Movies I've Watched: "Sophie Scholl:The Final Days" (2005)

Performed entirely in German, "Sophie Scholl: The Final Days" is about a resistance movement in the middle of the 3rd Reich in Nazi Germany in WWII led by students Hanz & Sophie Scholl by distributing leaflets against the 3rd Reich.

The movie is largely cerebral with much of the movie focusing on the interrogation of Sophie after she was witnessed distributing a huge stack of anti-Nazi leaflets in the middle of the university at Munich.

However, being fairly familiar with the 3rd Reich Gestapo interrogation tactics and the appointments of civilians to political posts in reward for their loyalties to the Reich, I found the dialogues absolutely fascinating in terms of their abilities to capture the hopes and fears of mankind on the different sides of the issues that faced Germany - the world - in 1943.

The movie avoids saccharine melodrama and is largely a battle of wits with the Gestapo courts and interrogation systems.  The movie is drawn from files that were stored in East Germany that recount the interrogations themselves and is a "true story" based on the documentation of events and drawn from the court transcripts themselves.

If you've ever watched the Neuremburg Trials and listened to the speeches of the Fuhrer, you'll know that their rhetoric was overly simple and definitely Axis II in orientation. However, much of this was captured brilliantly through the entire film and it was of course historically accurate. If you wish to get something out of the film rather than just watching an interrogation - ask yourself if you did what she did would it be worth dying for? Or confessing just to be killed anyways? How do you pick your battles....or hold up under such a cerebral and psychological onslaught? I'd give it a 2 thumbs up.  My only question would have been - had I been on the stand would be - "Is Germany so weak that a piece of paper can bring her down? Are our soldiers that threatened by paper? Send me out as a fool if not.  Or if we are so weak, we need to re-think our strategy."