The execution of Helmuth James von Moltke

On Tuesday 23 January 1945, at Berlin’s Plötzensee Prison, the 37-year-old lawyer Helmuth James von Moltke was hanged – co-founder and spiritual leader of the Kreisau Circle, one of the most important groups of the German opposition to Hitler. Twelve days earlier, on 11 January, the People’s Court, presided over by Roland Freisler, had sentenced him to death for high treason. The verdict was remarkable even by that court’s standards: Moltke had taken no part in preparing the 20 July plot, and the trial proved no act against him. He was condemned – as he himself wrote to his wife – for having considered, together with his friends, how Germany should be ordered after the fall of Adolf Hitler.

Several other men connected with the opposition were executed at Plötzensee the same day, among them the Social Democrat Theodor Haubach, the Catholic trade unionist Nikolaus Groß, the former Württemberg state president Eugen Bolz, and Erwin Planck, son of the Nobel laureate Max Planck. These executions were part of the wave of repression that followed the failed attempt on Hitler’s life and continued until the last weeks of the war.

The lawyer from Kreisau

Helmuth James von Moltke was born on 11 March 1907 on the Kreisau estate (today Krzyżowa) in Lower Silesia, near Świdnica (Schweidnitz). He was a great-grandson of Adolf von Moltke, brother of Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke – the victor of the wars against Austria and France, who had bought Kreisau in 1867 with the grant he received after the Austrian war. His mother, Dorothy, née Rose-Innes, was a South African of British descent, daughter of the Chief Justice of the Union of South Africa. Thanks to her Moltke knew English and the British world well; in 1935–1938 he trained for the English bar in London and Oxford so that, if need be, he could leave Germany and work in England.

He studied law and political science in Breslau (Wrocław), Vienna and Berlin. As a student he was already involved in work camps bringing together young workers, peasants and students; at Kreisau he gave part of the land over to new peasant smallholdings, which outraged the neighbouring landowners and earned him the nickname of the “red count”. In 1931 he married Freya Deichmann, the daughter of a Cologne banker. After the Nazis came to power he gave up a career as a judge, which would have required him to join the NSDAP, and became a lawyer in Berlin specialising in international law. According to his biographers, as a lawyer he helped Jews forced to emigrate, among them the owners of the Berlin firm of Kempinski in their “Aryanisation” negotiations.

In the Abwehr

After the outbreak of war, from 6 September 1939, Moltke worked as an expert on the law of war in the foreign department of the Abwehr, the military intelligence service of the Wehrmacht High Command (OKW), headed by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. He wrote legal opinions on the application of international law and tried to use them to soften criminal orders. He argued for treating Soviet prisoners of war in accordance with the Geneva Convention of 1929, and in the occupied Netherlands he maintained that shooting hostages was unlawful and politically harmful. He knew what was happening in the East. In October 1941, a few weeks after the Babi Yar massacre and in the days when the deportations of Berlin’s Jews began, he wrote to his wife that certainly more than a thousand people were being murdered in this way every day, and another thousand German men were growing accustomed to murder. What, he asked, would he say when he was asked: and what did you do during that time?

In the autumn of 1943, according to some historians, Moltke helped to warn the Danish resistance of the planned deportation of the Danish Jews, which allowed most of them to escape across the strait to Sweden. In the spring of 1943 he took the text of the last leaflet of the White Rose to Scandinavia, from where it reached Britain and then – dropped by the RAF – came back down over Germany.

The Kreisau Circle

From 1940 Moltke, together with Peter Yorck von Wartenburg, a civil servant and lawyer from an old Silesian family, gathered around himself people convinced that Nazism would fall and that Germany would have to be rebuilt from scratch. They included aristocrats and officials, Social Democrats (Julius Leber, Theodor Haubach, Carl Mierendorff), the educationist Adolf Reichwein, the diplomat Adam von Trott zu Solz, the Protestant theologian Eugen Gerstenmaier and the Jesuits Augustin Rösch and Alfred Delp. Three larger meetings – in May and October 1942 and in June 1943 – were held at Kreisau, after which the Gestapo later named the whole group the “Kreisauer Kreis”.

The Kreisau group was not a military conspiracy. It worked out a programme: the “Principles for the New Order” (dated 9 August 1943) envisaged a state governed by the rule of law and founded on Christian ethics, self-governing local communities, economic reform, the punishment of Nazi criminals and the integration of Germany into a united Europe. Moltke himself, a deeply religious man, long opposed assassinating Hitler – he feared it would give rise to a new “stab in the back” legend and that even a successful attempt would not change people brought up under Nazism. He also tried several times to make contact with the Allies through neutral countries; in Istanbul in 1943 his conversations with German émigrés served – according to research in the OSS archives – as the basis of a memorandum passed to the Americans, which, however, met with no response.

On 19 January 1944 the Gestapo arrested Moltke – not for his work in the Circle, of which it as yet knew nothing, but for warning a friend, the diplomat Otto Kiep, that he was being watched. Kiep belonged to the circle around Hanna Solf, which had been infiltrated by a Gestapo informer; the arrests in that milieu ended in death sentences for, among others, Kiep and Elisabeth von Thadden. Moltke was taken into “protective custody”, held among other places in the prison block of the Ravensbrück camp; for half a year his release seemed possible. Without him the Circle weakened, and some of its members – Yorck, Haubach, Trott, Leber – drew closer to the group around Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, which was preparing the assassination.

