Geschwister-Scholl-Platz: The Leaflets of 18 February 1943
Why is it significant?
In front of the main building of the university, look down at the cobbles. Scattered among them, as if someone had just dropped them, lie sheets of paper with typed text and photographs of young faces. They are made of ceramic and set into the ground, and they never blow away.
Key Facts
| Place | Geschwister-Scholl-Platz: The Leaflets of 18 February 1943 |
|---|---|
| Address | Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1, 80539 München, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.15090, 11.57980 |
| Part of Walk | Munich 1918-1945: The Nazi Era, Its Victims and the White Rose |
| Generated | Generated |
In front of the main building of the university, look down at the cobbles. Scattered among them, as if someone had just dropped them, lie sheets of paper with typed text and photographs of young faces. They are made of ceramic and set into the ground, and they never blow away.
They are copies of the leaflets of the White Rose, a small group of students and their professor who decided in 1942 that silence was complicity. They wrote six leaflets calling on Germans to resist, copied them at night, and posted them to addresses in cities across southern Germany. They also painted slogans such as Freedom and Down with Hitler on walls in Munich after dark.
On the morning of the 18th of February 1943, Hans Scholl and his sister Sophie carried a suitcase full of the sixth leaflet into this building while lectures were running. They laid piles outside the lecture halls. At the last moment, from the gallery around the great atrium, Sophie pushed the remaining sheets over the balustrade, and they fluttered down into the hall. The building custodian saw them and held them until the Gestapo came.
Four days later, on the 22nd of February, the People's Court under its president Roland Freisler sentenced Hans, Sophie and their friend Christoph Probst to death. They were executed at Stadelheim prison that same afternoon. Sophie was twenty-one, Hans twenty-four. Christoph Probst was twenty-three and the father of three small children. According to witnesses, Hans Scholl called out long live freedom before he died.
The leaflets did not die with them. A copy of the sixth was smuggled to Britain, and later in 1943 British planes dropped it over Germany in vast numbers as the manifesto of the Munich students. Inside the building, in the atrium, there is a small memorial exhibition, the DenkStätte Weiße Rose. Then cross Ludwigstraße to the square on the other side, named after the professor who wrote that last leaflet.