In his role as legal counsel for the German army, Helmuth had received and acted on information about deportations, mistreatment, and murders of Jews and prisoners of war. He wrestled with this knowledge, writing to Freya in 1941:
May I know this and yet sit at my table in my heated flat and have tea? Don’t I thereby become guilty too? What shall I say when I am asked: And what did you do during that time? . . .
How can anyone know these things and still walk around free? . . . If only I could get rid of the terrible feeling that I have let myself be corrupted, that I do not react keenly enough to such things, that they torment me without producing a spontaneous reaction. I have mistrained myself, for in such things, too, I react with my head. I think about a possible reaction instead of acting.10
And yet, within the realm of his abilities to affect change, Helmuth did act on his knowledge throughout the entire Nazi period, seeing it as his duty to help save lives in the Jewish community. As an early student of Hitler’s plans, he had counseled all persons with Jewish ancestry to abandon Germany, using his office to provide practical legal assistance in some cases. He presciently encouraged even those non-Jewish Germans married to partners with Jewish ancestry to flee a long way from the Third Reich, rightly telling a cousin of Freya’s in such a marriage that neighboring Holland was not far enough. On his trips abroad, he helped to protect Jewish populations elsewhere, obtaining residence permits for Jews in Sweden and warning the Danish Jews of an impending raid and deportations by the occupying Germans.
Knowledge of these atrocities certainly played a role in the deliberations of the Kreisau Circle, especially when drafting the principles for the punishment of war crimes at their third meeting in Kreisau in June 1943. This said, the fact that the documents drafted by the various working groups in the Kreisau Circle nowhere explicitly mention the fate of the Jews under National Socialism remains an absence to contend with. The role of Jews and Judaism in any future Germany was similarly left open. Welcoming the contributions of the two Christian denominations, the “Principles for the Reorganization” of Germany after the war left the legal position of other religious communities to be defined on the basis of a future dialogue.
If Christianity played a major role in the Kreisau Circle thanks to the participation of bishops and priests, Christian doctrine and faith also grew in importance for Helmuth over time. During his six months of confinement in Ravensbrück, he’d had ample time to read and to think after years of incessant work on his official and conspiratorial activities. He spent much of his time reading Luther and the Bible, and invited Freya to share in this experience. From then on, his Bible and hymnal were daily companions. In view of his ongoing dialogues with the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah, the apostle Paul, the psalmist David, and the poets of the hymns, who all wrote under extreme circumstances, it is not surprising that their way of thinking and speaking rubbed off on Helmuth, as can be readily seen in several passages of the correspondence in this volume.
Freya experienced her closeness to God more directly in her daily life, in the experience of love; she felt “cradled” and secure. By the time Helmuth arrived at Tegel prison in the fall of 1944, they both considered themselves firmly rooted in their Christian faith. This gradual transformation from a fairly secular and liberal attitude to a Christian outlook on life later led Freya back to an intense confrontation with the notion of death: “You know, if you live in the face of death, you operate at a deeper and higher level at the same time; liberal ideas are no longer sufficient.”11 Even though doubts at times interfere, these letters are suffused with a shared faith; its teachings and its idioms often provide a language in which Helmuth and Freya offer comfort to each other.
For the rest of her long life, Freya never lost this faith that came to her so naturally. It kept her connected to Helmuth and formed one of the foundations of her bond with her later life partner, the Christian philosopher and former friend of Helmuth, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. Her encounter with Rosenstock-Huessy taught her to see Christianity and Judaism in a broad historical, social, and philosophical context. She devoted a great deal of time to considering questions of faith in the history of mankind. Christian ideas remained a source of important insights for her although she did not employ religious language to express them. Her connection to the church was loose, and it remained so.
