Last Letters Read online

  This statement, as devastating as it is pithy, requires some context and nuance. In his almost elated report on the trial in the letter of January 10, 1945, Helmuth notes that by being sentenced merely for thinking together, he and his coconspirators have been cleared of “any practical action.” And yet, it would be misleading to conclude that either Helmuth himself or the Kreisau Circle as a whole performed no practical acts of resistance, or that they unequivocally opposed the more radical (though sometimes politically more conservative) paths taken by other plotters, including the groups around Stauffenberg and Goerdeler. As Hoffmann has pointed out, it is crucial to distinguish here between Helmuth’s tactical considerations as a defendant and attorney before the Nazis’ political judge on the one hand, and his actions and deeply held convictions on the other.21

  For Helmuth had surely involved himself in “practical action” against the regime on multiple fronts prior to his incarceration in early 1944. In his position as a conscripted lawyer for the army, he worked relentlessly even if often unsuccessfully for the recognition of international law and the prevention of war crimes. He used his position to help protect hostages, prisoners of war, and civilians, and he actively assisted persecuted Jews to secure their emigration and escape from the Nazis’ reach. The Gestapo never uncovered how much active resistance Helmuth had mounted against Nazi policies. They also knew only bits and pieces about his discussions with friends in Kreisau and about the group’s wide-ranging plans for the future.

  A lawyer by training, Helmuth spent countless hours in his Tegel cell drafting, revising, dismissing, and resuscitating potential lines of defense for the oft-delayed trial that finally took place on January 9 and 10, 1945. He tried to establish mitigating circumstances, considered whether the regime might use him for the war effort rather than execute him, and even involved Freya in a multifaceted attempt to secure clemency from high-ranking Nazi officials. Both Helmuth and Freya were granted face-to-face meetings with the general commanding the Gestapo, and Freya involved the judge, the state prosecutor, and senior officials of the Nazi government in seeking to save Helmuth’s life. The Moltke family name in Germany granted them this access. For the Nazis the long-deceased nineteenth-century general Moltke was a Prussian hero and the estate inherited by Helmuth made him heir to that lineage. They recognized Helmuth as a committed opponent, but still wanted the respect of his family. Freya ventured into the lion’s den with assurance, though always skeptical of her ability to succeed in saving Helmuth’s life.

  All these strands—Helmuth’s family background, his various defense strategies, the work of the Kreisau Circle, acts of resistance, and the role of “thinking together”—came to a head in Helmuth’s confrontation with Freisler in the People’s Court. The trial had been delayed numerous times during the final months of 1944. When the five remaining members of the Kreisau Circle appeared before the court on January 9 and 10, 1945, Helmuth quickly realized that what ignited Freisler’s indignation was not the Kreisauers’ putative links to the failed assassination attempt but, above all, their deliberations and plans (though the Kreisau documents containing those plans remained undiscovered in the attic of the Kreisau Schloss), as well as the group’s Christian character. Removed from the world of practical action by the twelve months of his imprisonment, Helmuth now stood before Freisler chiefly for his Christian, humanist beliefs. As he writes to Freya in the powerful letters reporting on his trial, he had succeeded in concentrating the duel between himself and Freisler around the one point where their fundamental incompatibility became crystal-clear—as Freisler himself pronounced, “There is only one way in which Christianity and we are alike: We demand the entire person!” For Helmuth there developed “a kind of dialogue—a spiritual one between Freisler and me [. . .] in which we came to know each other through and through.”22 This he saw as a triumph. The president of the People’s Court had unwittingly revealed that he recognized the basic incompatibility of their two worldviews. In light of this dramatic confrontation, Helmuth and Freya confirmed to each other in the letters that Helmuth would be executed for the right reason. They remained steadfast in their belief that, in the end, the values of humanity for which they and their friends had risked everything would survive. As Helmuth puts it, the Nazis “have recognized that Kreisau would take an ax to the very root of National Socialism, and the result would go beyond a modification of the facade, as was the case with Goerdeler.”23 The Nazi henchmen might kill Helmuth, but as Freya writes at one point, “In the end, they can take nothing from you but your life!”24

  III.

