Anti-Nazi resistance heroine von Moltke dies aged 98

FREYA VON MOLTKE, a prominent member of Germany’s anti-Nazi resistance in the Second World War, has died at the age of 98.

Helmuth von Moltke, her son, said his mother died on Friday after suffering a viral infection last week. She had lived in the US state of Vermont since 1960.

In her writings after the war, von Moltke described her life in the resistance with her husband, Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, who co-founded the anti-Nazi Kreisau Circle and was executed for his activities.

“To object and then to stand for what you believe in is one of the most important human activities to this day,” she said in 2002.

Born into a banking family in 1911 in Cologne, Freya Deichmann met her future husband when she was 18. They were married in 1931.

The couple settled on his Silesian estate, Kreisau, located in present-day Poland.

In 1932, they moved to Berlin where Helmuth set up an international law practice. An opponent of Hitler’s regime, he assisted Jews and other victims of Nazism in his practice.

He was drafted into the German army in 1939 as a legal specialist, but advocated the humane treatment of prisoners of war and civilians in German-occupied territories.

The von Moltkes formed the centre of a resistance group that became known as the Kreisau Circle that included the clergy, economic experts and diplomats.

Freya von Moltke hosted meetings in 1942 and 1943 at their estate at which plans for the democratic Germany they hoped would follow the collapse of the Third Reich were discussed.

In 1943, the group established contact with Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, the leader of the German military resistance and supported his failed attempt on July 20, 1944, to assassinate Hitler with a bomb.

Helmuth was arrested by the Gestapo in January 1944. He was executed a year later for treason.

Freya von Moltke and her two sons left for South Africa, where her mother-in-law had been born. She returned to Germany in 1956, where she began publicising the activities of the Kreisau Circle.

She came to Vermont in 1960 to live with Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, a Dartmouth College professor, who had fled Germany after the rise of the Nazis. He died in 1973.

Her transcriptions of her husband’s letters were published in German in 1988 as Letters to Freya 1939-1945.

Her memoirs, Memories of Kreisau and the German Resistance, were first published in 1997.

After the fall of communism in 1989, the von Moltkes’ former estate was chosen by the German and Polish governments as the site of a reconciliation Mass between the two nations.