In addition to the religious dimension and the language of the farewell letters, and despite the fact that they reflect the expectations of both Helmuth and Freya that the most likely outcome would be his violent death, the elegant prose of the correspondence often also reflects the authors’ serenity and wit. Even as the war nears its end, a sense of peace radiates from Freya’s descriptions of life continuing in the Kreisau Helmuth loved and of the beauty of autumnal Silesia, as well as from her depictions of birthday parties and Christmas festivities full of joyful children despite the shortage of gifts. Helmuth in turn describes his excursions to the prison’s medical clinic, where he was able to enjoy some rare morsels of food and a sunlamp on his damaged sciatic nerve. Despite the doctor being a committed Nazi, the orderlies were all against the regime and took satisfaction from subverting the doctor’s orders and helping the political prisoners.
Since Freya and Helmuth continued to expect that the trial would take place shortly, they were exposed to constant swings between hopes for Helmuth’s life, realization of the hopelessness of their situation, and acceptance of God’s will, whatever their fate might be. The tension between the struggle to survive and the readiness to die would at times become almost unbearable. “But if I think about your life and nurture my hopes,” Freya wrote, “I can’t help to prepare our hearts for death.”12 For Helmuth, the waves of his roiling inner sea rose higher and higher. Repeated deferral of his trial put him under immense stress, as it forced him to undertake intensive preparations time and time again—preparations not only for his confrontation with Roland Freisler, the capricious judge presiding over the People’s Court, but also and above all for his own death. Every delay forced him to come back to terms with life. In his lonely cell, he had no choice but to withstand moments of terrible anguish and internal struggles, fighting to keep his faith until the moment he could once more stand on solid ground, until he could say of his own soul that it was “where I prefer to have it: way down deep, but on bedrock.”13
These are love letters in extremis. They testify to the profound openness with which Helmuth and Freya confront their fears, declare their love, articulate their hopes, and find faith. Their import, however, far exceeds the singular couple who exchanges them. Written as bombs were falling on the German capital and the eastern front was nearing Kreisau during the final months of the war, these are farsighted historical documents of courage and resistance.
II.
At the beginning of this correspondence on September 29, 1944, the war had just entered its sixth year. Any sense that the Third Reich was nearing its end appeared only to reinforce the Nazis’ iron grip on power. By the summer of that year, the Red Army had already advanced deep into Poland, handing the Germans their largest losses in military history. On the western front, the Allies had consolidated their gains in France and were advancing toward the Rhine, while the U.S. troops were pushing northward in Italy, having taken Rome in July. With an intensifying air war, many Allied military planners were convinced that the war would be over by Christmas. However, they did not reckon with the manic ideological rigidity of the Nazi terror, which kept soldiers fighting against all odds and ordinary citizens denouncing each other for the mere failure to believe in victory, which was labeled “defeatism” and could be punishable by death. “Anyone who speaks to me of peace without victory,” Hitler proclaimed in these final months of the war, “will lose his head, no matter who he is or what his position.”14
The brutal repression and surveillance by the Gestapo as well as the perversion of truth by blanket propaganda distortions confined any form of overt opposition within Germany to small
groups of plotters, who were quickly eliminated once they appeared in public. Early left-wing dissenters had been interned in concentration camps, but occasional public opposition continued. The Rote Kapelle (Red Orchestra) was perhaps the best-known oppositional group: comprised largely of young men and women, the group posted calls for opposition in public spaces around Berlin. Other forms of resistance brought together students, such as Hans and Sophie Scholl of the Weisse Rose (White Rose). During the war, the group printed leaflets opposing the Nazis and distributed them both by mail and by scattering them at Munich University, where they were eventually caught. The Munich students were brought before Freisler at the People’s Court in early 1943 to be tried and executed; Helmuth was able to ensure that some of the leaflets reached the Allies, who would later drop them over Germany from the air. But the Nazis’ message was clear: Oppose us and you will forfeit your life. The same fate awaited anyone in the Nazis’ camps and ghettos who attempted an insurrection. The brave attempts at Jewish resistance, most notably among these the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, were all met with brutal repressive force and murder.
