Sophie Scholl: The Final Days German Nazi Drama Captivates

by Scott Holleran

Sophie Scholl: The Final Days opens with the title character, a plain college student, singing to an American record in English. The scene is a proper introduction to the story of a good, joyful German in Nazi Germany. Neither apologia—like last year’s dreadful Downfall—nor anothertrivialization ofNazism, this gripping account of an ordinary citizen’s ordeal under National Socialism dramatizes how faith in the state extinguishes life.

As presented in German by director Marc Rothemund and writer Fred Breinersdorfer, Sophie Scholl (Julia Jentsch in an intense performance) is a hero-worshipper, a freethinker and a believer in God, basically in that order. Sophie and her brother, Hans (Fabian Hinrichs), whose father also defied the Nazis, have joined a resistance movement in Munich.

With a band of other Bavarians, they meet in secret to produce hundreds of opposition leaflets and distribute the papers at the university. They report on the war. They encourage citizens to rise up against the Nazis. They paint walls with the word “freedom”. They call themselves The White Rose. In the waning days of the war, they haven’t a chance. Hans and Sophie are detained after exercising their right to free speech.

The taut, grey-tinged incarceration puts Sophie squarely where an idealist of her stripe would (and did) wind up: under constant interrogation—with none of Downfall’s or Munich’s equivocation about the nature of evil. This picture does not recite the explicit philosophy of the Nazis, whose aims were widely accepted by the German people, as Sophie points out to her slug-like tormentor, played by Gerald Alexander Held.

But their ideas—man’s duty to serve others, rule by brute force, collectivism—are in every frame. 21-year-old Sophie bravely struggles to maintain her innocence, and she passionately asserts her individual rights. Locked in a prison cell with a kindly Bolshevik, clutching her blanket and pleading to God, she barely endures.

Director Rothemund and writer Breinersdorfer give Sophie the consistency of character such a person would have to have in order to do what she does. From a moment of hero-worship in the resistance’s headquarters—caught in an upward look at her dashing older brother, a striking, confident young man—to a last salutation to the soldier she loves, Sophie practices her principles.

She wants to live, yet life is not possible in Nazi Germany, not as Sophie intends it. That the Nazis were far more monstrous with the Jews, millions of whom they systematically exterminated, is never far from one’s thoughts. That they did so with the consent of the civilized Volk, or people—personified here by Sophie’s interrogator, the most evil man in the movie—is on full display.

Throughout her ordeal, which includes a heart-stopping show trial commanded by the type of snarling beast who rises in a dictatorship, Sophie, whose prayers to God grow more desperate, remains focused on reality. In a final gesture to what might have been, she cocks her head, closes her eyes and juts her face to the sun.

Her steady, unaffected gaze and her undying idealism make hers an unforgettable journey. Its outcome is like an earlier adjunct to Stanley Kramer’s sterling Judgment at Nuremberg, which every adult American, especially now, ought to see. Yes, there were good Germans, Sophie Scholl: The Final Days demonstrably argues, but they lacked an intellectual offense, they were badly outnumbered—and here is what happened to them.

Originally published February 27, 2006 by Box Office Mojo

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