“The impact of student protest may have crested through the attention of contemporary mass media, but it was a potent political factor long before television. It even existed within Nazi Germany during World War II, when commitment to a dissident group was dangerous and the price for that kind of involvement was high.
“Sophie Scholl and her brother, Hans, were members of the White Rose, an organization of German students dedicated to inciting their countrymen against the government. In 1942, they were arrested for distributing pamphlets calling for popular resistance. Fünf letzte Tage is Sophie's story from the time of her arrest to her execution by guillotine for treason.
“Director Percy Adlon (Celeste), in his second feature after a series of documentaries, follows Sophie, played by Lena Stolze, through the eyes of a fellow inmate, Else (Irm Hermann).
“The two women, one of whom is now famous throughout Germany as a resistance leader, are rarely apart during these few days of Sophie's courage under the Gestapo interrogations. As Percy Adlon says, their story shows ‘the daily possibility of extending help and sympathy, affection and warmth of heart, which is to me the only hope in the insanity of the exercise of power then and now.'” Paul Silberberg, San Francisco Film Festival, 1983.
The White Rose Organization is the subject of another new German film, White Rose, due to open in New York, in which Lena Stolze also plays the part of Sophie.