THERE’S AN unforgettable moment in the 2005 film Sophie Scholl: The Final Days when its effervescent young heroine sweeps a stack of white leaflets off a top-floor banister; they rise up into the air and flutter gently down into the grand marbled atrium of Munich University, where Sophie and her brother Hans are students.

For nearly a year before that day in February 1943, the Scholls and a small band of students – who called themselves the “White Rose” – had been writing and mimeographing leaflets denouncing the Nazi regime, which they surreptitiously distributed around the city. At night they painted anti-Nazi graffiti on walls. The leaflets were still swirling around the atrium when Sophie, Hans and their friend and collaborator, Christoph Probst, were arrested. Within a few days they had been interrogated, tried, found guilty of high treason and sentenced to death.