Sophie Scholl
Else Gebel looked at her new cellmate, a young woman whom Else would later describe as a “dear girl with the open, childlike face,” and already felt awe at her “calm, friendly demeanor.”
The girl’s name was Sophie Scholl. She was twenty-one, a student of biology and philosophy at the University of Munich, and she had been arrested that morning for distributing leaflets with anti-Nazi messages.
The introduction took place on a Thursday evening, the eighteenth of February, 1943. By this point, Else had been in custody for months. Thirty-seven years old, from Augsburg, Germany, she had worked as a courier between Communist resistance circles in Berlin and Munich before her arrest. In prison, the Gestapo had put her to clerical use in the headquarters at the Wittelsbacher Palais, the former royal residence that the regime had converted into an interrogation center, and moved her into a cell there.
Throughout that February day, Else had heard about an incident at the university discussed in the corridors. Anti-Nazi activity was extremely dangerous in Germany, and one group in particular had caught the Gestapo’s attention.
Known as the White Rose, the group consisted of a small circle of students and one professor at the University of Munich. Sophie’s older brother, Hans, a medical student who had served on the Eastern Front and returned changed by what he had seen, had founded the group with a friend the previous summer. They had written and mimeographed five earlier leaflets in 1942, distributing them by mail to addresses copied out of telephone books, denouncing the Nazi regime. The sixth had been waiting. Its time had come.