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December 07, 2005

Collaborating with the dead: the transcripts of Sophie Scholl

The director of Foreign Language Oscar nominee Sophie Scholl: the Final Days, Marc Rothemund, talks to Bloomberg about his film, drawn from "original transcripts of her interrogation by the Gestapo, which until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 were hidden away in East German archives."

Rothemund got the transcripts after a simple phone call. "After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Gestapo transcripts were sent from Berlin to Koblenz, to the archives. But at that time everyone was worried about the end of the Cold War—and then more interested in their own transcripts and files. No one thought about the older transcripts. When I read that Sophie Scholl was interrogated by the Gestapo, I called the archives... and asked them whether they had the transcripts, and they said yes. And I asked whether I could have a copy, and they said yes—for 1 euro ($1.18) per page. So I got everything—the interrogation transcripts, the court transcripts, the execution transcripts... I saw that she first said that she was innocent, that she lied. It was gripping to read it. You had to ask: How long can she keep this up? When the evidence then forced her to confess, she continued lying to protect her friends...

"In America, people have realized that Saddam Hussein didn't have that much to do with al-Qaeda, and that there weren't any weapons of mass destruction, and some people have a bad conscience about believing their leaders so quickly. They have understood that every single person in a society has a responsibility to empathize and to be curious—not to believe everything the politicians say, but to double-check." More on the film here.