f. Two months ago, the facts of this case would have inevitably resulted in a death sentence; the indictment was drawn up to make it look as though I am one of the great sinners, but now they’re just looking to clear the decks of the old cases, so a case involving the July 20th plot might be judged more leniently today than the same case would be judged if it were just now emerging.
g. Freisler would definitely hear me out, if for no other reason than my name. I was very pleased with Hercher once again. He knows Freisler; he knows the ploys; he may not be clever, but he’s quite experienced in these trials. He also said: No dwelling on jurisprudence, which is of absolutely no importance here; no expressing viewpoints; stick to reporting the facts, but they can be spelled out down to the tiniest details. Just take whatever comes, don’t shout back, don’t defend yourself against insults; instead, in spite of any hollering and insults that may come your way, keep to your own presentation very calmly; even when stating opinions, couch them as facts. “Freisler is talented, ingenious, very sensitive, but not clever,” was Hercher’s summary assessment. In short, he said: We’ll see what we can do.
You see that here, too, a gradual pivoting has occurred, and that Hercher no longer sees the inevitability of a death sentence. The declaration of guilt, he said, is not a deciding factor at all. If he’s aiming for a death sentence, he has enough material; if not, he’ll get around the declaration of guilt. Besides, we’ll have plenty of time: he’ll add on a third or fourth day; that doesn’t matter.
All these flights of fancy invite the danger of diverting our attention from the goal at hand if we focus on them too much. Even so, I’m writing you so many details because the very same transformation has taken place here that we ourselves have undergone, namely that the death sentence is no longer being predicted with such an absolute appearance of certainty.
Here’s something interesting, by the way: Freisler sticks closely to the indictment; he could conceivably introduce new material as well, but it’s not very likely and he passes sentences only on the basis of the things that are argued in the oral trial and never on the basis of any other information.2 All this is quite interesting, and it rounds out the picture to show that although Freisler is a fanatical and fierce political judge, he’s also an eminent one.
My love, I’m happy that you felt I was standing straight. I don’t notice the differences myself. Hercher has the doctor’s certificate with him and would like to see Freisler grant permission for me to sit before the trial.
7 Jan 45
My dear love, our thoughts have already meshed in such a lovely way. Good morning. Of course there is absolutely nothing new. But I can go back to the very beginning again and tell you that I love you very much, that the two of us are a single idea of creation, and, when the Lord calls me to Him, you will be traveling along within me, and I remain here within you.
So off I go, well equipped, and what more could I ask for? Farewell, my very dear love, may the Lord watch over you and us. J.
1. Freya was not physically in Kreisau, and the house was owned by Helmuth and his siblings.
2. See Helmuth’s letter of October 12, 1944 [Addendum to Freya’s letter of October 11, 1944].
FREYA TO HELMUTH JAMES, JANUARY 6–7, 1945
Evening
My dear love, how beautiful it was today with you, and how well we parted. I hope, my beloved Jäm, you went back into your cell as happy and unsad as I went back into the world. During the time we sat there together, I felt only how steadfastly we belong together, how certain I am that it will always stay this way, and I didn’t need to feel any pain in parting, even though my eyes kept skimming over you, over the most beloved thing there is for me, and I knew that I may not see all this again in this world. I knew it, yet I didn’t believe it. No, let me put it another way, I thought I had to coax myself into believing it, but it didn’t work. I was quite honest and didn’t delude myself in the slightest, yet I could only be happy about your closeness, which is so familiar to me, so intimate, and so beloved. Once again, it seemed quite natural, but I felt that it was something tremendously precious to be able to sit so close to you. That is how it was for me! So beautiful, such an addition to our treasure. May God grant that it was not too difficult for you either, that you weren’t tormented in your cell, that it wasn’t too exhausting for you, that I did not once again pull you back into this splendid life we share. I