On the morning of 18 February 1943, Sophie Scholl stood on the top floor of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich with a stack of leaflets left over in her suitcase. She and her brother Hans had already left copies outside the lecture halls before classes ended. With seconds to spare, she pushed the last bundle over the balustrade, and the pages drifted down into the atrium below. Jakob Schmid, a university maintenance man and a Nazi Party member since 1937, saw them fall and held the siblings until the Gestapo arrived.
\n\nFour days later, Sophie Scholl was dead. She was 21, a student of biology and philosophy who had enrolled at the university only nine months earlier. More than eighty years on, her story survives largely through books, from her own letters and diaries to Frank McDonough’s biography 'Sophie Scholl: The Real Story of the Woman Who Defied Hitler', which the historian Richard J. Evans called “the standard work on its subject”.
\n\nScholl was born on 9 May 1921 in Forchtenberg, a small town in south-west Germany where her father, Robert, was mayor. Robert Scholl was a liberal and an outspoken critic of Hitler, and McDonough traces much of his daughter’s…
Original source: https://www.timesnownews.com/lifestyle
