"Die Weiße Rose" was the best known student resistance group during World War 2 in Germany. Based in Munich, the core of the group was formed by Christoph Probst, Willi Graf, Alexander Schmorell and the siblings Sophie and Hans Scholl, around them about a dozen other students, intellectuals and artists as well as their "mentor", Professor Kurt Huber.
In June and July of 1942, four pamphlets, mostly written by the Medicine Students Hans Scholl and Alexander Schmorell were spread in Munich. The authors, having enjoyed a conservative, pious and idealistic education, used them to ask everyone who read these leaflets to join in passive resistance.
After some of the members were called to the Russian front line and returned, shocked from the horror of Hitler's war in november 1942, the tone of their pamphlets got distinct. During the useless terrors of Stalingrad, they demonstrated the desperateness of this war, explicitly listing up several crimes of the Nazi regime and demanding to actively fight against it.
In the beginning of 1943, the Scholl siblings were caught throwing pamphlets down the stairs in the University of Munich by the janitor Jakob Schmidt3. Handed over to the Gestapo, they were executed four days later. A few weeks after this, Willi Graf, Kurt Huber and Alexander Schmorell were sentenced to death, 11 other members got imprisoned.
Below, my attempt to translate the last paragraph of Munich White Rose's last pamphlet:
Freedom and honour! For ten years, Hitler and his comrades have squeezed, worn thin and twisted the most beautiful German words until nothing but revulsion was left, like only dilettantes who throw the highest words of a nation before swine are capable of. In ten years of destruction of any material and mental freedom, of any moral substance in the German people, they have proved well enough what freedom and honour means to them. (...) If Germany's youth do not finally rise up, revenging and expiating at the same time, shattering their tormentors and establishing a new spiritual Europe, the word German will stay stained forever.1
The group in Munich being shattered, some pamphlets made their way to Hamburg, but only one member of the "Hamburger Weiße Rose" survived 1945.2
I went to the "Willi Graf Gymnasium" in Munich, and during our Abitur ball, I showed a friend of mine some rooms and other things about the school I was going to leave, including a huge painting of the last pamphlets of the Munich White Rose. Though being sort of a war-anti-war-cry, this one was still written in a pathetic language and simple in its statements, looking at it after half a century, it was as if you said "to live, we need to breathe", but I guess at this time, any of these basics was lacking.
So however, although I never liked the school, the headmaster himself being some kind of over-conservative realtime Mr. Burns and the school in general being, against its reputation, not liberal and tolerant and White Rose at all, it was still based and built on these ideals in the seventies, and that's something, right?
16th leaflet of the White Rose, after a design by Kurt Huber, with corrections by Hans Scholl and Alexander Schmorell, february 1943; source: "Katalog der Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand", a.a. O., Materialien 16.7, 16.8
2Several of these informations were taken from the issue "Informationen zur politischen Bildung 243, 2. Quartal 1994, B6897F - Deutscher Widerstand 1933-1945", Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, Bonn, Germany, 1994.
3Thanks to arcanamundi.
Thanks to Heisenberg and eliserh for English corrections.