Here is a quotation from my review of Michael Phayer, THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE HOLOCAUST (2000):
In excoriating German bishops and their flocks for not doing enough Phayer takes scant account of the conditions under which they lived. A never-delivered letter to an English friend, written by the martyred German Protestant resistance hero Count Helmut von Moltke in March 1943, vividly describes the difficulties of any resistance in wartime Germany: inability to communicate by telephone, post, or messenger; the danger of speaking openly even to trusted friends (who might be arrested and tortured); the exhaustion of people whose energies were fully occupied with the ordinary tasks of day-to-day survival. Most telling is von Moltke’s account of the terror visited by Hitler on his own people: nineteen guillotines executing an estimated fifty people daily, the relatives cowed into silence for fear of suffering the same fate.
The American diplomat George Kennan called von Moltke “the greatest person, morally, and the largest and most enlightened in his concepts that I met on either side of the battle-lines in the Second World War.” Like von Weizsäcker, Moltke held a strategic governmental position in Hitler’s Third Reich, blocking the worst when he could, and paying with his life at the end of the war for his efforts. Phayer makes scant allowance for the conditions which von Moltke described in this letter. The full text can be found in a remarkable and too little noticed book: Beate Ruhm von Oppen (ed.), Letters to Freya 1939-1945 (New York, Knopf: 1990), pp. 281-290.
George Kennan, successively U.S. ambassador to Germany & the USSR during World War II, called her husband, Helmuth von Moltke, the finest man he had met on either side of the battle lines. His letters to his wife are in a fine book, LETTERS TO FREYA.
Here is a quotation from my review of Michael Phayer, THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE HOLOCAUST (2000):
In excoriating German bishops and their flocks for not doing enough Phayer takes scant account of the conditions under which they lived. A never-delivered letter to an English friend, written by the martyred German Protestant resistance hero Count Helmut von Moltke in March 1943, vividly describes the difficulties of any resistance in wartime Germany: inability to communicate by telephone, post, or messenger; the danger of speaking openly even to trusted friends (who might be arrested and tortured); the exhaustion of people whose energies were fully occupied with the ordinary tasks of day-to-day survival. Most telling is von Moltke’s account of the terror visited by Hitler on his own people: nineteen guillotines executing an estimated fifty people daily, the relatives cowed into silence for fear of suffering the same fate.
The American diplomat George Kennan called von Moltke “the greatest person, morally, and the largest and most enlightened in his concepts that I met on either side of the battle-lines in the Second World War.” Like von Weizsäcker, Moltke held a strategic governmental position in Hitler’s Third Reich, blocking the worst when he could, and paying with his life at the end of the war for his efforts. Phayer makes scant allowance for the conditions which von Moltke described in this letter. The full text can be found in a remarkable and too little noticed book: Beate Ruhm von Oppen (ed.), Letters to Freya 1939-1945 (New York, Knopf: 1990), pp. 281-290.