[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 17 (Thursday, February 4, 2010)]
[Senate]
[Pages S478-S479]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      REMEMBERING FREYA VON MOLTKE

  Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, I rise to speak in memory of Freya von 
Moltke, an extraordinary woman and long-time resident of Norwich, VT, 
who passed away this January 1 at the age of 98.
  In 1929, at the age of 18, Freya met the young lawyer Helmuth von 
Moltke, and 2 years later she married him. Freya earned her own law 
degree in 1935 but never practiced; law had already begun to lose its 
meaning as Hitler and the Nazi party tightened their grip on power. It 
was for the same reason that Helmuth gave up his dreams of becoming a 
judge and of working closer to the family estate in Kreisau, in 
Silesia, now a part of Poland. Instead, he opened a small law office in 
Berlin, where he could remain independent of the regime without drawing 
attention to himself. He and Freya divided their time between the 
family estate and his apartment in Berlin.
  In the last years before the war, they traveled to South Africa to 
visit Helmuth's mother's parents in South Africa. On those trips they 
spoke openly of what the Nazi regime was capable of, and were 
constantly urged not to return to Germany. But they felt responsible, 
for their broader family, the estate, and Germany's fate; they felt 
they had no choice but to return. Helmuth's work as an attorney came to 
an end at the outbreak of the war in 1939, when he was drafted into the 
German army's intelligence service. Freya settled into overseeing the 
farm in Kreisau in his absence, and the flood of letters between them 
began. Helmuth came home whenever he could. They welcomed their first 
son Helmuth Caspar, in 1937 and their second, Konrad, in 1941.
  It was clear to the von Moltkes from the beginning that the Nazi 
regime was criminal, but moving from opposition to active resistance 
was a giant step. When Helmuth told Freya that he knew he had to do 
what he could to resist, she gave him her complete support. Slowly 
Helmuth gathered a loose group of friends and friends of friends, 
people who could be trusted, people who represented almost every class 
and interest group outside the Nazi party. He spent his evenings in 
Berlin meeting with them in small groups, discussing what would 
eventually have to be done to undo the damage to Germany by the Nazis. 
Only on a few memorable occasions did they all dare to meet together; 
Freya and Helmuth invited the whole group to gather for seemingly 
innocent weekends in Kreisau. There they were able to hammer out 
together their plans for the longed-for day when the Nazi regime would 
finally fall--their plans for a new Germany, a democratic Germany 
embedded in a renewed and democratic Europe. Freya not only 
participated in the discussions; she also took care of everyone's room 
and board.
  Early in 1944, Helmuth was imprisoned for warning an acquaintance of 
his imminent arrest. In July of that year, many of his friends 
participated in an attempt to assassinate Hitler. It failed, and many 
of them lost their lives immediately. In the aftermath, the Gestapo 
began to uncover the connections leading from one resistance group to 
another, including the one they called the ``Kreisau Circle.'' Most of 
the surviving members of the group soon joined Helmuth in prison. Most 
were tried before the infamous People's Court, convicted, and sentenced 
to death. Helmuth himself was executed in January of 1945.
  Between her trips to Berlin to make appeals for Helmuth's life, Freya 
took in a growing group of their friends' widows and children at 
Kreisau. In the face of the Soviet advance, she moved them all into 
nearby Czechoslovakia, only to find that it was safer to move them home 
again. Through the intervention of British friends, she and her 
children at last managed to leave Kreisau for Berlin, but they soon 
left Germany for South Africa, where Freya made her living as a social 
worker.
  In 1956, unable to tolerate apartheid any longer, Freya returned to 
Germany. In Berlin she began her work to keep the memory of the German 
resistance to Hitler alive; she also began to transcribe Helmuth's 
letters, which, along with the minutes of the Kreisau Circle's 
meetings, she had hidden from the Gestapo in the beehives on the 
estate. She published Helmuth's final letters from prison very soon 
after the end of the war. In 1988, many of the thousands of letters he 
had written her between the summer of 1939 and his death appeared in 
Englishas ``Letters to Freya.''
  It was in September of 1960 that Freya moved to Norwich, VT. She 
moved to Norwich to join her close friend--and her husband's--Eugen 
Rosenstock-Huessy, whose wife had died the year before. Freya lived 
with him until his death in 1973, and after his death she founded a 
nonprofit to keep his books in print; she was president of that group 
until the 1990s, by which time they had over 60 titles in print. Freya 
served for years on the board of the Co-op supermarket in Hanover, NH, 
and with friends from the Co-op board she went on to found the Twin 
Pines Cooperative Housing Foundation, the first group to try to develop 
affordable housing in that part of Vermont and the first in the State 
to establish a tenant-owned housing cooperative.
  At 75, after many years in Norwich, Freya became an American citizen 
and an active member of the League of Women Voters. At 93 she agreed to 
speak in Berlin on the 60th anniversary of the failed assassination 
attempt, but for many years she had spoken in Vermont high schools 
about what she and her husband and their friends had done and the need 
for courage in the face of injustice in any society. Students from one 
school she visited for years sent flowers to her funeral.
  It is no simple feat for a foreigner to become accepted as a 
``natural'' part of a small town in northern New England, but Freya did 
it. In 1985, the owner of Dan & Whit's general store in Norwich ran 
into her in the post office. He reacted to the flood of unfamiliar 
faces by telling her, ``Let them come. We were here first.'' His 
gallant inclusion of her as a ``native'' after only 25 years in town 
moved Freya deeply. Her own hospitality is reflected in the sign she 
tacked to her unlocked kitchen door at the age of 90: ``To Everybody! 
Please, walk in! Push hard. Find me upstairs if I don't respond.''
  Freya was firm in her belief that the territory Germany had lost, the 
land her family had lost, was the price Germany had to pay for the 
crimes of the Nazi regime. But she had hopes for what had been the 
family estate. In 1988, a group of young people in East Germany had the 
idea of making the former von Moltke estate a place where people from 
divided Europe could meet and get to know each other; they found 
friends in Poland, but also in West Germany, in Holland and the United 
States. Only a year later, a friend of their Polish friends became the 
prime minister of Poland and invited the chancellor of Germany to meet 
him for a mass of reconciliation in Kreisau. The two men agreed to fund 
the restoration of Kreisau, now called Kryzowa. The German chancellor 
had invited Freya to accompany him, but she said she would wait until 
the Poles invited her, which they soon did. In her final years, she 
lent her name and her blessing to a foundation to support the new 
Kreisau, which with support from the German and Polish governments has 
grown in 20 years from the dream of a few young people to an 
international meeting place that hosts about 100 events a year, 
attended by some 10,000 young people from all over Europe.
  Freya von Moltke was an inspiration to all who knew her. She was a 
wonderful friend and neighbor, and she enriched the lives of countless 
citizens of

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our State. She lived a long and fruitful life; she will be missed by 
admirers around the world, but most of all by the Vermonters who knew 
and loved her.

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