This photo is a scene from the movie Sophie Scholl: The Last Days. It shows Sophie's one day trial in a Nazi "People's Court." In the actual trial the judge was Roland Freisler. The date and place of the trial was February 22, 1943 in Munich.
The "People's Courts" stood outside the German traditional legal system. They had their origin in Hitler's dissatisfaction with the outcome of the trial of the defendants in the Reichstag fire.
This fire, which occurred on February 27, 1933, 28 days after Hitler's appointment as Chancellor, gutted the German parliament building in Berlin and led to the arrest and trial of five defendants, Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch drifter, a German Communist member of the Reichstag, Torgler, and three Bulgarian communists living in Germany, Dimitroff, Popoff, and Taneff. Van der Lubbe was arrested in the Reichstag on the night of the fire, Torgler presented himself voluntarily on February 28, while the Bulgarians were arrested on March 9, presumably to lend credibility to the government's claim, widely disseminated in the press, that the fire was a signal for a Communist armed uprising inside Germany.
This is a time line of the principal events.
Dimitroff had requested the court to call Hermann Goering as a witness. At the time, Goering was the Minister President of Prussia, the Interior Minister of the Reich, and the President of the Reichstag. As the Interior Minister he was responsible for all the police forces of the nation, including the Gestapo. The court granted Dimitroff's request.
Dimitroff called Goering as a witness on November 4. An abstract from the transcript follows (The source of this information is G. Dimitroff, Reichstagsbrandprozess, pp 109-110, Verlag Neuer Weg, Berlin 1946):
[DIMITROFF] After you, as Minister President and Interior Minister, announced that Communists were the arsonists, that the Communist Party of Germany, with the help of van der Lubbe, as a foreign Communist, were the perpetrators, wouldn't this, your personal evaluation, set the guidelines for the police investigation and for the judicial investigation and exclude other lines of inquiry to discover the real perpetrators of the Reichstag fire?
[GOERING] By law the conduct of the criminal police is determined such that, for any crime, it must conduct its investigation in any direction that the evidence takes it, no matter where it may lead. I myself am not an official of the criminal police, but rather the responsible Minister and that is why it was not that important for me to identify the individual small tramp, but rather the Party, the world view, that was responsible for it. The criminal police will follow every trail, you can rest assured. I only had to decide: Was the crime committed outside the political sphere or is it a political crime. For me it was a political crime and similarly I was convinced that the criminals were to be found in your [turning toward Dimitroff] Party. [Shaking his fists at Dimitroff and yelling] Your Party is a Party of criminals that needs to be destroyed! And if the judicial investigation allowed itself to be guided in this direction then it was doing nothing more than searching on the right track.
[DIMITROFF] Is the Minister President aware that this Party which "one needs to destroy" governs one sixth of the Earth, namely the Soviet Union, that this Soviet Union maintains diplomatic, political, and commercial relations with Germany and that its economic trade with Germany works to the benefit of hundreds of thousands of German workers?
[PRESIDING JUDGE] [to Dimitroff] I forbid you to engage in Communist propaganda here!
[DIMITROFF] Mr. Goering engages in National Socialist propaganda here! [then turning toward Goering] This Bolshevik world view reigns in the Soviet Union, the biggest and the best country in the world and here in Germany it has millions of adherents representing the best sons of the German people. Is that known…
[GOERING] [yelling] I will tell you what is known among the German people. What the German people know is that you behave yourself impudently here, that you came over here to set fire to the Reichstag. And I am not here so that you can interrogate me as if you were a judge and to have accusations made at me! To me you are a crook who belongs directly on the gallows.
[PRESIDING JUDGE] Dimitroff, I've already told you that you cannot make Communist propaganda here. And you shouldn't be surprised when the witness flies off the handle. I forbid you strictly to engage in this propaganda. You may only ask purely factual questions.
[DIMITROFF] I am very satisfied with the answer of the Minister President.
[PRESIDING JUDGE] Whether you are satisfied or not doesn't interest me. I withdraw your permission to speak further.
[DIMITROFF] I have one more factual question to ask.
[PRESIDING JUDGE] [more sharply] I withdraw your permission to speak further.
[GOERING] [yelling] Out with you, you bastard!
[PRESIDING JUDGE] [to the police] Remove him!
[DIMITROFF] [whom the police have already grabbed] It appears that you are afraid of my questions Mr. Minister President?
[GOERING] [calling to Dimitroff] Just wait until we get you outside the jurisdiction of this court! You bastard, you!
It should be recalled that Hermann Goering was the No. 2 man in the Nazi hierarchy. His role as the President of the Reichstag equates roughly to Vice President Dick Cheney's formal role as President of the Senate. In all other respects Goering's power greatly exceeded that of Cheney. Despite this it is inconceivable that an arsonist accused of setting fire to the US capitol and acting as his own defense counsel would be allowed to cross examine a US Vice President. What is inconceivable in the US had to made impossible in Hitler Germany.
Fully aware of the propaganda defeat that Dimitroff had inflicted on the Nazis, a special court called the Volksgerichtshof was established by a law promulgated by Hitler on April 24, 1934. The name itself, People's Court, is typical of the tendency of dictatorships to misname the instruments they create. The so-called People's Court was anything but that. It's presiding judge was invariably a Nazi ideologue with the other judges being reliable Nazis and military officers. The rights of the defendant were severely circumscribed. The People's Court was used to try cases of treason and high crimes against the State. The outcome for the defendant was frequently capital punishment.
Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans were members of the White Rose anti-war group in Munich. The group was formed in June 1942 and Sophie joined it in the winter of '42-'43. Initially a discussion group, it later began to publish leaflets which it distributed by mail and by courier in southern German cities and Austria.
Click the link below for more information on the White Rose group and a translation of their last leaflet.
White Rose Leaflet