Resistance Figure. Born Sophia Magdalena Scholl the fourth child of Magdalena and Mayor Robert Scholl at Forchtenberg am Kocher, Germany. At the age of 12, she was required to join the Hitler Youth group; League of German Girls. At home, however, she learned dissension from her father who disapproved of the Nazi regime. In 1940 she took a job as a kindergarten teacher at the Fröbel Institute in Ulm-Söflingen. In the spring of 1941, she began a six month term of mandatory national service in the auxiliary war service as a nursery teacher in Blumberg. In May 1942, she enrolled at the University of Munich, where she made friends with a group of students with whom she spent her leisure time. In 1942, her father was imprisoned for referring to Hitler as a 'scourge of God.' Soon thereafter, she, her brother, and their friends began discussions of how one should act under a dictator and agreed on a course of passive resistance. That summer they formed White Rose, a non-violent resistance group which also included Hans Scholl, Christoph Probst, Alexander Schmorell, Willi Graf, and Kurt Huber, their philosophy professor. They began writing and distributing dissenting leaflets; the first included the statement that the Nazi system had become evil and that Germans should rise up and resist the tyranny of their government. It was one of the first times that internal dissent had surfaced in Germany. They mailed leaflets to people by picking names from telephone directories, and left them in public places to be found. They successfully distributed five separate issues, upon the distribution of the sixth, on February 18, 1943, Sophie and Hans scattered their pamphlets at the university, where they were observed by the custodian, a member of the Nazi party, and were reported. The pair were arrested and searched. A handwritten draft of another leaflet was found in Hans' pocket, it matched handwriting on a letter found in Sophie's apartment written by Christoph Probst, who was then arrested as well. They were brought before the notorious People's Court on February 21, 1943, showing the effects of violent interrogations during which both siblings tried to deflect suspicion from Probst, the only family man in the group. Within hours all three were found guilty of treason and condemned to death. On February 22, 1943, at 5:00 in the evening, they were executed by guillotine in Munich's Stadelheim Prison. After their deaths, a copy of their sixth leaflet was smuggled out of Germany to England. The Allied Forces dropped several million copies over Germany in the summer and fall of 1943. The Geschwister-Scholl-Institut at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich has been named in honor of Sophie and Hans Scholl. In 2005, a German television survey voted Hans and Sophie the fourth greatest Germans of all time, and in the same year in a German women's magazine, Sophie Scholl was named the greatest woman of the 20th century.