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It looked like in the Middle Ages in Forchtenberg am Kocher when the new mayor Robert Scholl and his wife Lina moved here with their children Inge and Hans at the end of 1919.
Ancient half-timbered houses lined the steep streets of the fortress-like town on the hillside.
Chickens and geese ran about in the street, occasionally chased away by a wagon;
The only connection to the outside world was the stagecoach, with which the Scholl family also came.
“There was no sewer system, everything flowed down into the stove,” says Renate Deck, pointing to the river. “Only the new mayor Scholl made changes.” Progressive and liberal-minded, he helped the town to a sewer system and rail connection. At the same time Robert Scholl raised his children according to Christian-humanistic values, encouraged their critical thinking and love of freedom. And all of this against an unobstructed backdrop of nature, agriculture and viticulture.
The city itself is also idyllic;
the town hall dates from 1722 and contains the official residence used by the Scholls at that time.
“Sophie was born on the first floor at the back,” says Renate Deck.
Today the council chamber is located there.
Only the entrance area, where there are now arcades, has changed;
back then there was only one door and one gate.
In the foyer there is a memorial plaque and a bust of Sophie Scholl;
it shows the young girl with short hair and a forehead fool.
Source: WORLD infographic
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Her story and that of the White Rose resistance group, which Sophie and her brother Hans founded with like-minded people in June 1942, are told in short texts.
They come from Renate Deck, an artist who has been cherishing the memory of the siblings for 30 years - with campaigns, memorabilia and guided tours in Forchtenberg.
The Scholls lived there with Inge and Hans and their later-born children Elisabeth, Sophie, Werner and Thilde for ten years;
from 1932 they were at home in Ulm.
After coming to terms with the past sluggishly until the 1980s, there is now an active culture of remembrance in both cities.
Forchtenberg remembered Sophie Scholl late
In Ingersheim-Altenmünster, where Inge and Hans were born, Renate Deck organized the first commemoration in 1990.
“It took place under state protection,” she recalls.
"At first there was insane resistance."
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The fact that Sophie Scholl - who died under the guillotine at the age of 22 and arguably the most famous German resistance fighter - was born in Forchtenberg in 1921 was still little public in her home town in Baden-Württemberg 30 years ago;
only a plaque attached to the town hall in 1969 and a street named after her in 1973 announced it.
Hans and Sophie Scholl founded the White Rose resistance group with like-minded people
Source: pa / dpa / -
For a long time, many citizens saw no reason to change that - until Renate Deck set up a memorial to the White Rose in her studio in the town's 400-year-old Würzburg Gate.
By chance she got into conversation with the son of one of Sophie Scholl's teachers during an exhibition opening in Schwäbisch-Hall.
She tracked down other contemporary witnesses and was in contact with Sophie's sister Elisabeth from 1996 - she died last year on the day after her 100th birthday.
Where the Scholl siblings spent their childhood
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Renate Deck also designed a memorial path in Forchtenberg that leads to the stations of the childhood years of the Scholl siblings.
In 2015, Deck received the Federal Cross of Merit for her commitment.
Opposite the town hall, a steep lane leads up to the church and the castle ruins of Forchtenberg.
Where today children go down on mountain bikes, the Scholl children once went tobogganing.
The family had their vegetable garden under the city wall, the girls picked wild garlic at the Schwarzen Steg, and Sophie learned to swim in the river.
Sophie Scholl was born in Forchtenberg town hall in 1921
Source: picture alliance / dpa
Although Forchtenberg was bombed in April 1945, the structure of the town has not changed;
the houses were rebuilt as before after the end of the war.
“Sophie and Inge had piano lessons in the green house, the post office was in the yellow house over there,” says Renate Deck.
The butcher's shop where the Scholls bought their Sunday roast is still owned by the same long-established family.
Where an optician is based today, the Scholls waited in the pharmacist's house for the result of the mayoral election - it was to the disadvantage of Robert Scholl, after ten years in office he was not re-elected.
It was the second low point in Sophie's young life after the traumatic experience of the death of her sister Thilde, who died of measles at the age of nine months.
The Scholls had to vacate the town hall and, after an interlude in Ludwigshafen, moved to Ulm in 1932.
From the Hitler Youth to the anti-fascist resistance
From 1933 onwards, countless Nazi marches took place around the famous Ulm Minster.
Right in the middle of it all were the Scholl children, who made rapid careers in the Hitler Youth.
At home, on Olgastrasse, the house blessing was therefore very crooked, and the parents were repugnant to the regime.
