Background
Helmuth von Moltke was born on 2 March 1907 in Krzyzowa, Poland. The great-grandnephew of Field Marshal von Moltke. He was the descendant of one of Germany's most distinguished and aristocratic families.
Helmuth von Moltke was born on 2 March 1907 in Krzyzowa, Poland. The great-grandnephew of Field Marshal von Moltke. He was the descendant of one of Germany's most distinguished and aristocratic families.
A farmer on his Silesian estate and a jurist who practised law in Berlin, in 1933 he founded the Kreisau Circle, which met at his family estate in Silesia.
The group, which consisted of professional people, army officers and academics, and espoused a broad spectrum of political views was full of high-minded, noble idealism. It was von Moltke who was responsible for widening its appeal by bringing trade union and socialist members into the Circle.
During the war he advocated a new Christian socialist morality, which would be the prelude to rehumanizing Germany. His Circle was less concerned with overthrowing Hitler - something he personally shied away from - than with the shape of the New Order that would emerge after Nazism.
An expert on international law and legal adviser to the Abwehr from 1939 to 1944, von Moltke used his position to help victims of Nazism, prisoners of war and forced labourers. He also maintained secret contacts with the West, until his internment in January 1944 for tipping off a member of the peace circle of his imminent arrest. After the July plot of 1944, von Moltke was charged with treason, even though he had taken no part in the plans for assassinating Hitler.
During his trial before the People’s Court, it became apparent that he was being condemned not for any specific actions but for his Christian beliefs. He was hanged in Plötzensee prison in Berlin on 23 January 1945.
Von Moltke was from the outset opposed to Nazism, which he believed had degraded Germany and would lead it to disaster.
Quotations: ‘To us Europe after the war is a question of how the image of man can be re-established in the breasts of our fellow-citizens.’
Von Moltke's Anglo-Saxon and ‘pacifist' inclinations derived from his parental background - his mother was partly English and both his parents were Christian Scientists - and came to the forefront in his later call for the re-Christianization of Germany as the only answer to National Socialist ideology.