OnJan. 11, 1945 the Nazi regime issued its final sentence against Helmuth James von Moltke, accusing him of treachery, defeatism and of leading the Kreisau Circle, a group of individuals working toward a democratic future after the collapse of the Third Reich.
“All these things have rendered him permanently dishonorable. He is punished with death,” were the last words of the judgment.
On Jan. 23, the 37-year-old von Moltke was taken from his cell at Tegel Prison in Berlin, and transferred to Plötzensee Prison, where executions were carried out. Earlier, von Moltke wrote his final letter to his wife, Freya, knowing that execution was imminent, but not realizing that it would happen that day. He had been imprisoned in Tegel since September 1944.
During von Moltke’s incarceration, he and Freya wrote each other at least once daily. More than 150 of their letters have now been published in Last Letters: The Prison Correspondence, 1944-1945 (New York Review Books). There were two publications of the letters in the original German in 2011 and 2013, one complete, the other abridged, respectively. A Polish version followed. This is the first English language edition of the abridged text.
The period the prison letters encompass was “the peak of (my mother’s) life. These months were the most important in her life for her. They strengthened her in a way that lasted the rest of her life,” said Helmuth Caspar von Moltke, the oldest son of Helmuth James and Freya, in an interview at his home in Hartford. On Wednesday, von Moltke, born in 1937, will read from Last Letters at the Norwich Bookstore.
A retired lawyer who divides his time between Hartford and Montreal, von Moltke did not read the Tegel letters until he was an adult, and then read only his father’s half, which his mother had transcribed earlier. It wasn’t until her letters were transcribed for the first German edition that he understood more fully what that time had been like for his parents.
He recalled that after his father’s death his mother told him what had happened. “But I clearly was still too young to fathom what it was. I ran into her a few days later and she was crying and I asked her, ‘Why?’ ” von Moltke said.
Freya von Moltke, who lived in Norwich from the early 1960s until her death in 2010 at the age of 99, kept the Tegel letters with her the rest of her life and agreed to their publication as long as it came after her death. They are now housed in the German Literature Archive, near Stuttgart. A previous collection of correspondence, Letters to Freya: 1939-1945, which contains the communication from husband to wife only, was published in German in 1988, and in English in 1990.
The prison letters are of a radiant intensity, clarity and feeling, and read as if the writers are speaking to each other at that moment, face to face, with one heart, one soul. Husband and wife wrestle eloquently with the impending execution, expressing despair, hope, resignation and even humor, from one sentence to the next.
They also discuss strategies for escaping a death sentence and talk about their young sons Helmuth Caspar and Konrad, as well as management of the family estate at Kreisau, in what was then the eastern German province of Silesia (now part of Poland).
Kreisau lent its name to the circle of men and women who met secretly in Berlin, Munich and Kreisau to explore the possibility of a negotiated peace and to draft the central tenets of a post-war, constitutional government. Freya was one of the few women to attend the meetings. (The estate is now home to the Foundation for Mutual Understanding in Europe, which came into being after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and which Freya von Moltke enthusiastically supported.)
It was thanks to the prison chaplain Harald Poelchau (to whom Last Letters is dedicated) that Helmuth James and Freya were able to write to each other at all. Poelchau smuggled their letters in and out, at enormous personal risk. Freya hid the letters in a beehive at Kreisau.
That von Moltke had not been executed immediately was probably due in part to the family name, which had been one of the most honored in Germany. Helmuth von Moltke the Elder led the Prussian Army to a stunning victory during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871. For his service he was awarded the title of Graf, or Count, and promoted to field marshal.
That fame, and the subsequent military service of other von Moltkes, lent Helmuth James, a great-grandnephew of the field marshal and himself a Count, a certain mystique, although he neither revered nor rejected the von Moltke military legacy, Helmuth Caspar von Moltke said.
“(My father) felt all along and my mother felt, that it acted as a shield for him against the Nazis, and it did, of course, to some extent,” said von Moltke.
His parents met in 1929 in Austria. “My mother was absolutely smitten, and fell head over heels in love with him,” von Moltke said. Over time, Helmuth James’ “love of (Freya) grew stronger and stronger.” They were married in 1931, when she was 20 and he was 24.
Both were raised in privilege. Freya Deichmann came from a Cologne banking family. Helmuth James had grown up at Kreisau, the son of Helmuth Adolph von Moltke and Dorothy Innes, a South African of Scottish descent. Helmuth James and Freya had both studied law: she at the University of Bonn, he in both Germany and Austria.
When Hitler came to power, the couple, ardently anti-Nazi, were appalled and frightened. They debated whether it was wise to bring children into the world, but Freya prevailed — to her husband’s gratitude.
“He says it himself, she was much more positive toward life and living. She gave him a much stronger tie to life and to emotions. I think she developed his emotional life,” von Moltke said.
At the outbreak of the war, Helmuth James was drafted to work in a legal capacity for the Abwehr, German military intelligence. What von Moltke admires about his father, he said, was that during the early German victories, which for his father was a “moment of desperate depression, when he had the feeling that the powers of evil were winning, he knew he had to fight back.
“I think that really this resistance was an existential need for him, he needed to do something and to stand up. He felt it was required of him. I would say it was at the same level as the duty on him to care for his family. It was an imperative and therefore he could not resist it.”