The house, which belonged to the Jewish Guggenheimer family until 1938, is now a medical center.
A urologist donated a plaque in 2005.
In 1939 the Scholls moved to the fourth floor of an Art Nouveau building on Münsterplatz, the center of National Socialist power development in Ulm.
But the magic of Nazi ideology no longer caught on with the siblings;
with increasing age, their distance from the regime grew.
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In autumn 1937, Hans and Werner were arrested for joining the banned Bündische Jugend, a wandering bird movement that came into being after the First World War.
The father had to go to prison for four months in 1942, he had called Hitler a "scourge of God".
At that time, Hans and Sophie were already active in the anti-fascist resistance with the same consistency as they had once committed themselves to Nazi ideology.
In 1944 the house on Münsterplatz was bombed;
the current building is the seat of the Deutsche Bank.
A stele in front of it reminds of the history of the place.
I typed leaflets for the White Rose in Ulm
The most impressive connection to the White Rose is in the Martin Luther Church in Ulm.
In January 1943, pastor's son Hans Hirzel hid in the little organ chamber with his school friend Franz Josef Müller and a typewriter.
In the Luther Church in Ulm, members of the White Rose wrote envelopes for the leaflets on the typewriter.
There is an exhibition about this in the church
Source: Stephanie Bisping / p + o
One organ to drown out the hammering of the machine.
The two young people addressed envelopes for 2,000 copies of the fifth White Rose leaflet, which Sophie, now a student in Munich, had brought to Ulm by train.
The little table at which they typed has been preserved, and their voices can be heard on the tape.
The Ulm members of the White Rose, many of whom were still students, got away with prison terms after their arrest by the Gestapo.
In 1986 Franz Josef Müller set up the White Rose Foundation, the aim of which is to preserve the legacy of the resistance fighters.
Next to the church is the Hans-und-Sophie-Scholl-Gymnasium, which got its name in 1972 from the mayor, who thereby fulfilled the wishes of the students.
On February 18, 1943, Hans and Sophie laid out 1,700 leaflets at the University of Munich.
They were caught, arrested and four days later, together with their fellow student Christoph Probst, sentenced to death by Hitler's blood judge Roland Freisler;
she was handed over to the hangman on the same day.
Further death sentences against three resistance members followed in April.
In 1945 the Americans appointed Robert Scholl as Mayor of Ulm.
The man who'd lost two children by guillotine and a third on the front lines was her first choice.
Hans-und-Sophie-Scholl-Platz has been in front of his town hall since 2006.
Sophie Scholl - The last days
In February 1943, the young Sophie Scholl was arrested during a leaflet campaign at Munich University.
This was followed by interrogations that lasted for days at the Gestapo.
Sophie does not renounce her beliefs even if it could save her life.
Source: X Verleih AG
Tips and information
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Commemoration in Forchtenberg:
On May 6, 2021, a Sophie Scholl special postage stamp will be issued.
In Forchtenberg, a ceremony with a reading is planned in the town hall, which will take place digitally due to the pandemic.
The artist Renate Deck, who has been in charge of the “White Rose i-Punkt” memorial since 2004, is showing an installation and has collected 100 greetings from prominent personalities, some of which will be read out in the two churches of Forchtenberg, forchtenberg.de.
Renate Deck offers city tours in Forchtenberg, Tel. 07905/51 35 (costs depend on the type and duration of the tour).
A special Sophie Scholl postage stamp will be issued by Swiss Post on May 6, 2021
Source: Federal Ministry of Finance
Commemoration in Ulm:
Readings, lectures and church services are also planned in Ulm, some of which will take place digitally; more information is available at ulm.de. The exhibition “Sophie Scholl and the White Rose”, which opened in Munich at the end of March, will come to Ulm and Forchtenberg in the summer. The Ulm permanent exhibition “We wanted the other”, in the adult education center founded by Sophie's sister Inge Scholl and directed by her until 1974 (today Albert Einstein House) deals not only with the Scholl siblings and the “White Rose”, but also with other resistance groups . Further exhibitions can be seen on the ground floor of the family's former home at Olgastraße 139 and in the stairwell of the Martin Luther Church (daily 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., Zinglerstrasse 66). City tours in the footsteps of the Scholl siblings can be booked through the tourist office, tourismus.ulm.de.
Participation in the trip was supported by the Ulm / Neu-Ulm Touristik Gesellschaft. You can find our standards of transparency and journalistic independence at axelspringer.de/unabhaengigkeit.