Conscience runs ahead of the law. The law spends years trying to catch up. What people already sense to be wrong stays legal for years, sometimes generations, until the written statute finally staggers forward to catch what the conscience saw long before.

Sophie Scholl fell into that gap and it killed her.

On February 22, 1943, the twenty-one-year-old appeared before the People's Court in Munich. Four days earlier she and her brother Hans had scattered pamphlets from the balustrade of their university atrium calling ordinary Germans to resist the Nazi state and its slaughter of the Jews. A janitor saw the papers fall and within hours the Gestapo had her.