On the 105th anniversary of Sophie Scholl’s birth  The sun still shines

As a member of the Weiße Rose (White Rose) resistance group, Sophie Scholl is one of the most widely recognized figures of German opposition to the Nazi regime. Her name is often synonymous with courage and moral integrity. Yet behind this legacy stood a young woman who questioned, searched, and had to gradually arrive at her convictions.

Childhood and Family

Sophia Magdalena Scholl was born 105 years ago, on May 9, 1921, in Forchtenberg. She grew up in Ulm as one of six children. Her father, the local politician Robert Scholl, held liberal and democratic views; her mother Magdalena raised the children in the Christian faith. The political tensions of the 1930s were present in everyday family life, and her father in particular voiced early criticism of National Socialism, in stark contrast to the prevailing propaganda of the fascist government. In 1942, he was sentenced to prison for insulting the Führer.

League of German Girls (Bund Deutscher Mädel)

At around the age of thirteen, Sophie Scholl—like many young people of her time—joined the female branch of the Hitler Youth, the League of German Girls (German: Bund Deutscher Mädel). At first, she was enthusiastic about the sense of community, the experiences in nature, and the feeling of belonging to something greater than herself. She rose to the position of group leader and devoted herself with great energy to the organization, while her parents, especially her father, watched these developments with growing concern and did not shy away from openly confronting them.

Over time, Sophie began to question the regime and its propaganda, drew her own conclusions, and ultimately turned away from the movement, particularly after the arrest of her brother Hans in 1937.

A Window into Her Thoughts – Diaries and Letters

From her youth until shortly before her death, Sophie Scholl kept a diary. Her writings portray a young woman with a deep love of music—especially Bach and Schubert—an avid reader of Augustine, Dostoyevsky, and Rilke, a seeker of nature, and someone who simultaneously grappled with questions of faith, politics, and the world around her. Her letters and diaries, published under the title At the heart of the White Rose: letters and diaries of Hans and Sophie Scholl (adapted and translated from: Hans Scholl, Sophie Scholl, Briefe und Aufzeichnungen; ed. Inge Jens, New York: Harper & Row, 1987), present the portrait of an inquisitive young woman who dared to constantly question both herself and society.

The Woman in the Weiße Rose

The resistance group Weiße Rose emerged in June 1942 at the initiative of a circle of friends around Hans Scholl and Alexander Schmorell, two medical students who were studying together at Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) in Munich. Christoph Probst, Willi Graf, and later LMU professor Kurt Huber also joined the group. Although her brother initially rejected Sophie’s desire to join the group, she persisted and quickly became an essential member. As a woman, she was less likely to be stopped and searched at checkpoints than her male comrades, making her one of the group’s most important couriers. 

According to the German Federal Agency for Civic Education (Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung), only a few thousand people actively defied the Nazi regime across the entire German Reich, out of a population of approximately 80 million at the time. Contemporary sources describe the resistance as being limited to a vanishingly small minority. This makes the extraordinary courage involved all the more significant: a student in her early twenties, in a city where neighbors spied on one another and a single wrong word could lead to arrest, was a core member of the resistance group that wrote and distributed a total of six regime-critical leaflets. In them, they denounced the crimes of the fascists, criticized Hitler, and called on the German population to resist the government and the war.

On February 18, 1943, she and her brother Hans carried a briefcase containing around 1,700 leaflets (the sixth edition) at the entrances to the lecture halls of the University of Munich. They distributed them in empty lecture halls, on windowsills, and in corridors. At the end of their round, Sophie stood at the balustrade of the atrium and pushed a stack of leaflets over the railing into the open space below. A janitor saw the siblings and had them both arrested. Four days later, Sophie Scholl was dead. She was 21 years old.

Her Legacy in the Present

At a time when concepts such as resistance, civic courage, and democracy are once again contested in the streets and in parliaments, and when many feel the world around them is being torn apart by conflict, Sophie’s words remain as relevant as ever.
 
Sophie Scholl’s life reminds us above all of the importance of seeing clearly, thinking for ourselves, questioning what we are told, and having the courage to act—even when it comes at a personal cost. It was a sunny day, February 22, 1943, when Sophie Scholl was led through the corridors of Stadelheim Prison in Munich. Her last recorded words, addressed to her brother Hans, are said to have been: “The sun still shines.” A quiet, luminous sentence in a dark moment.

Today, 105 years after her birth, the sun still shines as we remember Sophie Scholl—her life, her courage, her refusal to look away. Her moral clarity, strength of conviction, and unwavering humanity stand as a quiet rebuke to a world in which short‑term advantage so often eclipses long‑term responsibility and humanistic values. She reminds us to trust our own judgment, convictions, and doubts, even when standing alone against overwhelming power. That truth remains undiminished—then as now.

05/2026