Background
Albrecht Haushofer was born in Munich on 7 January 1903. Son of the former general and founder of Geopolitik, Professor Karl Haushofer.
(These eighty sonnets were written by a man expecting to b...)
These eighty sonnets were written by a man expecting to be executed for his resistance to the Nazi regime. Just before Christmas 1944, Albrecht Haushofer had been delivered to the Gestapo prison in the Moabit district of Berlin. In solitary confinement, fettered hand and foot, he awaited a show trial with a predetermined outcome. After a while he was allowed some sheets of paper and a pencil. He began to write sonnet after sonnet describing his days and nights in prison, shared with comrades of the Resistance who were one after another taken away to the hangman. From Moabit his mind soared out to the world he had known and loved: the lands near and far he had visited, the men and women who meant most to him, the literary and artistic treasures of the past he valued most of all. Sometimes he wrote in sorrow over the destruction of this precious heritage, sometimes in anger against those who had led his people on the road to war. But mostly he wrote in praise and love, as he conversed with the dead and the living dearest to him.
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Albrecht Haushofer was born in Munich on 7 January 1903. Son of the former general and founder of Geopolitik, Professor Karl Haushofer.
In 1924 he graduated with his thesis "Paß- Staaten in den Alpen", Erich von Drygalski (1865–1949) was his supervisor. Haushofer then worked as an assistant for Albrecht Penck.
From 1928 to 1938 he was general secretary and a regular contributor to the Gesellschaft für Erdkunde (Geographical Society) and in 1939 he was appointed Professor of Political Geography at the University of Berlin. Albrecht Haushofer was probably the architect of Rudolf Hess's flight to Britain in May 1941 to seek British collaboration against the Russians. Hess had been a disciple of Albrecht’s father, and his son had acted as his adviser before 1933 until accusations of non-Aryan ancestry had obliged the deputy Führer to get rid of him. Nevertheless, their close relationship had been maintained and, after Haushofer had been forced to abandon a brief appointment in the Foreign Office in March 1938, Hess had obtained his reinstatement as the head of an Information Section.
Haushofer's extensive knowledge of Britain continued to influence Hess, who also protected the family from the Party fanatics who objected to Professor Karl Haushofer's half-Jewish wife. It was Haushofer who, in the interests of the Resistance, encouraged Hess’s fixed idea of promoting a peace between Great Britain and Nazi Germany, instigating the plan which led to the abortive flight of Hitler's deputy to Scotland. After Hess’s flight, Albrecht Haushofer came under observation but was not arrested until December 1944.
Opposed to Nazism and in favour of restoring an authoritarian monarchy, Haushofer had established contacts with the Hassell-Goerdeler-Popitz group, with the Kreisau Circle and even with some members of the so-called ‘Red Orchestra’. Following his arrest as an accomplice of Adam von Trott zu Solz, Haushofer was imprisoned in Berlin’s Moabit prison, where he wrote his Moabiter Sonnette, unexpectedly retrieved and published after his death. Haushofer was illegally shot by an SS section on the night of 23 April 1945, during the battle for Berlin, with the Russians already in the burning city.
(These eighty sonnets were written by a man expecting to b...)