friends reported that they didn’t know about Sophie’s resistance activities. Combining the documented actions with the thoughts and feelings she did share, I tried to paint a full picture of her role in the resistance efforts, together with her character as a very real person.
Though Germans failed to stand up and revolt following the executions, one pair of students did continue the work of the White Rose. Hans Leipelt and his girlfriend, Marie-Luise Jahn, received a copy of the sixth leaflet, and after the executions on February 22, they added the line und ihr Geist lebt trotzdem weiter, “and their spirit lives on,” to the top of the leaflet. They made copies and distributed them in Munich and Hamburg, resulting in their arrests in October 1943. At their trial a year later, Hans was sentenced to death and Marie-Luise to twelve years in prison. Hans was executed on January 29, 1945.
Smuggled leaflets also made it to the Allies, and more than five million copies were reprinted and dropped by aircraft over German cities. After the war, Inge’s book Die Weiße Rose brought recognition to the group’s actions, and countless other books and two successful films followed. Today there is a monument at the University of Munich honoring their resistance, and many streets and schools in Germany are named after White Rose members.
As Nobel Prize–winning author Thomas Mann said of Sophie and the rest of the group in a radio broadcast on June 27, 1943, “Good, splendid young people! You shall not have died in vain; you shall not be forgotten.”
I truly hope I have given Sophie and the White Rose justice.