Freya Von Moltke Passes Away in Norwich, Vermont, at Age 98
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the bulletin of the carolyn and leonard miller center for holocaust studies SPRING 2010 The Bulletin of the Carolyn and leonard Miller Center for holoCaust studies voluMe 14 the university of verMont spring 2010 Coming in Fall 2010 Lecture by Henry Rousso, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, France Lecture by Simone Schweber, University of Wisconsin-Madison The Raul Hilberg Memorial Lecture, to be delivered by Jeffrey Herf, University of Maryland at College Park Lecture by Aram Yengoyan, University of California, Davis Please check our website for Freya von Moltke Passes Away schedules and other details as in Norwich, Vermont, at Age 98 they become available: http://www.uvm.edu/~uvmchs One of the Last Survivors of the German Resistance to Hitler by Peter Hoffmann InsIde freye von moltke reya von Moltke was born the 1930s, the Moltkes lived in Berlin, on 29 March 1911 as the when Helmuth was in law practice faculty news F daughter of Carl Theodor there. The Moltkes never lived in student news Deichmann, a Cologne banker whose a grand way. Moltke father and son “child euthanasia” bank failed in the Great Depression regarded themselves as democrats, catholic church in Poland in 1931. She met Helmuth James Freya´s husband with his socialistic steven aschheim Count von Moltke, a law student, tendencies was the most radical one. 2009 hilberg lecture in 1929, and soon began the study In 1932, when the old President Paul criminals with doctorates of law at the universities in Cologne von Hindenburg – reluctantly – stood holocaust Geographies and Bonn; she received a doctorate for re-election, both Helmuth and Writing as freedom in law at Berlin University in 1935. Freya thought he was too old and eugenics symposium From her marriage in 1931, she Hitler too dangerous; they voted for presided over the Moltke household Ernst Thälmann, the leader of the Kahn lecture and the family farm in Kreisau, Communist Party of Germany (KPD). terezin which Helmuth´s great-great-uncle, In her recollections, Freya gives a carl schmitt the Field Marshal, had acquired with vivid account of how the Moltkes, as a sensitive topic money the King of Prussia had given first-hour anti-Nazis and with their hilberg him out of gratitude for the victory ancestor´s fame attaching to their murder trial over Austria in 1866. During part of continued on Page 2 1 the bulletin of the carolyn and leonard miller center for holocaust studies SPRING 2010 continued from Page 1 name, could avoid political entanglement.1 The village the 20 July 1944 failed uprising were scattered - Freya of Kreisau was astonished that they did not embrace returned to Kreisau on 25 January. By the beginning Nazism. They were respected. Moltke, in restructuring of May the Red Army had arrived. In June, visits from the ruined finances of the Moltke farm, had taken into Russians and Poles for purposes of looting, became account the claims of farmers who had incurred losses frequent. After the Potsdam Conference, in August 1945, from dealings with it. Moreover, the Moltke farm it became clear that Kreisau would be Polish, and Poles manager, Herr Zeumer, was an enthusiastic Nazi but began taking over the farms. Just when the Western an honest man who respected Helmuth; although he did Allies had taken up their occupation sectors in Berlin not share Moltke´s political views, he was totally loyal, in June 1945, the Moltkes´ English friends succeeded and he never denounced the family, “in the years when in finding out where Freya and her children were. In Germans denounced each other by the thousands,” as September 1945, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin asked Freya recalled. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, the British Sector commander in Berlin (September-October 1945) to ask Beginning in January 1940, Moltke drew together the Russians and the new Polish authorities whether friends and like-minded persons from the professions, English emissaries might bring Freya and her children the labor movement, the churches and the civil service from Kreisau to Berlin. Permission was granted, and in who worked to lay the political, social, and philosophical October a British major came with two soldiers, a large foundations for the governance of post-Hitler Germany, car and a small truck, and took them to Berlin, with the producing a number of drafts of constitutional principles belongings they still had, including the papers, Kreisau and some twenty other memoranda on issues of agrarian Circle document drafts, and Moltke´s letters. The and economic concepts, relations between church and documents survived, first, because Freya von Moltke had state, foreign policy with a view to a united Europe, hid the letters and papers in her beehives after Moltke´s rejecting all racial concepts as absurd, and declaring arrest and now also thanks