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Freya Gräfin von Moltke

March 29, 1911 - January 01, 2010
Freya Gräfin von Moltke Freya Gräfin von Moltke 

Freya Gräfin von Moltke grew up in Cologne. She was the daughter of the banker Carl Theodor Deichmann and his wife Ada. On her mother’s advice, she attended a women’s agricultural school but later gained her university entrance qualifications and then a PhD in law in Berlin. She met Helmuth James Graf von Moltke in 1929 and they married in 1931. Their first son Helmuth Caspar was born in 1937, followed by Konrad in 1941. Freya ran the estate in Kreisau during her husband’s absence. Helmuth informed her of his contacts and conversations in daily letters. Freya was her husband’s closest confidante and regularly participated in the meetings and discussions in Kreisau and Berlin. She transcribed some of the circle’s fundamental texts and saved her husband’s documents and letters by hiding them in her beehives on the Kreisau estate. The Gestapo was not aware of her involvement. Unlike her husband, for whose release she campaigned unsuccessfully, she survived the end of the war. From 1947 to 1956, she and her sons lived in South Africa, the home of her deceased mother-in-law, where she earned a living as a social worker. In 1960 she joined the cultural philosopher Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, who had strongly influenced Helmuth James Graf von Moltke in his youth, in Norwich, Vermont in the United States. In the 1970s she began transcribing her husband’s over 1,600 letters.

12 The Kreisau Circle