Freya von Moltke, née Deichmann, was born March 29, 1911, in Cologne as the third child of Carl Theodor and Ada Deichmann. Hers was a privileged childhood in a wealthy patrician household. Her father was senior partner of Deichmann & Company, a private bank in Cologne that had prospered in the fifty years before her birth by financing the expansion of the mighty industries of the Ruhr, which had become the backbone of the German economy. Her mother, also a native of Cologne and considerably younger than her husband, had liberal leanings similar to those of Dorothy von Moltke and ensured that her children too were brought up with an openness toward Germany’s western neighbors, their cultures and languages.
The deepening depression after the stock market crash of 1929 presented substantial difficulties for both families. Kreisau, the Moltke estate, had become heavily indebted and in 1929 Helmuth—only twenty-two years old at the time—was given the difficult task of running the estate and persuading the creditors not to foreclose but to give him a chance to repay the debts. He was able to rise to this considerable challenge. He had just completed his first law degree and from this point on also oversaw the property with the help of a manager installed by the creditors. He now lived with his mother and two youngest siblings, who were still in school, in the Berghaus, into which the Moltkes had moved in 1928 from the Schloss, the manor house, which was spacious but difficult to heat.
During these years, the Deichmann family—like the Moltkes—suffered a financial crisis. The global economic crisis caused the Deichmann & Company bank to become insolvent in 1931. Freya’s father was the personally liable partner and his assets were therefore seized in the insolvency. The period of prosperity came to an end for the Deichmanns as well. Their difficult straits had little discernible effect on the mothers and their children, however. Thanks to a large network of family and friends, no one suffered privation. The children all became independent in the 1930s, but the fathers did not benefit from the economic recovery. Freya’s father died at the age of sixty-five, just a few days after the wedding of Helmuth und Freya. Helmuth’s father had accepted a position as the German Christian Science representative and had to be in Berlin almost all the time, so his role in Kreisau was much reduced after 1929.
That summer, Helmuth and Freya met in Grundlsee, Austria. She was eighteen; he was twenty-two. As a student in Vienna, Helmuth had entered a circle of young people around the educator and social reformer Eugenie Schwarzwald. The group included artists, musicians, writers, and international journalists, among them the Austrian pianist Rudolf Serkin, the German writer Bertolt Brecht, the American journalists Dorothy Thompson and Edgar Mowrer, and the Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka. Helmuth was invited to the Schwarzwalds’ summer retreat on the Grundlsee where Freya had also come, along with her two older brothers. It was a magical summer for Freya and Helmuth. Even though it only contains Helmuth’s letters without Freya’s responses, Letters to Freya1 conveys the emotional upheaval of this encounter, which Freya would always remember as love at first sight: “I saw him and I knew, he is the one!” In October 1931, Helmuth and Freya had a small religious wedding ceremony in the home of Freya’s parents in Cologne. When Dorothy von Moltke traveled to South Africa in the winter of 1931–1932 to visit her parents, she asked her young daughter-in-law to take charge of the Kreisau household. The Kreisau estate played a central role for the extended Moltke family, and Freya took to her new tasks well. Within the family, however, there were political tensions with its more conservative members, who were critical of the liberal views of Helmuth and his young wife.
The National Socialist seizure of power spelled the end of Helmuth’s plans for a career as a judge. From the outset, Helmuth and Freya rejected any notion of cooperating with the Third Reich. Until 1939 they gave no outward signs of their oppositional stance, opting instead to limit their activities to the personal sphere by warning individuals in danger—mostly Jews—about their persecutors. Even though Helmuth did not want to work under the new rulers, he did have to earn a living; Kreisau did not bring in any money. In 1932, he and Freya relocated to Berlin, which would now become the center of his professional life. Freya was studying law, while he completed his legal traineeship and passed his assessor examination in 1934.
In that same year, Helmuth and Freya began a series of visits abroad. Twice—in 1934 and 1937—they spent extended periods with his grandparents in South Africa. Helmuth realized that by specializing in private international law, he had a way of justifying frequent trips abroad and contacts with people outside the Nazi sphere of influence. He therefore opted to gain accreditation as a lawyer in England. He began studying at one of the four British Inns of Court, the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple in London, and met the qualifications to become a barrister in 1938. He joined a law firm in Berlin and built a list of clients—many of them Jewish—who sought to save themselves and their assets as they left Germany. During this time, Freya was able to complete her doctorate in law without receiving any other legal degree.
