Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist Obituary

Even obituaries of admirable people can be pleasant surprises...when they lived to a ripe old age and you assumed they had been dead for almost seventy years. Who knew one of the German plotters to kill Hitler was still around?

Von Kleist's life is a good reminder of the moral choices involved in opposing one's own government. Before and during the war, the British (especially), and the Americans refused to have anything to do with the Germans who wanted their help in overthrowing Hitler. I remember the story of one British diplomat in Switzerland who wouldn't even meet in the late 1930s with anti-Hitler Germans. To British diplomats of the time, a traitor was too disreputable a type to have any dealings with, even a traitor to a past and likely future enemy.  There were reasons, of course, for these refusals but none of them bear up very well in hindsight.

When one considers the relationship of the west with Germany in the years after the war, and our less than whole-hearted efforts at de-Nazification, the US and British insistence on unconditional surrender and their rebuff of attempts by German military opponents to Nazism to negotiate an end to the war, seem short sighted. It was the inability to interest Britain and the U.S. in negotiations which ultimately forced the plotters to settle on an assassination plan.

One does have to wonder about the accuracy of the following paragraph from the obituary. Surely, even his "aristocratic roots" didn't qualify von Kleist as a sixteen-year old to travel as an emissary to England to solicit support to overthrow the leader of Germany.

Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist was born on July 10, 1922, in the province of Pomerania, in what was then Prussia. His family had aristocratic roots, and his father had opposed Hitler even before he took control of Germany. In 1938, with Hitler well in charge,  he traveled to England to try to convince the British that their support could help German military leaders overthrow Hitler.