Scholl, Inge

Inge Aicher-Scholl inspired a generation of pacifists in post-World War II Germany by writing about an anti-Nazi youth movement and the killing of her brother and sister.

Mrs. Aicher-Scholl moved millions of Germans toward nonviolence by chronicling the activities of the White Rose, a student movement whose leaders included her younger brother and sister, Hans and Sophie Scholl.

Both siblings were killed by Nazis on Feb. 22, 1943, and their parents were imprisoned by Nazi authorities for several months.

In 1952 Mrs. Aicher-Scholl published a book describing White Rose’s nonviolent resistance to the Third Reich and its brutal repression by the Nazis. Written in spare and dispassionate prose, the slim volume became a classic work of literature about the Third Reich.

Hans and Sophie Scholl “came to represent not just the small band of youthful dissenters but all the pacifist sympathizers who were tracked by the Gestapo and the innumerable anonymous victims who were forced to pay the price for believing that human rights were more important than obedience to arbitrary laws,” wrote Albert von Schirndung, a cultural critic for the Munich daily Suddeutsche Zeitung.

The book’s lack of pretension and its description of ordinary Germans lent it power. “It would have been wrong to create new heroes,” Mr. Schirndung wrote. “One had already had enough of heroes. The characters in ‘White Rose’ were people one could identify with.”

The book and subsequent writing by Mrs. Aicher-Scholl influenced many Germans who grew up after the war, reinforcing what was already a deep revulsion against the militarism that had brought the country to catastrophe and moral disgrace.

In 1946 Mrs. Aicher-Scholl and several friends founded a school for adult education and art in Ulm. One of the co-founders was her future husband, designer Otl Aicher. Mrs. Aicher-Scholl headed the school from 1946 to 1974, and remained active in Germany’s peace movement throughout her life.

In the 1980’s, she was a prominent figure in anti-military movements that bitterly but unsuccessfully opposed plans by the German government and NATO to station nuclear missiles in West Germany.

In 1985 she was arrested for taking part in a sit-in at the American Pershing II missile base at the southern town of Mutlangen. She and other protesters were charged with disrupting public order and given suspended fines.

Mrs. Aicher-Scholl, who died at home in Leutkirch, in southern Germany, is survived by four of her five children, Eva, Florian, Julian and Manuel; another child, Pia, died in a car accident in 1975, and her husband died in 1991.