After 20 July

The failed attempt of 20 July 1944 changed the prisoner’s position. Investigators of the Gestapo’s special commission uncovered the Kreisau group’s contacts with the conspirators and its constitutional plans. Yorck was executed as early as 8 August, after the first trial before the People’s Court; in the following months Trott and Reichwein died, and on 5 January 1945 Leber. Delp, Gerstenmaier, Haubach and others were arrested. Moltke was transferred to the prison in the Berlin district of Tegel, where he awaited trial together with the others.

At Tegel the prisoners were helped by the prison chaplain, Harald Poelchau, who smuggled their letters in and out. Thanks to him the Kreisau group were able to agree a line of defence: all were to deny any part in preparing the coup and maintain that they had merely talked about the future. Poelchau also carried Moltke’s almost daily correspondence with his wife. Freya von Moltke later preserved these letters – according to her recollections she hid them at Kreisau, among other places in beehives – and they are today the chief testimony to her husband’s last months.

The trial before Freisler

The trial of Moltke, Delp, Gerstenmaier, Franz Sperr – a former Bavarian envoy in Berlin – and several other defendants opened on 9 January 1945. The Reich Prosecutor brought the charges and Freisler presided – president of the court since 1942, notorious for shouting, mocking and interrupting the accused. Moltke described the proceedings in long letters to his wife written during the trial. According to them, Freisler quickly dropped the charge of complicity in the assassination attempt, which could not be proved, and concentrated on the conversations at Kreisau themselves: on the fact that the count had discussed Germany’s future with Jesuits and bishops and had not reported what he knew of others’ plans. Moltke recorded a remark by the judge which he considered the most important of the whole trial: “Herr Graf, Christianity and we National Socialists have one thing in common, and one thing only: we demand the whole man.”

Moltke took this as confirmation of the meaning of his stand. He wrote that he stood before the court “not as a Protestant, not as a landowner, not as an aristocrat, not as a Prussian, not as a German […] but as a Christian and nothing else”, and that he would be hanged for having thought, together with his friends – not for any deed. To his sons he left an explanation: ever since the Nazis came to power he had tried to soften the effects of their rule for its victims and to prepare for change, because – as he wrote – his conscience drove him to it.

On 11 January Freisler announced the verdicts. Moltke, Delp and Sperr were sentenced to death. Gerstenmaier, who – although he had been in the Bendlerblock on the evening of 20 July – managed to convince Freisler in court that he was an unworldly theologian, received seven years’ penal servitude; the other defendants were given prison sentences. Theodor Haubach was also sentenced to death, in a separate trial.

23 January at Plötzensee

Twelve days passed between the verdict and the execution, during which Moltke went on writing to his wife and sons. On 23 January he was hanged at Plötzensee. His ashes were scattered so that no grave would remain. Several others condemned in trials connected with 20 July and the opposition died there the same day: Theodor Haubach, by then seriously ill; Franz Sperr; Erwin Planck – a former state secretary in the Reich Chancellery, sentenced as early as October 1944 despite his father’s appeals to Hitler for clemency; Eugen Bolz, who was beheaded; the trade unionist Nikolaus Groß; the Social Democrat Ludwig Schwamb; the officer Hermann Kaiser; Busso Thoma; and the lawyer Reinhold Frank. Alfred Delp was executed on 2 February 1945.

On the Eastern Front the Vistula–Oder offensive was already under way; the Red Army was entering Silesia, the region Moltke came from. In Berlin the trials before the People’s Court went on until 3 February 1945, when Freisler was killed in an American air raid on the city. The trial of Fabian von Schlabrendorff, who survived the war, was interrupted as a result.

Place in the history of the war

Moltke’s death had no effect on the course of the war, which by January 1945 was being decided on the Vistula, in the Ardennes and on Luzon. It was, however, one of the last acts of the regime’s reckoning with the German opposition. After 20 July 1944 several thousand people were arrested; the People’s Court and other courts sentenced to death – according to estimates by German historians – some two hundred people connected with the plot, and the executions continued until April 1945. Moltke’s case revealed the essence of Nazi justice better than many others: the court itself admitted that it was punishing not a deed but a thought, and its president openly set the state’s total claims against those of faith.

After the war Kreisau passed to Poland as Krzyżowa. Freya von Moltke left Silesia in 1945, went with her sons to South Africa, and from 1960 lived in the United States, in Vermont, where she died in 2010. The letters she saved, published in Germany as Briefe an Freya 1939–1945, received the Geschwister-Scholl-Preis (the Scholl Siblings Prize) in 1989 and are among the most important testimonies of the German resistance. Of those sentenced with Moltke, Gerstenmaier survived – he was freed by the Americans in April 1945 and in 1954–1969 served as President of the Bundestag.

Over the years the Moltke estate became a symbol of Polish–German reconciliation. The Mass of reconciliation attended by Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki and Chancellor Helmut Kohl, celebrated at Krzyżowa on 12 November 1989 – three days after the fall of the Berlin Wall – is remembered above all for the two politicians’ exchange of the sign of peace. In 1990 the Krzyżowa Foundation for Mutual Understanding in Europe (PL) was established, and since 1998 it has run an international youth meeting centre on the restored estate. The idea for which Moltke died – Germany as part of a common Europe founded on law – found its place there, in the country that in 1939 had been Hitler’s first victim.