The von Moltkes repeatedly considered leaving Germany, von Moltke said. In fact, his father read for and was called to the English bar, to leave that option open. “He was encouraged by friends and relatives to leave, but in the end he felt he owed it to his family and his inheritance that he stick it out.”
Although neither parent took a pro-military stance, neither were they pacifists, von Moltke said. For practical and philosophical reasons, Helmuth James preferred not to use violence to remove Hitler from power, which separated him from the conspirators behind the July 1944 failed attempt to assassinate Hitler.
By that time, von Moltke had already been arrested for warning a colleague that the secret police knew of his activities in an anti-regime group, and was being held in a prison on the grounds of Ravensbrück concentration camp, north of Berlin.
After the failed assassination, the Gestapo cast a wider net for opponents to the regime, and looked again more closely at people like von Moltke. In so doing they discovered the fuller workings of the Kreisau Circle and transferred von Moltke to Tegel, which had been a civilian prison, where he would await trial for his purported crimes against the Reich.
Conditions were Spartan but von Moltke had the good fortune, if one can call it that, to be held there, rather than in the nearby Gestapo prison, where torture was inevitable. The guards were for the most part sympathetic to the anti-regime prisoners, looking the other way when food and personal items were brought in.
Although von Moltke said his parents were not particularly religious before the war, the pervasive atmosphere of death, and their search for some kind of grace and meaning in the face of such suffering, turned them to the Bible for sustenance, finding in it a greater spiritual existence that would transcend the inevitable, violent death that awaited Helmuth James.
“It was the times that brought them to seek refuge in religion. My mother said that you get into situations where liberal ideas are not enough to give you guidance,” von Moltke said.
After the German surrender, chaos reigned, particularly in the east of the country. It was clear the Soviets were going to occupy Poland and what became East Germany, including Silesia. Through the intervention of the British, von Moltke said, he, his mother and his brother were airlifted by the Americans to Switzerland. From there they went to South Africa, where relatives of Helmut James’ mother still lived. They were there for nine years.
Helmuth Caspar von Moltke later studied at Oxford University, while his brother Konrad graduated from Dartmouth. In an email, von Moltke wrote that he never felt it was onerous to shoulder his parents’ legacy.
“I grew up in the Anglophone world where my father was always admired and it was helpful to me in dealing with the horrors of Germany under the Nazis that I was sure that both my parents were only tied to these horrors by virtue of their nationality and no more. … My mother always encouraged me to lead my life as I wished, neither burdened nor exalted by their actions in (World War II) and that is what I have done.”
In the early 1960s Freya von Moltke met and fell in love with Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, the eminent historian and philosopher, who had left Nazi Germany in 1933, made his way to the U.S., and wound up teaching at Dartmouth. She loved Vermont and the Upper Valley, and admired the U.S. Constitution, said von Moltke, who lives in a modestly-sized house on a hillside in the Jericho section of Hartford, with views south to Mt. Ascutney. She worked tirelessly the rest of her life to promote European integration and cooperation and to speak in favor of civil disobedience, and it was she who began the task of transcribing her husband’s letters.
Other members of the von Moltke family have houses nearby, and a road sign tucked into the woods tells visitors they are on Von Moltke Strasse (Street). Von Moltke’s younger brother Konrad von Moltke died in 2005. When they were young men, information about their father came from their mother, and a few other sources.
“I did want to know a good deal about my father but it took a while. In postwar Germany, the interest in what he and his friends had done was muted,” von Moltke said.
Beginning in the 1970s, however, revisionist historians began to look more closely at who had done what during the war, and a new era of scholarship was born, one in which the activities of various Resistance groups were excavated and examined.
For that reason the von Moltke family wanted the letters which appear in both Letters to Freya and Last Letters published.
“The first set of letters was really a historical record for historians in many ways. (My father) was reporting on his daily events and what he did. He also says whom he saw among the various conspirators, a very valuable record of when he met whom, and what it was that they discussed. It’s been a very valuable set of papers for historians studying these movements. My mother wanted it published,” von Moltke said.
Last Letters is a much more intimate record of the relationship between husband and wife. But, it also contains von Moltke’s invaluable account of his trial at the so-called People’s Court, under the jurisdiction of the notorious Judge Roland Freisler, whose sentences of death were virtually preordained before a trial was even held.
“The gift was that (my father) was able to report on the trial. … They didn’t proceed immediately to have him executed,” which was customary, von Moltke said.
The thrust of the case against von Moltke, Helmuth James observed in a letter to Freya, was not only that anyone passing judgment on the Fuhrer was on the “path to committing high treason,” but that “anyone not to Herr Freisler’s liking is guilty of high treason.”
In his last letter, von Moltke reassured his wife. “I’m doing fine, my love. I’m not restless or agitated. No, not a bit. I’m ready and willing to entrust myself to God’s guidance, not just forcibly but willingly and gladly, and to know that He wants the best for us, for you too, my dearest.”
The Catholic chaplain who ministered to the prisoners at Plotzensee later reported that von Moltke “took his final steps with complete calm, indeed with an inner cheerfulness, ready to die, finished with his farewell to the little boys he loved so much and to Freya.”
Helmuth Caspar von Moltke will read from Last Letters: The Prison Correspondence, 1944-1945 at 7 p.m. on Wednesday at the Norwich Bookstore. Reservations are suggested. Call the bookstore at 802-649-1114 for reservations and information.
Nicola Smith can be reached at mail@nicolasmith.org.