The Documents

If you know, why don't you act?

The Leaflets

The White Rose was the name chosen by a group of German students to identify their opposition to the Nazi regime. Meeting secretly, they produced a series of pamphlets mailed anonymously to prominent citizens. They also conducted a graffiti campaign condemning the Nazis and calling for an end to the war. The first four leaflets were drafted by Hans Scholl and Alexander Schmorell in the summer of 1942, but their efforts were interrupted when on  July 23rd Hans, Alex, and another conspirator, Willi Graf, were sent to fight on the Russian front. The leaflet campaign resumed when they returned home.

A fourth member, Kurt Huber, helped them write the fifth leaflet in January 1943, and authored the sixth leaflet alone the following month. A draft of a planned seventh leaflet, written by Christoph Probst, was found on Hans Scholl when he was arrested distributing leaflets at the university in February, 1943.

You can read the Oxford student translators’ versions of the pamphlets in English here:

The First Pamphlet

The Second Pamphlet

The Third Pamphlet

The Fourth Pamphlet

The Fifth Pamphlet

The Sixth Pamphlet

The Seventh Pamphlet

This video from the White Rose Foundation (Weiße Rose Stiftung) in Munich shows how the leaflets were typed, copied using a duplicating machine, and posted.

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