In 1935, Dorothy von Moltke died suddenly at the age of fifty-one. She had been the focal point of the family in the Berghaus. Freya stepped in to fill the big gap left by Dorothy’s death. She now essentially relocated to Kreisau, which meant that she and Helmuth were often separated. A lively correspondence ensued. Helmuth’s letters to Freya have been housed at the German Literature Archive in Marbach since 2009. They constitute a valuable personal and historical archive. In addition to those in the present collection, many of the letters Helmuth wrote in 1939 and the following years were published in Briefe an Freya2 (Letters to Freya) and Im Land der Gottlosen.3 In spite of Helmuth’s misgivings about bringing children into the world in such trying political times, their first son, Helmuth Caspar, was born in November 1937, and they had a second son, Konrad, in 1941.
When World War II began in September 1939, Helmuth was conscripted as a war administration councillor and, as an expert in international law, entered the foreign division of the Armed Forces High Command. In this position he could attempt to mitigate some of the excesses of the regime. Particularly in issues pertaining to the treatment of prisoners of war and hostage-taking, he constantly endeavored to hold National Socialist legal interpretations to the standards of international law. He used his official trips abroad to contact opponents of the Nazis.
In his private life, Helmuth, along with Freya, moved from a general opposition to the regime to active resistance when the war began. Early on, he had learned the value of rigorous, focused work. Four years of strenuous efforts ensued, aimed at drawing up the outlines of plans for a new Germany after what Helmuth regarded as the inevitable loss of the war. Working with Peter Graf Yorck von Wartenburg, who shared his vision, Helmuth developed a common basis for a broader discussion. At the same time he called on the friends he knew from the Löwenberger Arbeitslager, and little by little they expanded the circle with trustworthy people of highly diverse backgrounds and points of view: socialists, large landowners, unionists, capitalists, and Social Democrats, as well as Catholic and Protestant Christians and church representatives. In numerous small groups, most of them in Berlin, and at three large gatherings at the Kreisau estate, they discussed a fundamental restructuring of Germany after the end of National Socialism. They focused on the future democratic organization of government and society; issues of law, the economy, and education; and the integration of Germany into the community of European states. The approaches and transcripts that emerged from these meetings, the “Kreisau plans,” were not discovered by the National Socialists in their written form even after the assassination attempt on Hitler on July 20, 1944, although these meetings, even without documentation, provided enough facts for the prosecution of the participants.
But they were not just making plans. Helmuth and some of his friends were also determined to inform the Allies about the existence of the various resistance groups so that they would abandon demands for unconditional capitulation and work together with the resistance in German
y. However, their calls went unheeded.
In January 1944, Helmuth was arrested because he had warned an acquaintance, Otto Carl Kiep, about a Gestapo informer. After a brief incarceration at the Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse Gestapo prison in Berlin, Helmuth was transferred, as a prisoner in protective custody, to the prison building adjacent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Following the discovery by the Gestapo of his connection to the men involved in the July 20, 1944 assassination plot, his prison conditions became harsher. On September 28, he was brought to Berlin for incarceration in the Tegel prison. Thanks to the help of the prison chaplain, Harald Poelchau, he was able to carry on a secret correspondence with Freya over the course of almost four months. On January 11, 1945, he was sentenced and was executed on January 23.
At first Freya and her sons stayed in Kreisau, along with Rosemarie Reichwein (also a widow) and her four children. When the Soviet troops approached, they temporarily fled to the Riesengebirge, but soon came back and lived at the estate, which was under Polish-Russian occupation until the fall of 1945. Lionel Curtis, a British friend, was able to arrange for emissaries of the British embassy to evacuate Freya and her sons from Silesia in October 1945 and bring them to Berlin.
