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Why did he take this risk?

Was Hans Scholl high on that February 18, 1943?

Had he taken opiates that he could easily get at as a medicine student?

Or was his action a conscious self-sacrifice?

In any case, that Thursday morning, Hans and his younger sister Sophie put out bundles of leaflets in the atrium of the Munich University, depicting a frontal attack on Hitler and official Germany.

It was already the sixth text that the group of students around Hans Scholl, The White Rose, distributed.

But until now they had sent their messages by post, often disguised as memorial letters - almost everyday during the war - or put directly in the mailboxes of potential supporters, sometimes placed in telephone booths or, in dry weather, had them distributed by the air pressure of a train.

Hans Scholl and his younger sister Sophie (1921–1943), who was arrested and executed with him

Source: Getty Images

But now the two siblings laid out messages from their suitcases that they knew and wanted the Nazi state to feel hit: “Our people are shaken by the fall of the men of Stalingrad.

330,000 German men senselessly and irresponsibly drove the ingenious strategy of the World War II private soldiers into death and destruction.

Leader, we thank you! ”Strong words, formulated neither by the Scholls nor by Hans' friends Alexander Schmorell and Willy Graf, nor by their fellow student Christoph Probst - but by Kurt Huber, associate professor of philosophy.

Hans and Alexander inaugurated the avowed Hitler opponent at the end of 1942.

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In mid-February 1943 the group had printed and distributed this leaflet.

It was aimed specifically at the student body: “Gauleiter attack the female students with great jokes.

German students at the Munich university gave a worthy answer to the defilement of their honor, German students stood up for their comrades and stood their ground. ”It is understandable that Hans and Sophie wanted to address this message specifically to their fellow students.

But a janitor at the university, Jakob Schmid, who wore a Hitler mustache himself, watched her lay out the leaflets and arrested her on her own initiative - in the midst of the students pouring out of the lecture halls.

Should Hans Scholl have expected it?

Anyway, he took the risk.

In front of the University of Munich, the White Rose leaflets and the biographies of Hans and Sophie Scholl and Christoph Probst are set into the ground as a memorial

Source: picture alliance / dpa

Hans Scholl, born in 1918, was initially a staunch Hitler boy.

A brief homosexual trial at the age of 16 had brought him into conflict with the Nazi state and to 17 days of pre-trial detention, but not to a clear stance of resistance.

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When exactly and why Hans Scholl became the clear opponent of the Third Reich, who knowingly began his life, even several biographers could not convincingly clarify.

In any case, he wrote sentences like this: "You cannot deal with National Socialism intellectually because it is unspiritual."

The risky action on February 18, 1943 remains all the more astonishing, because it not only endangered himself (and his sister), but also all other members of the White Rose.

All in all, five students and Kurt Huber lost their lives as a result of the regime's thirst for revenge, while others who knew about it and helpers received long prison sentences.

Hans Scholl, like his sister and Christoph Probst, died after a short trial of a few hours, for which the People's Court came to Munich, on February 22, 1943 in Stadelheim under the guillotine.

The honorary grave of the Scholl siblings in the Perlacher Forst cemetery in Munich

Source: picture alliance / Winfried Roth

A few months later, in the summer of 1943, a Munich public prosecutor assessed the White Rose leaflets unequivocally: "It is probably the most serious case of treasonous propaganda that occurred in the Altreich during the war." What was intended as a verdict turned out to be after 1945 as the highest praise for Hans Scholl and his friends.

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