"Sophie Scholl: The Final Days," Germany's nominee for this year's Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, doesn't ask any questions — the movie is spare and straightforward. But it provokes a question unavoidably. While most of us are quick to assert our beliefs and opinions, how quick would we be if doing so were dangerous — if standing up were certain to mean we would be brutally cut down?

The movie begins on the night of February 17, 1943, with Sophie Scholl (Julia Jentsch), a 21-year-old student at the University of Munich, making her way through streets hung with Nazi banners to a secret workshop where her brother, Hans (Fabian Hinrichs), and two friends are producing anti-Nazi leaflets. They are all members of the White Rose, a student resistance movement dedicated to inciting young Germans to rise up and overthrow the murderous Nazi regime. This is the last meeting the group members will have. Sophie has six days left to live.

The dictatorship of Adolf Hitler is now in its ninth year, and its barbarism is in full, appalling flower. Germany's Jews have been officially stripped of their rights and ordered to wear yellow stars in the streets. A government euthanasia policy, initially intended to eradicate mentally and physically handicapped children, has been expanded to include adults, and at a half dozen killing clinics around the country, "elite" Nazi SS soldiers have tested a new, experimental method for their termination: poison gas. This having proved efficient, the mass gassing of Jews has begun the previous summer at a death camp in Poland called Auschwitz. Like Poland, such other countries as Czechoslovakia, France, Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands have fallen before Nazi invasions, and Germany is now at war with Great Britain, the United States and other allied nations.

Hans Scholl and three other members of the White Rose have recently returned from tours of duty as conscript medics on the Eastern Front, where they witnessed SS troops murdering Jews indiscriminately in Poland and the Soviet Union. Their second White Rose leaflet, mailed out to academics and pubs in late 1942, noted that "since the conquest of Poland, three hundred thousand Jews have been murdered ... in the most bestial way. Here we see the most frightful crime against human dignity, a crime that is unparalleled in the whole of history." White Rose leaflet number five, distributed in early February of 1943, decried the Nazis as "a criminal regime," and implored Germans to stand up and cast them off. "In the aftermath," the leaflet warned, "a terrible but just judgment will be meted out to those who stayed in hiding, who were cowardly or hesitant."

Now, on this last night of the White Rose, it is decided that the freshly-printed leaflet number six will be distributed within the University of Munich itself. This will be an insanely dangerous mission — Nazi informers are everywhere. But Hans Scholl volunteers for the job, and Sophie insists on going with him.

Early the next morning, February 18, Hans and Sophie enter the university carrying a small suitcase stuffed with leaflets. Scurrying through the empty hallways, they place stacks of them at random along the floor. Thinking they've finished, they prepare to leave, but then realize there are still some leaflets left. They turn back and mount a staircase, and Sophie tosses a sheaf of leaflets off a balcony onto the main concourse below, just as students and staff are beginning to pour into the building. She is spotted by a janitor, a Nazi stooge, who calls the Gestapo. Sophie and Hans are arrested and taken to secret-police headquarters.

What follows is based on the official record of the hours of interrogation of Sophie Scholl conducted by Robert Mohr, a Gestapo inquisitor who is seen by the filmmakers as more of a by-the-book policeman than a Nazi ideologue — a contemptible but passive collaborator. He and Sophie face each other across an imposing desk in his bleak office. Mohr (Alexander Held), in a gray suit and a bowtie, is for the most part quietly bemused. He has a son just one year younger than Sophie, and he doesn't think Sophie is guilty — complicit, yes, but probably just led astray by her brother. Sophie admits nothing. As Mohr carefully peppers her with questions — about why she was at the university so early, why she was carrying the suitcase, who else was involved — she stares him straight in the eye and deftly improvises an alibi he can't crack.

Sophie claims to be apolitical herself, but allows that there are things happening in Germany about which a more political person might feel disgust. Mohr tells her she is "confused." The Jews aren't being wiped out, he says, they're simply "emigrating." "You have to realize," he says, "a new age is dawning." Sophie clearly disagrees. Erupting in frustration, Mohr shouts, "Without law, there is no order. What can we rely on if not the law?" Sophie mildly replies, "Your conscience. Laws change. Conscience doesn't."

Meanwhile, the Gestapo has been gathering evidence at Sophie's apartment that implicates not only her and her brother, but also another member of the White Rose, Christoph Probst (Florian Stetter), a young married father of three. He, too, has been arrested. Finally, in their last confrontation, Mohr presents Sophie with a document signed by Hans — a confession, in which he claims sole responsibility for the leafleting operation. Mohr tells Sophie that if she will just admit she was misguided, and renounce any anti-Nazi beliefs, she will avoid punishment. She refuses. Is she confessing guilt? "Yes," she says, "and I'm proud of it."

On February 22, Sophie and Hans and Christoph Probst are brought to trial — a hideous travesty conducted before an audience of Gestapo thugs and presided over by an infamous Nazi judge, Dr. Roland Freisler (André Hennicke), a screaming lunatic in crimson robes who also acts as prosecutor and jury. (This scene is based on the official trial transcript.) By pre-arrangement with Hans and Sophie, Probst claims that he became involved with the White Rose while in a state of severe depression, and pleads to be spared for his children's sake. Freisler tells him he's not worthy to be a father. The judge makes it frothingly clear that he views the defendants as insects buzzing ineffectively about the great body of National Socialism; but when Hans steps forward to testify, he tells Freisler, "If you and Hitler weren't afraid of our opinion, we wouldn't be here."

Finally, Sophie is brought to stand before the court. After delivering himself of another barrage of hysterical invective, Freisler asks her, "Aren't you ashamed?" Sophie says, "No." And to the courtroom at large, she adds, "You will soon be standing where I stand now."

The verdict for all three defendants is "guilty," of course, and the sentence, death. Shockingly, they are told that they will be executed forthwith. A prison matron nervously allows them to share a last cigarette together, and then we follow Sophie into the last room she will ever see. I will not describe it.

The director of "Sophie Scholl," Marc Rothemund, has kept the unbridled horror of the Nazi period carefully tamped down in his film. There are no vicious beatings or bloody tortures. The prospect of inescapable doom that hangs over the heads of the three main characters is horrific enough. We marvel at these young students who had a whole life left to live, but who gave it up for a belief — when all around them, others had given up the belief itself instead. Will there always be people of such immeasurable courage? And in similar circumstances, how likely is it that we would be among them?