Sophie Scholl - The Final Days

I once saw an art exhibit that consisted of a collection of stills from movies set during the 1930s and World War II, with dozens of well-known actors in Nazi uniform. The photographs were each about the size of a piece of looseleaf paper and arranged in a line at eye level going around the whole enormous gallery. Max von Sydow as a Nazi, Robert Shaw as a Nazi, Michael Douglas as a Nazi, and so on. The exhibit captured the cultural saturation of the images and tropes from postwar movies set in the period, in a visual shorthand. I remember going through the stills and being able to match the vast majority of them to the movies they were from, because I had seen so many.

The World War II alternate history tale The Eagle Has Landed—which offers up Robert Duvall and Michael Caine in Nazi uniform—made a big impression on me as a child, because it also featured Donald Sutherland as an IRA man cycling around the English countryside committing acts of sabotage in aid of the German paratroopers about to land. I wondered, What is this Irishman doing here? Were there really Irish saboteurs helping the Germans? Is this obviously fake story actually based on anything? I must have seen this movie five or six times, catching it as it aired on TV in the years after its release, pondering these questions.

I tried to watch The Eagle Has Landed again the other day, and could not make it more than fifteen minutes in because it was so absurd. I must not be very big on alternate history versions of WWII, because I never made it through Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, either, being uncomfortably aware of its wildly ahistorical quality. There is an early scene in Eagle where the lead paratrooper, played by Michael Caine, is on a train coming back from the Eastern front and sees another train carrying Jews from a Polish ghetto to a camp. Caine, who is portrayed as heroic, intervenes to help one of the Jewish prisoners escape, aided by his men, who all pull guns on the soldiers rounding up the ghetto residents. It is supposed to be the first time these soldiers have witnessed anything of the kind. To which the only possible response is: Right! As if! The whole point of the Eastern front was making every soldier there participate in atrocity, so where are these unblemished souls supposed to have come from?

It made my mind go in the opposite direction. What is a thoroughly authentic film set in this era? What captures only things that really happened, with zero or nearly zero dramatic license? I recalled the existence of Sophie Scholl - The Final Days. Scholl was a student from Munich sentenced with treason in 1943 for distributing leaflets critical of the Nazi regime and the war. I didn’t think of seeing the film when it came out, in 2005, because I had already seen the 1982 film The White Rose, about Scholl’s resistance group—with the great Lena Stolze playing Scholl—and wasn’t sure I needed to be a completist about depictions of this one episode. I may also have found the title off-putting. Why are we focusing on the final days? I knew that Scholl ended up in the hands of the Gestapo, so I assumed it would feature scenes of torture. I wasn’t sure what the purpose of this focus was, or whether I could bear it.

I decided to give it a chance, especially since it turned out to be based on transcripts and eyewitness accounts of what had happened, and I was curious about this question of authenticity. It did become unbearable at times, but not for the reasons I thought. It was mostly just the ordinary difficulty of watching an unfolding injustice, coupled with the anticipation of knowing how the story ends. As soon as the date “18 Februar” popped up on the screen, I felt a sense of dread at what a short period of time we were dealing with. Just the events of a few days, as the title indicates.

The bulk—and heart—of the film is the interaction between Scholl and her interrogator, Robert Mohr. There were no scenes of torture, because Scholl confessed under regular questioning, mostly to protect other members of her group. The reason that the filmmakers focused on this period, and this particular interaction, is that it is clear that Scholl’s conviction shook Mohr, and raised doubts for him about his participation in her case and in the regime generally. Not that she disrupted the travesty of a trial at all, or aroused his sympathy enough to save her. More that this one girl and her brother, a pair of relatively ordinary students, represented a huge threat to the entire regime, because they recognized and told the truth. That’s why they were arrested and tried and executed in under a week. Because they had the power of truth and conviction on their side—and because their opinions might influence all the other people in Germany starting to have doubts.

Scholl’s brother, Hans, had served on the Eastern front and knew what was happening there. He knew Germany was going to lose the war and become a pariah among nations because of the atrocities it had committed. Since he and Sophie quickly accept that they are going to die for their beliefs, they have the courage to speak their minds at their trial, even in a room full of diehard Nazis. And they score some direct hits. As Hans points out, he was at the Eastern front and the judge was not, so he would know better what was going on there than the judge did. He speaks to the people in the room who have been to the place themselves, trying to get them to admit what they all know is true: that Germany could not possibly win the war. And at least as depicted in the film, it is very uncomfortable for everyone there. It has the ring of truth to it, too, because the power structure clearly was afraid of these students.

Sophie’s power is quieter than her brother’s, and more influenced by the natural sympathy she elicits. The reason she is terrifying to the interrogator or the judge is that she would not in other circumstances be a target. She’s recognizable to them as an ordinary German—one who even used to belong to the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the female equivalent of the Hitler Youth—and they are afraid that if someone like her can become disenchanted, anyone can, and the whole edifice will collapse. The lesson Scholl seems to offer is that any structure built on lies is vulnerable to truth-telling. A secondary message, at least for me, is that in warped societies that depend for their survival on the demonization of an out-group or scapegoat it is incumbent on the members of the in-group who do have a conscience to speak their minds. It is, for example, important for white people to speak out about racism in the U.S. precisely because the system bestows white people with extra privilege. Your voice carries farther, so you have to use it.

Another member of the resistance managed to smuggle out some of the leaflets printed by the Scholls’ group, The White Rose. The Allies printed thousands of copies of them and dropped them on German cities, as part of the propaganda war. So their sacrifice was not in vain.

In the past few weeks, I have been thinking about how the U.S. might need to resort to dropping flyers on certain populations, given our current media landscape. Therefore, I may have been primed to receive this particular message at this time.