Anti-Nazi hero Sophie Scholl to get her own coin
August 12, 2020
Anti-National Socialism political activist and student Sophie Scholl will be commemorated on a special coin, said the German Finance Ministry on Wednesday.
The €20 ($23) sterling silver collectors coin will be issued in April 2021, timed to coincide with Scholl's birthday.
Scholl was a member of the non-violent Nazi-resistance White Rose group. She was convicted of treason for distributing anti-war pamphlets along with her brother Hans and executed on February 22, 1943, by guillotine. She was 21 years old when she was killed.
Her resistance has become "an example for the fight against lack of freedom and oppression," said Germany's Finance Ministry, announcing the decision in Berlin.
The coin has been designed by Saxony-based artist Olaf Stoy. A portrait of Scholl's face will be on one side of the coin.
"A feeling for what is just and unjust" – a quote from Sophie Scholl – will be written on the edge of the coin.
Who was Sophie Scholl?
Sophia Magdalena Scholl was born in Forchtenberg, Germany in 1921. She studied biology and philosophy at Munich University, where her brother was studying medicine and where he had formed the White Rose organization. Sophie later found out about the secretive group and joined.
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The pacifist group campaigned against the Nazis, writing leaflets using political and biblical arguments to persuade people to resist the National Socialist ideology.
On February 18, 1943, Sophie and Hans were arrested after distributing a sixth anti-Nazi flyer at the university and killed days later.
Read more: Albert Speer and the myth of 'the good Nazi'
Remembering White Rose members
It's not the first time that Germany has honored members of the well-known resistance group.
At the end of last year, Germany's military renamed the Hochbrück army complex the Christoph Probst barracks after the medical student and White Rose activist.
In 2012, the main lecture hall at the Bundeswehr's medical academy in Munich was named after Sophie's brother, Hans Scholl.
kmm/dj (AFP, epd, KNA)