White Rose: The Motion Picture

Last June, while Dick Durbin was comparing the American guards at Guantanamo Bay to Nazis on the Senate Floor, I quoted a long passage from Part Two of Ian Kershaw’s mammoth two-part biography of Adolf Hitler, focusing on the White Rose Resistance Movement. This was a group of German college students whose leaders included Hans and Sophie Scholl, brother and sister attending Munich University. They were protesting the enormous carnage at Stalingrad in 1943–300,000 Germans dead, plus another 500,000 or so of the Nazi’s allies. The Nazis repaid that protest with a trip to the guillotine for the group’s leaders, ordered by fanatical “People’s Court” judge Roland Freisler, who similarly would order the executions of those involved with the plot to assassinate Hitler a year later.

Clive Davis writes that there is now a German-produced film about the last days of their lives, titled, logically enough, Sophie Scholl. If you visit the film’s official American Website, it lists showtimes for major cities in the US, and says that more will be added. Judging by the trailer, and Clive’s review, it sounds like a worthy successor to 2004’s Downfall, and equally well-worth seeing.