hope Hercher helped you and turned your mind to your defense, your work, and your reflections, and pulled you away from sad thoughts about us. My dear love, how I love you and how glad I am to be able to love you so; what I wouldn’t do to be able to preserve your life, for you and for me, yet I’m so keenly aware that we have, after all, experienced and understood so profoundly: “Thy will be done.” My Jäm, my dearest, maybe this letter is the last one I’ll ever write you, maybe, but what matters most is not letter writing, or even living together; what matters is love. Since I’m still able to write, I’m once again writing you today about my love. Whatever happens, you are the happiness of my life, you are my riches, you are my life. What would I be without you! I’ve grown toward you. No sooner was I grown up than you were there, and I knew I was yours. I know it now more than ever; you know it too. My love, you now have to focus everything on the path ahead of you, on the trial and on death. You mustn’t think about me anymore, and you don’t need to either, because my love will surround you tirelessly and irrepressibly. It will envelop and warm you when your enemies encircle you, it will go with you wherever you have to go. Never, never, never will it have an end. It has made my life rich and will keep my life rich. We will always find each other in our love, here or there. We were happy, we are happy, and we will stay happy. Together we are grateful, and together we are in good hands; we will stay together, and death cannot part us. I’m not complaining, because we have to be willing to lay our lives on the line. I approve of everything you did, from the bottom of my heart. I don’t want to start making grand statements that would make it seem as though we’re not as one, but since we are, this is also a part of it and it gives me courage and composure and pride. But this goes too far in pointing to your death: we ought to consider that outcome possible, but we don’t have to believe in it firmly. First we need to fight, and for this fight you need my love. You have it, you have me. I will beat as your heart, and warm you and pray and hold you in my thoughts without fear, without anxiety, utterly prepared and determined to fight for us. You, too, need to stay calm and firmly anchored, safe and secure in God and united with your Pim. Then the gifts of your spirit and head and heart will come to our aid—because you are not fighting just for yourself! I could go on writing for a long, long time, but nothing else is new and all has been said between us.
—Sunday morning. Good morning, my dear love, I’m sure you wrote that to me this morning as well. I’m staying with my plan of going to Hercher early on both days and then spending the day in Lichterfelde, and will go to the friends’ home in the evening after Hercher’s call. That will be my schedule. My thoughts will be with you and with the good Lord, and I’ll darn or sew or do anything to keep my hands busy. I won’t pressure you with thoughts and wishes, I will just be there and be led by God. He will help me stay calm and the way you need me to be. If the death sentence should come out on the second day, or whenever it comes out, I will spring into action. I will certainly not despair, I don’t need to tell you that, since you know my inner workings so well—and I know yours. My beloved heart, my Jäm, my dearest.—After the face-to-face meeting, I spent a little more time with Dorothee [Poelchau], wrote to Freisler, and came to the People’s Court at 1 o’clock, but no one was doing anything there by then.—I then realized, with Haus and Oxé, that the information according to which the petition for clemency was submitted to the Wehrmacht legal division was wrong. They’re still sitting on it! Or it’s in the wastebasket. Haus then wrote the enclosed letter right away. I wanted to have Uncle Wilhelm [von Moltke] sign. But when no one was there, I quickly