After spending time in Switzerland, Freya and her children moved to Cape Town, South Africa, in 1947. Helmuth’s grandparents had died, but earlier friendships were still intact, so Caspar and Konrad could grow up in peace there. Freya found a job as a social worker at an organization for disabled children. By 1956, however, she’d had enough of the injustice of the apartheid laws in South Africa and returned to Germany. She and Annedore Leber co-authored a history book about the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich for secondary schools, and began transcribing Helmuth’s letters, which were later edited by Beate Ruhm von Oppen for an edition that spanned August 22, 1939, to January 18, 1944.
In 1956, Freya crossed paths with Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, whom she had met briefly in Berlin before he emigrated to America in 1933. The two fell in love and after the death of Rosenstock-Huessy’s wife in 1960, Freya moved to Vermont, where they spent the remaining thirteen years of his life together, and where Freya would continue to live until her death in 2010. Rosenstock-Huessy had been a legal historian, sociologist, and philosopher who had taught at several universities and written many books. There were visitors of all kinds at his home, and they were now joined by Freya’s friends and family. As she had in Kreisau, Freya ran a large convivial household. After Rosenstock-Huessy’s death, she was kept busy into her old age disseminating his work and keeping Helmuth’s legacy alive.
As of 1945, Kreisau was behind the Iron Curtain. From early on, Freya had considered a return of the Moltkes as owners both impossible and undesirable. She and Helmuth had always assumed that ceding the estate to Poland was part of the price that had to be paid for the crimes of the National Socialists. But in the 1960s, Freya began to entertain the idea that Kreisau could once again play a role in fostering the relationship between Poland and Germany, and in 1989, with the help of Polish and East German citizens’ initiatives, a “New Kreisau” to promote German–Polish and European understanding began to take shape. On November 12, 1989, three days after the Berlin Wall fell, a reconciliation mass, initiated by the heads of both governments, was held in Kreisau. Freya vigorously supported transforming Kreisau (now called Krzyżowa) into the Foundation for Mutual Understanding in Europe.
Freya faced the unexpected death of her son Konrad on May 19, 2005, in Vermont; she herself died at the age of ninety-eight on January 1, 2010. Memorial stones in Kreisau and at the cemetery in Norwich, Vermont, bear the names of Freya and Helmuth.
1. Helmuth James von Moltke, Letters to Freya, 1939–1945, edited and translated by Beate Ruhm von Oppen (New York: Knopf, 1990).
2. Helmuth James von Moltke, Briefe an Freya, 1939–1945, edited by Beate Ruhm von Oppen (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1988).
3. Helmuth James von Moltke, Im Land der Gottlosen: Tagebuch und Briefe aus der Haft 1944/45, edited by Günter Brakelmann (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2009).
FURTHER READING
Michael Balfour and Julian Frisby. Helmuth James von Moltke: A Leader Against Hitler. London: Macmillan, 1972.
Ian Kershaw. The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1944–45. London: Penguin, 2012.
Klemens von Klemperer. German Resistance Against Hitler: The Search for Allies Abroad, 1938–1945. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.
Annedore Leber. Conscience in Revolt: Sixty-Four Stories of Resistance in Germany, 1933–1945. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994.
Dorothee von Meding. Courageous Hearts: Women and the Anti-Hitler Plot of 1944. Providence, RI: Berghahn, 1997.
Freya von Moltke. Memories of Kreisau and the German Resistance. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2003.
Helmuth James von Moltke. Letters to Freya: 1939–1945. Edited by Beate Ruhm von Oppen. New York: Knopf, 1990.
Ger van Roon. German Resistance to Hitler: Count von Moltke and the Kreisau Circle. London: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1971.
Antje Starost and Hans Helmut Grotjahn. Love in the Time of Resistance: Freya. 87 mins. Antje Starost Filmproduktion, www.starostfilm.de
Dorothy Thompson. Listen, Hans. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1942.
Krystyna Węgrzyńska-Kimbley and Anna Cichón. Towards a New Europe: How the “Krzyzowa” Foundation for European Understanding Originated. Wroclav: The Society of Krzyzowa’s Friends, 2002.
ANNOTATED INDEX OF NAMES
The annotated index does not include the names of children (other than Helmuth James and Freya’s), estate employees, and persons appearing solely in the footnotes. Following German style the “von” is ignored, so the von Moltkes are listed under “Moltke, von” etc.
