Anti-Nazi resistance heroine dies at 98

Freya von Moltke, a prominent member of the anti-Nazi resistance in the Second World War, has died at the age of 98, her son said.

Helmuth von Moltke told US paper, the Lebanon Valley News, that his German-born 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, Freya 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 told an interviewer in 2002.

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

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

In 1932, they moved to Berlin where Helmuth von Moltke set up an international law practice. An opponent of Adolf Hitler’s regime from its start, Helmuth von Moltke assisted Jews and other victims of Nazism in his early law practice.

Helmuth von Moltke was drafted into the German army in 1939 as a specialist in international and martial law, but during his military service he advocated the humane treatment of prisoners of war and civilians in German-occupied territories under the Geneva Conventions.

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

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

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.

Freya von Moltke later told an interviewer that she knew what her husband was planning with the group and fully supported him.

“I never advised him to stop, but rather encouraged him, because I was convinced that that was the right way for him to fulfil his life.”

Helmuth von Moltke was arrested by the Gestapo in January 1944 on unrelated charges of warning a friend that he was about to be arrested. He was executed a year later in January 1945 for treason.

After the war, Freya von Moltke and her two sons returned to the family estate which was in territory ceded to Poland.

In 1947, she left for South Africa, where her mother-in-law had been born. She worked as a social worker, but grew troubled by the apartheid regime and returned to Germany in 1956, where she began work on publicising the activities of the Kreisau Circle.

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

After Mr Rosenstock-Huessy died in 1973, she dedicated herself to promoting his works, in addition to those of her late husband.

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.