  The incarcerated members of the Kreisau Circle who remained in the early fall of 1944 were split between two prisons. At Tegel, Helmuth, Father Alfred Delp, and Gerstenmaier had neighboring cells, while Theodor Haubach and Theodor Steltzer were imprisoned at the Lehrter Strasse Gestapo prison. They were joined in the trial by three members of the Bavarian resistance: Franz Reisert, Franz Sperr, and Joseph-Ernst Fürst Fugger von Glött. Through the assistance of Poelchau, the prison chaplain, and because of the daily joint outdoor walk, there were good lines of communication between the accused at Tegel, but everything proved more difficult for those kept at the Lehrter Strasse complex. Here, the prisoners’ wives or other confidants had to convey clandestine messages to help coordinate strategy among the group’s members—a very dangerous undertaking.

  Imprisonment at Tegel—one of the prisons run by the civil authorities—was, despite everything, easier to endure and also more predictable in its routines than was detention at the Gestapo prisons on Lehrter Strasse or Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, for example. The majority of the Tegel guards were well-inclined toward the political prisoners, and Freya and Helmuth were on very friendly terms with a few of them. Some even took the risk of relaying information and bringing in regular packages of food from prisoners’ families during the weekly delivery of clean linens, in which small notes were very often to be found hidden as well. In exchange, these guards were given regular gifts of cigarettes or part of the prisoners’ provisions. Thanks, in part, to their leniency, the prisoners at Tegel were able to write many private (uncensored) letters in their cells. Helmuth was brought in several times to the Gestapo offices for questioning. It was in the basement rooms of the complex at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse that many detainees were tortured by the Gestapo. Helmuth later suspected that they had succeeded, on one occasion, in eliciting certain confessions from him by slipping a drug into his soup, confessions that he was sorely to regret later on. Although Helmuth was never tortured, it is probable that all other imprisoned members of the Kreisau Circle did in fact undergo torture.

  At Tegel prison, Helmuth sat locked away in a seventy-square-foot cell on the fourth floor of Building I, a place reserved for those facing potential execution that was also known as the “house of the dead.” Day and night, the lights burned overhead; day and night, the prisoners’ hands and feet were kept shackled. Only at mealtimes were their handcuffs to be removed. Helmuth, beset by severe pain in his back, successfully negotiated that he should be left unshackled for a time in December and January. Following his trial and death sentence, however, the prison regulations were reapplied in all their severity, and he was once again handcuffed. The small cell grew cold during these winter months. Helmuth spent the bulk of his time seated atop his desk with a blanket wrapped around him, his feet resting on his chair, as he studied his Bible or his hymnal—he was no longer interested in reading anything else. He learned many verses by heart during those hours and even worked on committing entire passages to memory, now reciting them, now singing or whistling them to himself. Or he wrote letters in his tiny handwriting, often with bound hands. Once a day, the prisoners were let into the prison yard and allowed to march around in a circle for half an hour. In January 1945, however, they did not set foot outside once; it was too cold, and many of the prisoners had only thin, torn clothing.

  Meanwhile, the end of the Third Reich was becoming apparent: the front was creeping close
r, and those in power were increasingly on edge. Allied bombing runs, announced by the wail of air-raid sirens, picked up in both frequency and intensity over the course of Helmuth’s detention at Tegel. While the guards were able to scurry down into the safety of the bunkers, the shackled prisoners had no choice but to endure the attacks in their cells, alone. Explosions rattled doors and windows, setting surrounding buildings ablaze. In the course of these few months, both the Tegel and the Lehrter Strasse prisons suffered partial bomb damage. As we learn from his letters, on each occasion, Helmuth was overcome by an intense fear of death.

