WANT TO SEE WHAT A HERO LOOKS LIKE?

Ever heard of Sophie Scholl? Seen here with a daisy tucked into her lapel, she was a University of Munich student in the 1940s—a kid, really, my son’s age. A kid with convictions and a moral compass stronger than most adults ever find. At 21, Sophie and her brother Hans, 24, joined Der Weisse Rose—The White Rose—a non-violent, intellectual resistance group that dared to call out Nazi crimes at the height of Hitler’s power. They distributed anti-Nazi leaflets, painted defiant messages on city walls, and insisted Germany could choose humanity over horror. A year later, Nazis chopped their heads off with a guillotine.

When I picture Sophie, I imagine her certainty, her youth, her appetite for risk—and the dawning awareness that speaking the truth might cost her everything. What makes someone step into danger that has a thousand faces? What makes an ordinary student resist when surrounded by neighbors eager to look away—or eager to inform? Was she brave, naïve, reckless? Or simply a young woman who believed resisting atrocities against millions mattered more than preserving herself? The White Rose—just a handful of students and one professor—chose to name themselves after something pure and beautiful, and that choice alone leaves me in awe.

Sophie and Hans were hauled before a Nazi kangaroo court and denied any real defense. Sophie reportedly interrupted the “blood judge” again and again, trying to argue for her life—or maybe for her beliefs. I wonder what raced through her mind in those final minutes before the blade fell. Her family? Fear? Defiance? Did she regret anything at all? Or did she look her executioners in the eye and know she had already won something they could never touch? When I think of Sophie at 21, I know I would not have been nearly as brave.

My grandfather wasn’t either. His CIA file—compiled by the U.S. Army Air Forces after he was brought to America through Operation Paperclip—describes him as an “anti-Hitlerite” who defended his Jewish engineers. Maybe some of that is true. Maybe some of it was convenient fiction to clear him for Cold War work. What is true is that Robert Lusser’s career intersected directly with the darkest machinery of the Third Reich. He knew the world’s first cruise missile—the V1 flying bomb project he led—was built by slave laborers in an underground concentration camp. That truth is its own kind of indictment.

The White Rose lasted barely two years before the Nazis plucked every petal and ground them into the dirt. And I’m always struck that Hans and Sophie were once in the Hitler Youth—just like my aunts had been, though by 1939, membership wasn’t a choice but a requirement. Indoctrination didn’t leave much room for conscience, yet somehow these two young people stepped into the rip current and swam hard the other way. They transformed themselves—from participants in a system to resisters of it. And it cost them their lives.

But it also left us something: a reminder that moral courage is rarely comfortable, rarely convenient, and almost never safe. The White Rose showed that even in a time when silence was rewarded and obedience could mean survival, someone can still decide to say no. Someone can still choose the truth.

And the question they leave us with—Sophie’s question, really—is the only one that matters now:

When the moment comes, will we stay quiet… or will we choose to be the ones who speak?