The White Rose: German Resistance To Nazism

At the mere age of twenty-one, Sophie Scholl was executed by the People’s Court in Germany on February 22, 1943 for her involvement in The White Rose, an organization that was secretly writing leaflets calling for an end of the war and the rejection of all activities committed by the Nazis. Before the beginning of the Second World War and during the war, the Nazi Propaganda Ministry took control of all forms of communication in Germany. Newspapers, books, magazines, public meetings and rallies, art, music, movies, and radio were all censored and any viewpoints that were in any way “threatening” to the state or Nazi beliefs were eliminated from the media. However, German resistance to Nazism did, in fact, exist which consisted of small and usually isolated groups such as the White Rose. The success of the White Rose can mainly be accredited to an all-encompassing intellectual rebellion in which Germans could dissociate from the party and overthrow it by virtue of strength in numbers. For the first few years of Nazi rule, all of the Scholl children were
It demonstrated to the world that within the largely silent population of Nazi Germany there existed those with a conscience. It recognized the guilt felt by every German and the shared responsibility for the atrocities. They wanted to spread the voice of Nazi dissent and if they only changed the opinion of one German youth then their efforts were not done in vain. They knew that they alone could not stop the Nazi regime, so the White Rose focused their attention on different aspects of resistance but ones that were still