Marc Rothemund
La Rosa Bianca - Sophie Schöll

THE REVIEW

"The accused have, in time of war and by means of leaflets, incited sabotage against the war effort and armaments, and the overthrow of the National Socialist way of life of our people, they have spread defeatist ideas and have defamed the Führer in a very vulgar manner, thus aiding the Reich's enemy and weakening the armed security of the nation. For these reasons, they must be punished with death."

La Rosa Bianca/Die Weisse Rose, one of the most renowned youth groups against the Nazis. A group of brave students, former comrades-in-arms, dissidents, fully aware of the beginning of the end. Coinciding with the disastrous defeat at Stalingrad: the gateway of the Caucasus that incites the rebirth of the Allies' Europe, scorned and post-testing extermination camps.

Sophie Schöll and her brother Hans represent that, already steadily but silently rising, unofficial micro-intelligentsia. Catholic medical students in Munich, they share with a considerable number of those just over twenty, who did not identify with the swastika, disdain for that violence and that disgusting National Socialist authoritarianism, the same which hides behind pedantic and pompous war-totalitarian rhetoric the horrors that are unfolding in the East.

Members of the Die Weisse Rose movement, peaceful and anti-war mongering, they set out to distribute a series of leaflets throughout Munich, determined to open the eyes of a civilian population still intoxicated and lulled by the false Hitlerian eloquence: they, in open contrast to the Fuhrer and his elite of opportunists, preach values and socio-political goals antithetical to the doctrine of Mein Kampf: the reconstruction of a Europe crushed by bloodshed, the definitive peace, the overthrow of National Socialism, the complete recovery of democracy and the federalism set aside.

The idea of abandoning these sheets at the University of Munich is fatal: caught red-handed, they are immediately arrested by the Gestapo and translated to the barracks. Strategically separated from Hans, Sophie Scholl gains particular prominence in the plot of the film: exhaustively battered by the caustic investigator Robert Mohr, she is forced to confess to the crime of treason, demoralization of the troops and aiding the enemy, yet she does not lose that ardor and courage, combined with an incredible calmness, which cause no few difficulties (moral and material) to Mohr.

Tried alongside her brother and Christoph Probst by the renowned criminal jurist Roland Freisler at the People's Court in Munich, Sophie is immediately guillotined (although custom dictates the execution of the death penalty 99 days after the sentence), shocked but proud in spirit.

Terribly realistic and historically effective, the feature film offers the viewer the saddest picture of wartime Hitlerian Germany, shaken and torn by Stalingrad, yet not deserting and scornful of surrender: although the low populace is almost unaware of the Extermination Camps, the idea of the Final Solution already in progress finds a discreet but dangerous dissemination among the small intellectuals, often former soldiers returning from the Eastern Front and primary spectators of the Polish-Eastern concentration universe. Notable is the chapter of the film concerning the communicative diatribe between Sophie and investigator Mohr: having obtained the confession from the girl along with some names, Mohr understands that nothing will tarnish her unbreakable conscience. Shamefully bringing together concepts like freedom, well-being, and morally responsible government with the Nazi machine, the investigator tries to convince Sophie of the unequal bartering between her morals and Hitlerian ethics, miserably failing. Indeed, it seems that Schöll’s straightforward yet simple arguments, extolling respect for dignity, the value of the individual (even mentally debilitated), peace, and God, strike a personality like Mohr’s, weak and passively adhering to something that even he is incapable of defending.

The mock trial held by Freisler also shows the negative ambitions of that era: preferring the violent exposition of fallacious arguments, the judge plays the pitiful role of arbitrator of a justice that doesn’t exist, punishing rationality and pluralism, praising the passive moral recognition of a regime that sheds more blood than ethical/material well-being.