FREYA GRÄFIN von Moltke, a leading member of the anti-Nazi resistance movement, has died from a viral infection aged 98.
Countess von Moltke co-founded the “Kreisau Circle” in 1940 with her husband, Count Helmuth von Moltke, executed by the Nazis for treason in 1945.
After the war, she moved to the US, and from her new home in Vermont devoted her life to writing about resistance in the Third Reich. She encouraged reconciliation work between Germany and Poland, donating the former Moltke family home in the Silesian town of Kreisau – now Krzyzowa in Poland – to serve as a centre for German and Polish youth.
Freya von Moltke was born in 1911 into the Deichmann banking family, which lost most of its fortune in the 1930s depression.
She married Helmuth von Moltke in 1931, after which the couple lived with their two children in Berlin, where she studied law – “quickly and poorly”, she later admitted.
The couple were horrified by the rise of the Nazi ideology, which Helmuth described early on as “exaggerated nationalism, narcissism that slew everything Europe stood for”.
Freya herself had an early brush with the new regime in January 1933 after arriving late to a film premiere. “It was already dark and a man stood next to me . . . I saw only his eyes, terrible dreadfully unquiet eyes,” she recalled later.
“I thought to myself, ‘who is this next to me? What kind of eyes are those?’ And then the light came on and it was Hitler.”
The Kreisau Circle was a diverse group of thinkers that met alternately in Berlin and at the Moltke estate to plan Germany’s reconstruction after a Nazi defeat.
They were aware of Count von Stauffenberg’s plan to kill Hitler with a bomb, but were doubtful if killing the Nazi leader alone was enough to bring down the regime.
After the Stauffenberg plot failed in June 1944, the von Moltkes were denounced by a servant.
Though Helmuth von Moltke claimed to know nothing of the bomb plot, one of Stauffenberg’s co-conspirators was also a member of the Kreisau Circle. He was executed on January 23rd, 1945, as the Red Army advanced.
“I still live from the resistance we carried out,” said Freya von Moltke in later years.
“It is completely alive to me. The high point of my life was with my husband and the time we stood against the Nazis.”