ABSTRACT
On 22 February 1943, anti-Nazi activists Hans and Sophie Scholl together with their friend Christoph Probst were found guilty of treason by a Nazi court and beheaded by guillotine a few hours later. The three—medical students at the University of Munich—were members of a small nonvio-lent group called the White Rose, which had been formed the previous year. Their crime was to have distributed by post or in person five leaflets calling on Germans to embrace passive resistance as a means to destabilize and topple the Nazi regime. In the wake of their execution, three more persons associated with the White Rose (Alexander Schmorell, Kurt Huber, and Willi Graf) were taken into custody. All three were sentenced to death on 19 April 1943; Schmorell and Huber were executed three months later. The Gestapo spared Graf’s life for the time being in the hope of extracting the names of other White Rose collaborators from him. Graf did not give anything away and, after the Gestapo gave up its efforts to break him, Graf was guillotined on 12 October 1943. Eleven more White Rose activists were subsequently rounded up, including eight from a Hamburg affiliate. All of these died, whether by execution or by suicide or in a concentration camp. Many others were sent to prison.
