This political party controlled the German government as a dictatorship Anyone who tried to resist the Nazis risked arrest In fact the Nazi secret police or Gestapo were already looking for the people who were making the leaflets The Scholls and their friends had created the leaflets They had heard stories of the Nazis killing hundreds of thousands of people And they had seen Nazis treat Jewish people horribly Despite the danger of resistance they felt the need to speak out At the university students were attending classes Sophie and Hans knew they had to work fast They placed piles of leaflets in front of doors on windowsills and along staircases As the classes ended the siblings had only a small pile of leaflets left Sophie hurried to the top level of the building She tossed the leaflets over an open 6
This scene from the film Sophie Scholl The Final Days shows Sophie and Hans leaflets floating to the ground area at the building’s center Paper rained down on the students below as they left their classes Sophie and Hans turned to leave Suddenly one of the school’s janitors appeared He had seen Sophie and Hans distributing the leaflets They tried to blend in with the other students but the janitor caught them He turned them over to the Gestapo 7
CHAPTER 2 DARK CLOUDS OVER EUROPE Sophie Sophie Scholl was born in 1921 in a small town in southern Germany The Scholls moved to the city of Ulm when Sophie was 11 years old In January 1933 Adolf Hitler became the German chancellor Hitler led the Nazi Party He used his new position to begin taking over the German government At the end of February his regime passed a law that took away the civil rights of German citizens Adolf Hitler waves to crowds during a parade 9
