The White Rose was an informal, non-violent resistance group whose goal was to oppose the war and Nazi regime. It was founded in early 1942 by Hans Scholl (Sophie’s brother), William Graf and Christoph Probst. Together the group wrote six anti-Nazi resistance leaflets, in which they instructed Germans to passively resist the Nazis, and distributed them across Munich. In the beginning Sophie was not aware of the group but when she found out about what her brother had helped put together, she wanted in. Sophie began to give out leaflets and carry messages for the group. She became a good addition because as a women she was much less likely to be stopped by the SS. Leaflets were left in telephone books in public phone booths, mailed to professors and students, and taken by courier to other universities for distribution. Attempting to take the leaflets to other cities required taking great risks because trains were constantly patrolled by military police who demanded identification papers of any male of military service age. Members of The White Rose worked all day and all night cranking a hand-operated duplicating machine thousands of times to create the leaflets which were cramped into envelopes and mailed from various major cities in Southern Germany. Recipients of the leaflets were chosen from the telephone directories and were generally scholars, medics and pub-owners in order to confuse the Gestapo (secret police of Nazi Germany) investigators.