The White Rose

The first of a trilogy that dares to tell the truth about Germany during the war, this well-crafted film is based on a true story of student resistance to Nazi rule in Verhoeven's native Bavaria, a predominantly Catholic region. In their early 20s, the Scholls form their dissent out of religious and social conscience. Hans is a medical student whose pacifist inclination is strengthened after a tour of duty on the East Front. His sister Sophie studies philosophy and decides to join the underground when a favorite professor, the musical historian Kurt Huber, is victimized by Nazi persecution. The Scholls coordinate a clever and intensive campaign of underground pamphleteering that, in February 1943, results in a student uprising at the University of Munich. The Gestapo does not take this insurgency lightly and a massive search intensifies for "Bolshevist instigators," really a Catholic boy and girl with a printing press. The other films in the trilogy are THE NASTY GIRL and MY MOTHER'S COURAGE..

Born in Berlin in 1938 and trained for a career in medicine, Verhoeven developed a unique voice in post-war Germany. While some denied and others chose to forget, Verhoeven risked popular opinion by daring to tell the truth. He was the first West German director to raise the issues of German resistance against the Nazis in THE WHITE ROSE, and how modern-day citizens are repressing the truth in THE NASTY GIRL. Verhoeven completed his trilogy by telling the miraculous and true story of how one woman saved herself from deportation in MY MOTHER'S COURAGE. While the 50th anniversary of the fall of Hitler was marked with messages of healing between Germans and Jews, Daniel Goldhagen's recently published book, HITLER'S WILLING EXECUTIONERS emphasizes the complicity of ordinary Germans with the war. By contrast, Verhoeven tells the little known stories of resistance and of modern-day Germans seeking a relationship with the past.