Foreign Office and Abwehr official who played an important role in the German Resistance.
Background
Adam von Trott zu Solz was born in Potsdam on 9 August 1909, the son of a distinguished, noble family which had produced diplomats and statesmen for several generations. His father had been Prussian Minister of Education from 1909 to 1917, and his half-American mother, of Calvinist-Huguenot stock, was descended from the First Chief Justice of the United States, John Jay.
Education
A Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford, during the early 1930s.
Career
Von Trott zu Solz established contacts in Great Britain which he was later able to use on behalf of the German Resistance. On his return to Germany in 1934, von Trott zu Solz practised law, published a new edition of Heinrich von Kleist’s works with a commentary that celebrated him as a rebel against tyranny, and became active in the Kreisau Circle of opponents of the Hitler régime.
By 1939, when he entered the Foreign Office as a protégé of Ernst von Weiszacker’s, von Trott zu Solz was already one of the leading anti-Nazis of the younger generation, responsible for keeping contacts open with sympathizers of the ‘other Germany’ abroad. In June 1939 he visited England on what was ostensibly a ‘fact-finding mission’ on behalf of the Führer, meeting at Cliveden with the Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, and other leading figures in British politics. Introduced as a friend of the Astor family, von Trott zu Solz reported back to the German Foreign Office that Hitler could appease British public opinion, and thereby ‘paralyse his enemies’, if he withdrew from Bohemia and Moravia. Statements sympathetic to Germany, reported by von Trott zu Solz, however, may have encouraged Hitler to believe that he could invade Poland without fear of British intervention.
Von Trott zu Solz’s real purpose was most likely to gain time for the German opposition - as on an earlier visit to Washington in October 1938 - and to avoid a world war, though there are still doubts as to whether he was not a German spy. The British Foreign Office regarded him with distrust, considering that the dossier against him was ‘formidable’, and did not respond to various peace overtures made by von Trott zu Solz during the war on behalf of the German Resistance. British doubts were reinforced by the fact that von Trott zu Solz and his associates were not in favour of restoring territorial acquisitions gained by Hitler. When, through his Abwehr contacts in Switzerland, he met British and American diplomats in 1943-4, he warned that if the West did not offer a decent peace with a non-Nazi Germany, the Resistance would turn to the Soviet Union.
In spite of the divided loyalties which afflicted him (he was a strong German patriot), von Trott zu Solz was a convinced anti-Nazi who believed passionately in the ecumenical Christian idea as taught by men like Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Tried before the People’s Court for his complicity in the von Stauffenberg conspiracy of 20 July 1944, he was sentenced to death and hanged in Berlin's Plotzensee prison on 26 August of the same year.
Views
The Protestant piety of his mother and his Anglo-Saxon background were factors in von Trott zu Solz's anti-Nazism, which was strongly tinged by the belief that only the re-Chnstianization of Germany could preserve it from complete barbarism.