to British intervention with that the “right to work and property, regardless of race, the Russian and Polish authorities in Silesia. nationality and religious affiliation is protected by public authority.” A special paper established rules for the After living for several years in South Africa, the home of punishment of “defilers of the law.” her husband´s mother´s family, Freya and her children left because she found the Apartheid policy there Freya justly mentions not only her husband´s principled unacceptable. She came to Norwich, Vermont, where opposition, but also her own Rhineland left-bank spirit she had friends, and her youngest son wanted to go to of independence, her own strength. She knew all along Harvard. In the last fifty years of her life, in Norwich, what her husband and his friends were doing and her son Konrad, who did important environmental work, planning, working to overthrow the Hitler regime, which built a house next to hers. She was frequently host to at the time constituted treason and was punishable by a growing number of grandchildren, she was in contact death, and actively supported it. The letters are evidence, with friends such as the Jochums, Eugen Rosenstock, and sometimes oblique and obscure references in them Rudolf Serkin, and the Galbraiths, and she involved demonstrate that Freya knew much more than Moltke herself in community work and in preserving the legacy wrote to her.2 In an interview published in 1992, she of her husband and the anti-Hitler Resistance through said that about 1940 Moltke had asked her a question. many publications and interviews. “He put the question to me explicitly: Now comes the time when one can do something against it; I want to do Freya von Moltke has become a historic figure herself. it, but I can do it only if you support it, and I said, yes, Through her work in keeping the memory of her husband that is worthwhile. That is how it started, a stand for alive, through her tireless and successful efforts to create justice, against that Nazi state without the rule of law. in Kreisau, through the Kreisau Foundation, a venue for [...] Our situation was that of opponents, and one did German-Polish and international encounters especially not think about that fact any more. It was day-to-day for young people, through giving judicious access to her life, the resistance was everyday life.” Although she was papers and allowing publications of them, her legacy and first of all her husband´s wife, she was much more active that of Helmuth James von Moltke have been sustained. than has been recognized. Her husband demanded of Freya von Moltke passed away on January 1, 2010. her that she “pitch in,” and “I backed and supported everything.” They discussed all the fundamental issues that Moltke debated with his friends, a group called 1Memories of Kreisau and the German Resistance (Erinnerungen an Kreisau) (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2003); the Kreisau Circle after three plenary meetings at the Dorothee von Meding, Courageous Hearts: Women and the Anti-Hitler Moltke´s Kreisau farm in Silesia, in May and October Plot of 1944 (Providence, RI : Berghahn Books, 1997). 1942 and June 1943. 2Helmuth James von Moltke, Letters to Freya 1939-1945 (New York: After Moltke´s arrest in January 1944, Freya spent Alfred A. Knopf, 1990). much time in Berlin and saw him as often as she was allowed. After her husband´s execution on 23 January Peter Hoffmann is William Kingsford Professor of History at McGill 1945 – the ashes of the resisters executed in the wake of University. 2 the bulletin of the carolyn and leonard miller center for holocaust studies SPRING 2010 News from the Faculty Antonello Borra (Romance Languages) organized the following Nicole Phelps (History) received an honorable mention for lectures on the UVM campus: 1) Professor Lucienne Kroha, the Unterberger Dissertation Prize, awarded by the Society McGill University, “Of Gardens and Ghettos: The Italian-Jewish for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), for her Experience in Giorgio Bassani’s “Romance of Ferrara,” on dissertation, “Sovereignty, Citizenship, and the New Liberal October 26, 2009; and Profesor Sergio Parussa, Wellesley College, Order: US-Habsburg Relations and the Transformation of “Writing as Freedom, Writing as Testimony: Judaism and Writing International Politics, 1880-1924.” She is also serving on in Twentieth Century Italy,” on March 17, 2010. SHAFR’s Teaching Committee and the Program Committee for Meaghan Emery (Romance Languages) published two article: the organization’s 2011 annual conference. Her article “’A Status “Nicolas Sarkozy’s Historical and Political Transgressions: au Which Does Not Exist Anymore’: Austrian and Hungarian Enemy service de la République?” in Contemporary French Civilization Aliens in the United States, 1917-1921” will appear later this 34.1 (Winter/Spring 2010): 1-18; and “Immigration, Europe, and year in Contemporary Austrian Studies.