Some members of the elites from the pre-Hitler days were galvanized into action as the deaths and atrocities of the war mounted. One group coalesced around the deposed mayor of Leipzig, Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, and the deposed general Ludwig Beck. However, they could not find influential serving generals to join them in an attempt on Hitler’s life. Helmuth, some twenty years younger, believed that the generals had compromised themselves and that after the brutalities of the Nazis, any return to past structures was a betrayal of the victims. He and Peter Yorck decided that despite their youth and lack of positions of real power it was incumbent on them to bring elements of a functioning civil society together to discuss the structure of a forward-looking Germany after the Nazis had been eliminated, whether from within or without. To do this they recruited reliable participants from the civil service, theologians of the Catholic and the Protestant churches, and representatives of labor and the business world as well as academia and the legal profession, all united in the goal of devising common positions for a more peaceful and democratic future Germany. Members of the Kreisau Circle generally met in Berlin or Munich in small groups arranged as subcommittees dealing with defined topics. They formed working committees to look at questions of a constitution, economic policy and labor representation, education and religious freedom, and European integration. Helmuth reported about the work almost daily in his letters to Freya. When these were published in English and German in the 1980s, historians gained invaluable insight into the thinking within the resistance groups.15 To achieve consensus and prepare a final draft, the group scheduled three plenary meetings, which for purposes of confidentiality were held in Helmuth’s rural home in Kreisau, thus lending the group the later appellation Kreisau Circle. The work spanned from 1941 to 1943 and was completed in August 1943.16
In this work, which remarkably remained hidden from the Gestapo, Helmuth and his friends viewed with skepticism the efforts spear-headed by Beck and by Goerdeler, who had been designated as the future chancellor in the event that Stauffenberg’s coup attempt succeeded. Both Beck and Goerdeler had been early sympathizers of the Nazis, but they had become disillusioned and turned to resistance when they realized the totalitarian threat to the state, the nation, and the law. While they consequently shared some of the Kreisauers’ concerns, the group remained suspicious of Beck and Goerdeler’s generally more conservative outlook. Even before the Nazis came to power, Helmuth frequently had to fight against German nationalist tendencies, sometimes within his own family; he assigned much of the blame for Hitler’s seizure of power to the reactionary attitude of the traditional elite. He was unwilling to stand by and look on as these same groups returned to power following the catastrophe of the Hitler years. Guided by Helmuth and Peter Yorck, the Kreisau Circle, by contrast, wanted to see a Germany that would break radically with its top-heavy, authoritarian political tradition and work to overcome both political and economic inequalities.
Though the suspicion with which Helmuth and his friends regarded Beck and Goerdeler was evident at a January 1943 meeting between the two groups and in Helmuth’s letters immediately afterward, in his correspondence with Freya from Tegel prison he exaggerates the differences. In retrospect his reference to the much older men as “excellencies” and his attempts to extricate himself from any association with what he now called the “Goerdeler mess” must also be seen in the context of his evolving defense strategy. It was an attempt to distance himself from the failed assassination attempt in whose wake the Kreisau Circle’s activities had first come to light.
More complicated than the question of political differences, however, is the issue of Helmuth’s opposition to the attempt on Hitler’s life. In the short time he spent in the company of Stauffenberg in Berlin in late 1943, Helmuth came to respect the man greatly, even if the two did argue over major issues of substance. He continued for a long time to wrestle with the moral and political implications of an assassination attempt for a number of different reasons. First, he did not wish to see a future Germany born of an act of murder. The head of the Bavarian Jesuits, Father Augustin Rösch, who made the rejection of tyrannicide a precondition of his collaboration with Helmuth and his colleagues, would later report that Helmuth, in a face-to-face meeting dating all the way back to 1941, had spoken to him of the necessity of “taking the leadership out of Hitler’s hands,” but he also stressed the need to find “other means than murder.”17 Second, Helmuth thought that the use of violent means to stage a coup would lead to a repetition of the stab-in-the-back myth exploited endlessly by the Nazis during their rise to power in the 1920s—the legend that the German armies in World War I would have been victorious but for the so-called traitorous politicians who agreed to an armistice. Third, Helmuth held that no attempt at eliminating Hitler could have any prospect of success without the cooperation of the Wehrmacht—but he saw no grounds for trusting the army. Even Stauffenberg conceded that the generals had failed, drawing the conclusion for himself that it was now the colonels’ turn.