signed it myself, writing “von Moltke” under his name, and the letter already left Tirpitzufer yesterday at 4:15 and today arrived on the desk of Keitel, that repulsive wimp, or his adjutant. Hewel’s is with Steengracht again. The only one still en route is the one to Himmler. Haus was very nice again. “Now we have to do something for our count,” he said to Frau Tharant, and then he dictated, conferring with me. What good is any sort of intelligence, if one’s character isn’t worth anything. Rarely do both combine in one individual. Haus is an agreeable example of that.—Blü-Blü1 came the day before yesterday, in the evening. Might you have noticed that about me yesterday? At any rate, I’ll be over it by the time of the trial, and now I’m not doing badly at all. I’m not misleading you, and you needn’t worry about me. I would be incapable of misleading you now in even the tiniest of matters, not even to be considerate, because we are too in unison and you would somehow manage to realize it anyhow. No, the fortress is holding up quite well, but that is surely because of the bedrock it’s standing on, and because it has such an exemplary owner! But it has always been a faithful companion, this fortress, and I know how grateful I can be for it. Few of us have one that is so secure and solid, and at times now, I have a truly detached feeling of gratitude for its constancy.—It seems to me, my love, that I’ve now told you everything; we’re about to have breakfast here, and the peace and quiet is over for now.—Our gratitude to our friends cannot be overstated (but that’s another story), and that is also a subject that requires an explicit exchange of ideas between us, but if this should be the last letter from me that ever reaches you, a word about their love and friendship is certainly in order. What would have become of us without them, inside and out! May the good Lord protect them. She is not one bit behind him in stature, and they complement each other in exactly the same natural way that we do. They, too, belong together. I wrote our verses on a slip of paper for you. Take them along or leave them there, just as you please. You don’t need to take along any material things from me, for you carry me firmly within you, just as I carry you. So this letter is neither an end nor a beginning, but merely one of the many seals on something far more beautiful and enduring, for which there are no proper words, something we possess as a precious treasure, and will never have to lose, and never will lose. That is why no more tears should fall onto these words, as we have reason only to be confident and joyous, grateful and happy, and to take up our human destiny as God’s children together, together—that is how it will remain, both here and there. And so I say, may God watch over you, us! I am and will forever remain your P.
1. Menstruation.
HELMUTH JAMES TO FREYA, JANUARY 7, 1945
Tegel, 7 Jan 45
My dear love, how wonderful that I’m able to write to you again even though I don’t know of anything left for me to write, since we’ve already said everything quite clearly in detail. I don’t want to repeat it either, lest the repetition weaken and diminish it, like waving goodbye when a train just won’t depart. So I’ll simply say that it makes me happy to be able to send you another little night-and-morning greeting.
Yes, my dear, on the days of the trial, I’ll look for you in Carl Dietrich [von Trotha]’s apartment and at the friends’ in the evenings. Don’t do anything, not even regarding my things, because it’s either too late or too early for all that; besides, you’d always run the risk of getting upset. I would arrange to have Carl Viggo [von Moltke] and/ or Jowo [von Moltke] come to make sure that one of them is here the morning after the verdict; if there is no death sentence, he simply goes home again; if there is a death sentence, however, something needs to happen right away, above all to get Hercher to tell us what sorts of prospects for clemency the trial may have offered; or shall we say, how great the degree of guilt is. The target of all such efforts needs to be Himmler.
Poelchau has surely told you that I’m doing well. I pray that this remains so whatever may happen. If the Lord keeps me as I now am, nothing at all can happen to me.
Farewell, my love, good night for today. J.
HELMUTH JAMES TO FREYA, JANUARY 10, 1945
Berlin, 10 Jan 45
My dear, just think how nice it is that I have been brought back here to Tegel, that the dice, which will land in a manner that is already clearly determined, are arrested one more time in their fall, you might say, so I’m still able to write a report in peace.
Let me first jump right to the end: At about three o’clock, Schulze, who didn’t make a bad impression, read out the prosecution’s motions: Moltke: death and seizure of assets; Delp: ditto; Gerstenmaier: death; Reisert and Sperr: ditto; Fugger: 3 years in prison; Steltzer and Haubach: dealt with separately. Then came the defense counsel, all actually quite nice, none vicious. Then the closing statements of the accused; your husband was the only one not to participate. Eugen [Gerstenmaier] was somewhat uneasy, as I noticed in his closing statement.
Now for the course of the trial. It is, of course, forbidden to report any of this.
