Sophie Scholl

In the 2002 documentary ‘Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary’, Traudl Junge speaks of reaching a bitter epiphany when she saw a memorial plaque for Sophie Scholl, the sole female member of the White Rose anti-Nazi resistance group. Junge, who claimed she knew nothing of the Holocaust while in the Führer’s employ, was 22 years old when she went to work for him, a year older than Scholl was at the time of her execution for high treason; she was guillotined alongside her brother, Hans, and their White Rose comrade Christoph Probst. As the mortified Junge concluded, ‘It was no excuse to be young.’Scholl’s story has been told before, in two films released in 1982 with Lena Stolze, but Marc Rothemund’s film – starring Julia Jentsch of ‘The Edukators’ – can take advantage of new-found transcripts of Scholl’s interrogation by Gestapo officer Robert Mohr. An award-winning hit in Germany, the movie parses the last six days of a brief life: from Hans and Sophie’s risky decision to distribute resistance leaflets in the atrium of Munich University to Sophie’s fatefully conspicuous impulse to push a stack of the leaflets from an upper floor on to the exiting students, her arrest and extended interview with chain-smoking villain Mohr (Gerald Alexander Held) to the grotesque show trial and the executions that swiftly followed. Unfortunately, screenwriter Fred Breinersdorfer makes sentimental use of historical licence and the film holds few surprises, though it builds a remarkable level of suspense during the fait-accompli interrogation scenes, and is a well-intended commemoration of a courageous young woman.