THE KREISAU CIRCLE
Persons involved in the detailed discussions were organized in concentric circles on a need-to-know basis. Besides Helmuth James and Freya von Moltke, the following individuals mentioned in these letters were members:
Ernst von Brosig
Alfred Delp, S.J.
Horst von Einsiedel
Eugen Gerstenmaier
Hans Bernd von Haeften
Theodor Haubach
Paulus van Husen
Lothar König, S.J.
Julius Leber
Hans Lukaschek
Carlo Mierendorff
Hans Peters
Harald Poelchau
Adolf Reichwein
Augustin Rösch, S.J.
Theodor Steltzer
Carl Dietrich von Trotha
Margarete von Trotha
Adam von Trott zu Solz
Eduard Waetjen
Irene Gräfin Yorck von Wartenburg
Marion Gräfin Yorck von Wartenburg
Peter Graf Yorck von Wartenburg
Aunt Leno: See Hülsen, Leonore von
Bamler, Rudolf (1896–1972): Lieutenant general; chief of staff for the German army in Norway (1942–1943)
Bausch, Viktor T.: “Vikki” (1898–1983): Brought Theodor Haubach into his company, Felix Schoeller & Bausch, in 1938 after his release from a concentration camp
Beck, Ludwig (1880–1944): Resigned as the chief of the general staff of the army in 1938 because of Hitler’s plans for war; head of the military, nationalist, conservative resistance along with Carl Friedrich Goerdeler; after the failed assassination attempt of July 20, 1944, forced to commit suicide that same night
Bergmann, Hugo: Public defender at the People’s Court
Bertram, Adolf Johannes (1859–1945): Cardinal; archbishop of Breslau; chairman of the Fulda Bishops’ Conference, which pursued a policy of appeasement and accommodation toward the National Socialist system
Bismarck-Schönhausen, Gottfried Graf von (1901–1949): Chairman of the regional council for Stettin in 1938 in Potsdam; in 1943 SS-Oberführer; incarcerated in a concentration camp on suspicion of participating in the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944; acquitted on October 23, 1944
Bo
nhoeffer, Dietrich (1906–1945): Theologian; confidant of Hans Oster and Hans von Dohnanyi (of the international bureau of the Abwehr in the Armed Forces High Command); with Helmuth James in April 1942 on an official trip to Scandinavia; incarcerated April 1943; executed in Flossenbürg concentration camp on April 9, 1945
Bormann, Martin (1900–1945): Head of the Nazi Party chancellery; as of 1943 “secretary of the Führer”
Borsig, Ernst von (1906–1945): Owner of the Gross Behnitz estate at which several Kreisau Circle meetings about agricultural policies took place
Breslauer, Katharina: Trusted secretary in Helmuth James’s law office
Buchholz, Peter (1888–1963): As of 1943 Catholic prison chaplain in Plötzensee; largely in agreement with his Protestant colleague Harald Poelchau, with whom he also tended to the inmates in Tegel prison
Bürkner, Leopold (1894–1975): Navy captain; chief of staff in the international bureau of the Abwehr in the Armed Forces High Command from September 1, 1939 to June 30, 1944; supervisor of Helmuth James
Canaris, Wilhelm (1887–1945): As of March 1938 head of the international bureau of the Abwehr of the Armed Forces High Command; dismissed in 1944; arrested after July 20, 1944; executed in Flossenbürg concentration camp on April 9, 1945
Carl Bernd: See Moltke, Carl Bernhard von
Casparchen: See Moltke, Helmuth Caspar von
Claus: Head guard at Tegel prison who was kind to Helmuth James
Curtis, Lionel (1872–1955): British official and author; co-editor of The Round Table, a foreign-policy quarterly; founder of the Royal Institute of International Affairs; member of Milner’s Kindergarten in South Africa; friend of the Rose Innes family; mentor and correspondent of Helmuth James
Daddy: See Rose Innes, Sir James
Davy: See Moltke, Davida von
Deichmann, Ada: “Mütterchen Deichmann” (née von Schnitzler; 1886–1975): Freya’s mother
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