A guillotine used to execute thousands of people during the Nazi era, including a brother and sister who led a group of Munich students known as the White Rose in resistance to Hitler, has been provisionally identified in a storage area belonging to the Bavarian National Museum, museum officials said Friday.
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Sophie and Hans Scholl and another member of their White Rose group, Christoph Probst, were executed on Feb. 22, 1943, just four days after they were spotted by a guard at the University of Munich as they distributed the sixth edition of their fliers, which from the summer of 1942 had reported intermittently on Nazi crimes, including the mass killing of Eastern Europe’s Jews.
In all, at least 14 members of the group, which historians say comprised 30 to 35 people, were executed by guillotine in Munich and Hamburg. This was in keeping with a revival of beheading under Hitler, who “personally ordered a good number of guillotines to be built,” said Jud Newborn, the co-author of a 2006 book about Sophie Scholl.
The guillotine used to behead the Scholls was for decades considered to be lost. But museum officials said Friday, in response to a report on Bavarian radio, that a recent examination of items stored by the Munich museum suggested that they had found the device.