Political Quotes

“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.…”