Her father Robert Scholl had credentials in taxation and law, though he most enjoyed reading All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque. During the First World War he took a pacifist stance and served as a member of the ambulance corps. Her mother was a Lutheran lay preacher.
In the spring of 1932 the family moved to Ulm where hills, caves, green fields and woods surrounded the city. Sophie wrote of her deep affinity with nature:
"I can never look at a limpid stream without at least dangling my feet in it. I cannot walk past a meadow in May. There is nothing more enticing than a fragrant piece of land...Luxuriant in its flowers, and I am knee-deep amid luscious grass and flowers... I press my face to the tree's dusky, warm bark and think 'My homeland', and I am so inexplicably grateful."--In Vinke, The Short Life of Sophie Scholl, pp. 27-28
“Tradition and Risk” is today the motto of Ulm.
Sophie became a trainee kindergarten teacher and was promptly beheaded at the age of twenty-one. That is, because she had social concern.
“I’d be lying if I told you that the children give me unadulterated pleasure. Almost every face conveys so clearly what it promises to become in future: in other words, the kind of people (Nazis) that exist today”. A letter to Fritz Hartnagel, 17 June 1940
The concern for the future of those children spurred her and the White Rose student resistance. God was a unifying factor for the members of the white Rose. “They all emphasized Christianity as the basis for moral regeneration in a post-Hitler Germany.” McDonough 95
Klaus Schlaier, interviewed by McDonough, is manager of Einstein-Haus which runs a photographic exhibition dedicated to the White Rose in Ulm. Sophie’s life, like the witness of the White Rose, was brief yet trenchant. Klaus Schlaier expanded on the aims of the group for the future of Germany. “They wanted a liberal idea of parliamentary democracy, which upheld basic rights: free speech, democratic elections, freedom of religion, free trade, toleration, a united Europe within Federal states. They were very international in outlook. They wanted a peaceful world, but they were also prepared to oppose tyranny and fight for human rights.“
The day of her sentencing Sophie made clear one desire, a single word written on the pamphlet she received in court: Freiheit (Freedom).
Thankfully we have more words to describe her. In Sophie Scholl: The real story of the woman who defied Hitler (2009) Frank McDonough writes, “Sophie in Ulm was nicknamed Baubamadle (tomboy), because of her ability to climb the tallest trees and her short boyish haircut.” She was an Amazon who transcended her times, a sign of hope for our own.
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