Kreisau Circle

The Kreisau Circle was a German group of professionals, army officers and academics who were opposed to Nazism. It was founded in 1933. Its leader was Count Helmuth von Moltke (1907-1945), and its members frequently held their meetings on his estate. The Kreisau Circle saw defeat in the war as inevitable and post war planning and reorganisation as essential. It laid plans for a new social order built on Christian principles. Members organised a failed coup against Adolf Hitler on 20 July 1944. Eight members of the Circle were subsequently caught and executed, including Von Moltke who was arrested by the Gestapo in January 1944 and hanged in Plotzensee prison in Berlin in 1945. The programmes described here were preserved by two widows of the group, Marion Yorck von Wartenberg and Freya von Moltke, as typescripts entitled "Der Nachlass von Kreisau" (described in the "Nemesis of Power" by Wheeler Bennett, p. 547).