  What a different world it was for Freya, outside the prison walls. The same waves of air attacks that Helmuth suffered through in his cell were destroying houses and even entire city districts. The network of public roads and rails was extensively damaged and interrupted at many points; commuters and travelers frequently had no choice but to make long detours. Most mornings saw Freya leave from the apartment of Helmuth’s cousin Carl Dietrich von Trotha, the Moltkes’ own apartment in Berlin having been lost to bombs in 1943. She would set out for the various government offices to which Helmuth was constantly dispatching her on new missions. “Most of the time during those months,” she remembered, “I was in Berlin always on the go or writing to Helmuth.”25 Wearing out and mending a pair of socks daily, she submitted petitions and attempted to obtain audiences with officials, and she worked her way to the Gestapo and the People’s Court—“into the lion’s mouth,” as she put it; she traveled out to Helmuth’s former office at the Armed Forces High Command (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht), to the prison at Tegel, and to meetings with friends, advisers, and others who could possibly be of assistance. As day turned to night, she would then regularly make a stop at the Poelchau family apartment to read Helmuth’s letters and write her response; to share a meal with her friend Harald and his equally beloved wife, Dorothee; and on occasion to sleep there.

  On the weekends, Freya would often make the trip back to Kreisau. At first, life in Kreisau went on quietly. She spent much of her time with her young sons, the seven-year-old Caspar and three-year-old Konrad, whom she entrusted to the care of her sister-in-law Asta and her housekeeper when she was away. She would also spend some of her time reviewing the state of the Kreisau agricultural operations, for which she now exercised joint responsibility alongside Adolf Zeumer, the manager of the estate. As noted, this estate had come down to Helmuth and Freya from Field Marshal von Moltke. During the Depression years, twenty-two-year-old Helmuth had rescued the deeply indebted property from its creditors, and the family had moved to the more modest but comfortable house formerly used by elderly members of the extended family, which was much easier to heat and maintain. Freya had been in charge of the farming already for all the war years. She spoke with the people from the village and those from the Schloss (manor house), where in the meantime many people in need had taken up residence—not only relatives but also Rosemarie Reichwein, the widow of the already executed Kreisau Circle member Adolf Reichwein, along with her four children and numerous refugees. The villagers were concerned about Helmuth and Freya’s fate, and even those who were politically inclined toward National Socialism stuck by the family. Freya’s weekend visits to Kreisau were invariably pleasant, satisfying days, but as long as she remained there she found it difficult to keep living in step with Helmuth as his death approached, and she was restless. For that reason, nothing could keep her at home for much longer than a few days. She would most often set off on Sunday evening, boarding the night train to Berlin so that she could be close to Helmuth once again come Monday morning. This pattern began to change only in January 1945, as the eastern front moved closer and closer; the urgent question then became whether her first concern should be Helmuth or their sons.

  With the advent of the trial, Freya wanted to be close by in Berlin. After the trial, Helmuth was returned to Tegel prison, where he wrote his dramatic report, which relates in great detail the intemperate outbursts of the judge, the political nature of the charges against him, and the course of the proceedings. In addition, Freya and Helmuth were allowed one last face-to-face conversation; she made a further round of the city, knocking on every possible door. She went to the offices of the Gestapo and spoke with its chief, General Müller, who explained to her in a “friendly” way how it simply wasn’t possible to remit Helmuth’s sentence; her husband, now a convicted traitor, could not be spared the journey to Plötzensee prison, the site of the executions. Seeking to obtain a pardon she ventured on to the Ministry of Justice, where the relevant official at one point surprisingly remarked, “So then he’ll die a martyr.” Freya rejected this appellation, and she would continue to do so for the rest of her life. She feared that accepting it would only serve to put Helmuth on a pedestal, thereby creating a lofty, unreachable figure that instead of emboldening others to resistance would move them only to passive reverence.