In the winter of 1943–44, the assumptions of those involved in the resistance had undergone a shift. The Kreisau work on plans for a post-Hitler government had already been concluded, all the important documents written and hidden away. Stauffenberg had returned to Berlin following a war injury and subsequent convalescence, and Helmuth had been arrested. A number of the men who had been gathered around him and Peter Yorck welcomed Stauffenberg’s desire to act and joined in planning the attempt on Hitler’s life. Eight former participants in the Kreisau Circle’s discussions were arrested in July and August after the plot’s failure, and the Gestapo found ample clues leading back to Helmuth.
We will never know how Helmuth would have chosen to act had he not been taken into custody six months prior to the bomb plot. By the time he came to prepare his defense, the assassination attempt had already failed and all those directly involved had been executed. It is only natural that in building his defense he put as much distance as possible between himself and the failed assassination attempt of July 20th. Eugen Gerstenmaier, who had been actively involved in the bomb plot and who stood with Helmuth before Freisler’s court in January 1945, would later say that, in view of the untold millions of dead still being claimed by the war, Helmuth likely would have stood by his friends and supported their attempt to remove the regime by force, had he not already been in custody. Similarly, the historian Peter Hoffmann considers the notion that Helmuth would not countenance any violent solution at any point a “legend,” which becomes reinforced here by the tactical considerations prevailing in the letters from Tegel.18
Throughout their work, members of the Kreisau Circle tried to make contact with Allied governments via their friends whenever they were able to do so undetected on trips to neutral countries. However the Allied insistence on Germany’s unconditional surrender imposed almost insurmountable obstacles on the conspira
tors’ attempts to reach out across the borders of the Third Reich. And yet, some contacts did exist. Helmuth had studied for the bar in Britain where he had made many friends through the extensive network of his grandfather, a former chief justice of South Africa. Even before the onset of war, Helmuth had befriended the American journalist Dorothy Thompson, who would subsequently introduce him to an American mass audience as the pseudonymous addressee of her radio broadcasts entitled Listen, Hans. In fact, key individuals in the American government also knew of Helmuth and his work. Looking back, George F. Kennan, an American diplomat, ambassador, and strategic thinker of the Cold War period, considered him “to have been the greatest person, morally, and the largest and most enlightened in his concepts, that I met on either side of the battle lines in the Second World War.” When Kennan first encountered him in 1940 while stationed in Berlin, with the United States still clinging to neutrality, Helmuth was a young international lawyer with legal qualifications in both Germany and England. In his recollection of the years immediately preceding the American entry into that war, Kennan noted that even then Helmuth had seen through the Hitler regime and anticipated the catastrophe that was bound to ensue. He had prepared himself and strove to prepare his people, Kennan wrote, “for the necessity of starting all over again, albeit in defeat and humiliation, to erect a new national edifice on a new and better moral foundation.”19 This work required bringing together trustworthy, representative figures of different political persuasions from various sectors of civil society. It was a hallmark of the Kreisau Circle that its members managed to think across the differences that separated various political groups, and thereby to project a just and democratic future for Germany and Europe. The surviving documents emphasize principles of subsidiarity, seeking to ground political decisions in local processes where possible and ensuring the representative and democratic nature of decision-making at all levels of government. In other words, at the height of the Nazis’ totalitarian reign, the members of the Kreisau Circle jointly imagined and debated the principles of democratic government. This alone constituted a treasonous act in the eyes of the Nazis, who considered such projections seditious and defeatist. Helmuth consequently notes with some justification after the trial that “we’re being hanged for having thought together.”20
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