The trial took place in a small room that was full to bursting. Apparently a former schoolroom. After a long introduction by Freisler about the formalities—all parties bound to secrecy, ban on taking notes, etc.—Schulze read out the charges, but only the short text, which was also in the arrest warrant.1 Then it was Delp’s turn, and his two policemen stepped forward with him. The proceedings were as follows: Freisler, whom Hercher had described quite accurately: gifted, ingenious, and not clever—all three of these in the highest degree—gives an outline of the defendant’s life, which is affirmed or supplemented, then come the issues of fact that interest him. He selects the details of the case that suit him, and leaves out entire sections. With Delp he started by asking how he got to know Peter [Yorck] and me, and what was discussed the first time in Berlin; then the topic of Kreisau2 in the fall of ’42 came up. Here, too, it takes this form: presentation by Freisler, into which responses, objections, perhaps new facts can be interjected; but if there’s a chance that this could interrupt the flow of his argument, he grows impatient, indicates that he doesn’t believe it anyway, or shouts at the person who spoke. The buildup for Kreisau was like this: First there were general discussions to lay the groundwork, then the practical case of a defeat was discussed, and finally there was a search for state administrators. The first phase might still be tolerable, although it was surprising, he argued, that all these discussions took place without a single National Socialist present but did include clergymen and all kinds of people who later participated in the July 20th plot.—The second phase, however, already constituted the blackest defeatism of the darkest kind. And the third, open preparation for high treason.—Then came the discussions in Munich. That turned out to be much more innocuous than in the indictment, but the Catholic clergy and the Jesuits got pelted with abuse: support for tyrannicide—Mariana;3 illegitimate children; hostility to Germany, etc., etc. All this is delivered with a middling degree and level of shouting. The fact that Delp had left during the discussions that took place in his apartment was also held against him as being “typical Jesuit behavior”: “Your very absence serves as your own documentation that you knew for certain that high treason was up for discussion, that you wanted to keep the tonsured little head, the sanctified holy man, out of it. He may well have gone to church during that time to pray for the plot to succeed in a way pleasing to God.”—Then came Delp’s visit to Stauffenberg. And finally Sperr’s statement on July 21st that Stauffenberg had dropped hints about a coup. These last two points were largely glossed over. The remarkable part was that throughout the hearing, in one way or another, Freisler mentioned me in every other statement: “the Moltke Circle,” “Moltke’s plans,” “also belongs to Moltke,” etc.
The following legal principles were decreed: “The People’s Court holds the view that the failure to report defeatist statements like Moltke’s, statements of this kind from a man of his reputation and position, is itself an act of treason.”—“Anyone who discusses highly political questions wit
h people who are in no way competent to engage in such discussions, especially those who do not at least actively belong to the party, is already on the path to committing high treason.”—“Anyone who presumes to pass any sort of judgment about a matter that is for the Führer to decide is on the path to committing high treason.”—“Anyone who himself objects to acts of violence but prepares for the case that another, that is, the enemy, removes the government by force, is on the path to committing high treason, because he is then counting on the force of the enemy.” And it went on and on in that vein. This allows for only one conclusion: Anyone not to Herr Freisler’s liking is guilty of high treason.
Then came Sperr. He extricated himself from the Kreisau affair to an extent—somewhat at my expense. But he was reprimanded as follows: “Why didn’t you report it? Don’t you see how important that would have been: the Moltke circle was to some degree the inspiration for the ‘Counts’ circle,’4 which, in turn, made the political preparations for July 20th; since the driving force behind the July 20th plot wasn’t Herr Goerdeler at all; the true motor was within these young men.” All in all, Sperr was treated in a friendly manner.
Now Reisert. He was treated in a very friendly manner. He had had three meetings with me, and he was accused primarily of not having noticed by the end of the first one that I was a traitor and an arch-defeatist, and went on to have two more meetings with me. He was mainly accused of failing to notify the authorities.
Lastly, Fugger. He made a very good impression. He had been ill for some time and had now recovered, was modest, assured, didn’t incriminate any of us, and spoke nice Bavarian, and I liked him more yesterday than I ever had before; not the slightest bit nervous, even though he had always been terrified here. He immediately admitted that after everything that was said to him today he saw clearly that he ought to have notified the authorities, and he was dismissed so graciously that I thought last night he would be acquitted.
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