Germany to honor one of last Nazi resistance leaders

Germany is to honor one of the last members of the anti-Nazi resistance movement on Tuesday, with a memorial service to Freya von Moltke who died at age 98 in the U.S. earlier this year.

Von Moltke, who lived in Vermont from 1960, founded the anti-fascist Kreisau Circle with her husband Helmuth James Graf von Moltke during World War II. Her husband was executed in January 1945, just months before the end of the war.

Tuesday's events include a memorial service in a central Berlin church and an evening concert in von Moltke's honour, attended by her son Helmuth Casper von Moltke.

The Silesian choir and orchestra, conducted by Marek Tracz, is to feature young rising Polish musicians and soloists.

Helmuth Casper von Moltke said the family was honored by the memorial service, explaining that his parents had lived in Berlin for several years after marrying in 1931.

"My mother had a very strong relationship with my father and loyally supported him in his war-time anti-Nazi resistance activity," von Moltke told German Press Agency dpa.

"Even after he had been executed and she was left to raise two small children, there were still no regrets," the retired lawyer said.

Freya von Moltke, whose maiden name was Freya Deichmann, was born into a banking family in Cologne in 1911, and met her future husband when she was 18 and they married in 1931.

In 1932 the couple moved to Berlin where, in 1939, von Moltke was drafted into the Germany army as a specialist in international and martial law.

Throughout the war years, Helmuth James Graf von Moltke insisted on the humane treatment of prisoners-of-war and of civilians in German-occupied territories under the Geneva Convention.

The von Moltkes formed the Kreisau Circle resistance group, which included a number of prominent German diplomats, clergy members and business people.

Freya von Moltke hosted meetings at the family estate in 1942-43, at which group members discussed plans for a "democratic Germany," once the Third Reich had been overthrown or defeated.

The couple's small terraced house in Berlin was also the place of numerous meetings between members of the resistance movement.

Famous 1930s leftwing politician Julius Leber, and conservative Eugen Gerstenmaier - who became a postwar president of the West German parliament - were among those said to be linked to the Kreisau Circle.

The group made contacts with Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, a wartime resistance leader and senior figure within the army who plotted to kill Hitler.

In January 1944, the Gestapo got wind of von Moltke's activities and arrested him - six months before von Stauffenberg's abortive July 20th assassination attempt.

The Nazis executed von Moltke for treason in 1945, a year after his arrest. By then, Red Army forces were moving in on Berlin from the east, and U.S. and British troops were swiftly advancing from the west of the country.

Helmuth Caspar von Moltke was six years old when his father was arrested. "My memories of him still remain strong today, even if they are a young child's memories," he said.

In 1947, Freya von Moltke left a devastated Germany with her two young sons and traveled to South Africa, the birthplace of her mother-in-law.

There, she was a social worker, but her concern at South Africa's apartheid policies drove her out of the country in 1956.

Back in Germany she was soon in the public eye, publishing vivid accounts of the Kreisau Circle's war-time activities.

In 1960 she left for America to join Eugen Rosenstock-Heussy, a professor and social philosopher who had fled Nazi Germany before the war and with whom her husband had studied.

In 1989, von Moltke's husband was posthumously awarded a German literary prize for the letters he had written to his wife from prison, in the months before his execution.

After the collapse of communism in 1989-90, the von Moltke estate was turned into a German-Polish reconciliation site. Now it is an international youth centre, promoting European integration.

Freya von Moltke's funeral took place in Vermont, after her death on January 1, 2010.