Last Letters
By Freya and Helmuth James von Moltke (translated by Shelley Frisch)
NYRB, 432pp, £14.99/$18.95
In any society the number of people who are prepared to suffer for their beliefs and principles is generally very small. This is especially true in times of persecution, as was the case in the Third Reich, where overt opposition to the Nazi regime meant imprisonment and death.
Count Helmuth James von Moltke and his wife, Freya, were one such couple.
A member of the Prussian nobility and an Anglophile, he had trained as a lawyer and was opposed to the Nazis from the beginning. He was conscripted to work in the foreign division of the armed forces High Command at the start of the war, and he did what he could to uphold international legal standards, defend dispossessed Jews and safeguard the treatment of prisoners of war.
