The White Rose Nazi resistance group might have been small in scale, but its legacy still resonates today.

Started by students at Munich's Ludwig Maximilians University (LMU) in 1942, the group opposed Nazi and fascist thinking by bravely writing and distributing nonviolent, oppositional pamphlets.

Professor Dr Kiran Klaus Patel says that over a one-year period the White Rose managed to write six leaflets and secretly mail them out to people around Germany and Austria whom they thought would be interested.

"The first of the pamphlets was a rather long text," Patel explains. "It was really a call for people to make themselves free of Nazi ideology and to then resist – firstly passively, and then a call to really do whatever is possible to fight the Nazis themselves." 

Much of the group's writing was rooted in Christian ethics, humanism, and some elements of German Romantic philosophy. Yet they also looked towards the work of international philosophers, such as China's Lao Tzu.

"Lao Tzu thinks about how people should act right," says Patel as he shows CGTN around a museum dedicated to the White Rose just off the main entrance lobby of LMU, where he is the chair of Modern History. 

Lao Tzu, he explains, theorizes whether people should "follow the lead of those in power or think independently. His quotes also made it into one of the leaflets. That shows that there was a transnational, even a global dimension in their thinking."

Clearly the members of the White Rose chose to think independently. But it was dangerous to speak out publicly against the Nazis. 

On February 18, 1943, two of the most well-known members, siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl, celebrated the Nazi defeat in Stalingrad. Feeling the end of the regime was imminent, they took the brazen act of tossing copies and the 6th leaflet off the balconies of LMU.

The siblings were immediately reported to the Gestapo, the Nazi police – and sentenced to death four days later.

Their pictures and those of the leaflets are engraved in the stone at the entrance of the university.

Professor Dr Johannes Tuchel is the Director of the German Resistance Memorial Center in the capital, Berlin, where there is also a permanent display of some group members and their leaflets.

"I think that was the most important motive for their resistance, knowledge of the Nazi mass crimes," Tuchel tells CGTN. "Deep desperation about all the bystanders at that time in Germany and deep desperation of how this will end with Germany."

Other members of the group were also executed for their outspoken stance against the Nazis.

"By 1942-43, the regime was very hard against small signs of resistance," says Patel. "It was very clear that it was putting your life in jeopardy and also of those who just received the paper – so all this was extremely risky and they were fully aware of the risk they were taking."

Tuchel celebrates that bravery and determination.

"They show us that it was possible to have your own independent thoughts," he concludes, "and that you are responsible for what you do in your society every time."