  Shortly before Helmuth’s execution, Freya was obliged to make yet another trip back to Kreisau; the symptoms of social disintegration brought on by the looming loss of the war were already beginning to reach Silesia, and the front was now approaching Kreisau and her sons. It took a great deal of effort on her part, but she somehow succeeded in swimming upstream against the tide of refugees and reaching Kreisau, only to turn quickly around and come back with the families fleeing before the Soviet Red Army, arriving in Berlin late on the night of January 22, 1945. On January 23, 1945, the day of his death, Helmuth received Freya’s report on her epic journey, and he also had the time to compose a letter himself, which she in turn received. Freya’s letter of noon the same day never reached him. When Poelchau stopped by his cell once more, Helmuth had already been collected by the authorities. Poelchau immediately notified Peter Buchholz, the Catholic chaplain, who also served as a minister to the prisoners at Plötzensee. As Poelchau writes in his memoirs, Buchholz saw Helmuth and had the chance to give him his regards; afterward he was able to report back to Freya that “he took his final steps with complete calm, indeed with an inner cheerfulness, ready to die, finished with his farewell to the little boys he loved so much and to Freya.”26

  IV.

  Unlike the correspondence from earlier years contained in Letters to Freya, these last letters form an intense, intimate, two-way conversation that preserves both voices, Helmuth’s and Freya’s. The reader comes to know Freya as an open, confident, and hopeful woman. Though she often speaks of her “complicated” husband and describes herself as “simple,” she was a strong and, in her own way, complex figure. Possessing great insight and understanding, Freya had a talent for capturing difficult events and situations in a few telling words. She knew herself, as distinct from her husband, to be “well suited to life.” With the cheerful, buoyant character of her native Rhineland, Freya never lost her ability to laugh. Helmuth, by contrast, despite having a pronounced—though at times somewhat biting—sense of humor, had become a graver and more serious man, one whose keen sense of political realities led him early on to foresee his own violent death. By the same token, Freya would occasionally think ahead to a life in which she would no longer have Helmuth by her side, confident that he would “always remain inside me until I may die and find you again, one way or another.” In other words, Freya, too, projected a future out of these four months of farewell, one in which “I’ll grow old and I’ll change,” as she writes in her first letter to Helmuth in Tegel. 27

  She did grow old, treasuring not only the memory of Helmuth but also the “long written conversations” that they had been able to carry on during the last months of his life. Already in the correspondence itself, the couple discusses the importance of Freya holding on to the pain of the separation and living with Helmuth “inside” rather than alongside her. Half a year after Helmuth’s death she would write to her mother: “I think it’s fair to say that I’ll never be truly alone again in my life, since I was able to part from Helmuth in such a beautiful manner.”

  Freya drew sustenance from this
long parting, remaining true to herself and to Helmuth’s memory for the decades of her life that followed—not only in the social work she performed in South Africa during the years after the war, in her writings and speeches on the resistance in postwar Germany and the United States, and in her political engagement, but also in the open house she led after settling in the small rural town of Norwich, Vermont, or in her frequent returns to Germany and Poland well into her old age. Wherever she was invited, she showed up as a passionate ambassador of resistance against injustice, oppression, and discrimination in all their forms. She was particularly eager to transmit the legacy of Helmuth, their shared life, and the work of the Kreisau Circle to younger generations, to render it meaningful for the future and not just as a relic of the past.

  Freya survived her husband by sixty-five years. When she died on New Year’s Day of 2010 in Norwich, news spread quickly in her native Germany. Three years earlier, the Federal Republic had commemorated the centennial of Helmuth’s birth, honoring his memory as a key member in the German resistance. Obituaries also appeared in many other countries, particularly in Europe, but also in Russia and most of the English-speaking world. After Helmuth’s death, Freya spent the many years of her remaining life standing for the principles that her husband and his friends had died for and speaking to audiences far and wide about their actions and the need to resist abusive regimes. Over the years, several biographies have been published of both Helmuth and Freya, and there now exists a substantial literature focusing on their resistance to the Nazis. Today, the Kreisau Circle and the work of its individual members are considered foundational for the self-conception of the Federal Republic of Germany.