There are relatively few movies about what life was like for Gentiles in Germany was Hitler came to power (“The Unknown Brother”, “The Aryan Couple”, “Invincible”) and during WWII, but surely “Sophie Scholl: The Last Days” (“Die Letzten Tagen”) is one of the most powerful. The two-hour film, directed by Marc Rothemund, is distributed (2005) on DVD by Zeitgeist and was produced by Film Bavaria and Goldkind.
Sophie Scholl, 21 in 1943, and her brother were among the most fearless anti-Nazi activists in Germany. She is brought in and interrogated for leafleting, and at first she claims it is a clumsy accident. The film spends a lot of time as a “play” with verbal confrontations between her and her interrogators. Gradually the script becomes more ideological. Eventually the courtroom (“the People’s Court”) drama appears, and she and others are put to death by guillotine.
The dialogue moralizes a lot: it is apparent that the Nazis had talked themselves into believing that they had created the perfect “moral” system were people somehow wind up with what they are worthy of. Then, how dare a young girl speak out against a system that had brought “prosperity” to “dem Deutschen Volke.” It seems laughable that leaflets could become such a treasonous threat, but after all, that’s what the Allies did from the Air. Freedom had become a vice. The leafleting was that society’s equivalent of the Internet today.
There is a line where she says she is Protestant, but later the Nazis deny the existence of God as Christians understand him.
The film perhaps also recalls “The Diary of Anne Frank”, and the tragic end also reminds me of “The Robe”.
The DVD is two-sided, with the extras on side 2; you place the side you want to play down. I got this wrong, and when I started the real movie it tried to play it full screen; I had to take out the DVD and close the Mac DVD player and put the DVD back in to get the aspect ratio right.
The back-side interviews (including one with Sophie's sister, and another with a former Gestapo member) bring out the fact that older Germans remained quiet and passive, unwilling or afraid to speak out since the economy was getting "better", whereas some younger Gentile people believed that it was wrong and that the Nazis would lose the war against overwhelming Allied forces. The sister calls the German people of the era "cowards". The Nazis considered any counter-speech as "treason".
Attribution link for public domain (Canadian copyright expired) of Berlin at end of WWII
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