Carl-Dietrich von Trotha

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Carl-Dietrich Ernst Wilhelm von Trotha (born June 25, 1907 in Kreisau , † June 28, 1952 in Fox Lake , Illinois ) was a German lawyer , economist , university professor and senior government councilor . He was a resistance fighter against National Socialism and a member of the Kreisau Circle .

family

He came from the Saxon noble family von Trotha and was the son of the royal Prussian major general Dietrich von Trotha (1857-1914) and his second wife Margarete von Moltke (1879-1946).

Trotha married on October 29, 1933 in Wilhelmshaven the economist Dr. rer. pole. Margarete Bartelt (1907–1995), lecturer at the socio-educational seminar of the Pestalozzi-Froebel-Haus in Berlin , daughter of Mayor Emil Bartelt and his wife Dorothea Gerdsen. The couple has four sons.

Life

Already at the age of 21 Trotha founded a voluntary labor camp for farmers, workers and students with his cousin Helmuth James von Moltke and Horst von Einsiedel with the aim of breaking down social barriers. At the age of 22 he became managing director of the emergency community of the mining area in Silesia. Together with Einsiedel he was a member of the Silesian Young Team as part of the Bundische Deutschen Freischar .

He studied economics and social sciences and later law in Wroclaw . As with his college friend Einsiedel, his professor Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, with his ideas about education and the so-called “labor camp movement”, played a major role in his economic values. He was one of the founders of the Löwenberg working group . In 1933 he received his doctorate from Rosenstock-Huessy with a thesis on state economic control .

In 1936 he became an employee of the Reich Ministry of Economics , initially in the general department of the State Secretary . He later switched to the department for energy management, which he became head of. During this time, too, he kept in close contact with his friend Einsiedel, and together they were in contact with Arvid Harnack and Harro Schulze-Boysen .

As early as the late 1930s he tried to formulate concepts for an economic order together with Moltke and later with Einsiedel. He was one of the first to belong to the Kreisau Circle . His interest in the district was the social market economy and an economic order. He was added to the assassins of July 20, 1944 . However, the Gestapo was unable to provide any evidence .

From May 1945 he worked in the central administration of the newly formed magistrate of Berlin. In 1948 he was a participant in the first world conference of the World Council of Churches . He became co-founder and chairman of the Europa-Union in Berlin and then represented Berlin and the German movement for a united Europe in Strasbourg. During the Berlin blockade , he was a co-founder of the German University of Politics , where he became professor of foreign studies and foreign policy.

He died in 1952 while swimming at night in Fox Lake, Illinois, when he was hit by a motorboat.

Trotha and Einsiedel's visions of Europe and the renunciation of national sovereignty were presented in detail several times in his remarks on a post-war economic order and have basically not lost their relevance.

literature

  • Klaus von Trotha : Carl Dietrich and Margarete von Trotha - Kreisau and the Kreisau Circle (= Stuttgart Stauffenberg Memorial Lecture. Born 2010). Published by the House of History Baden-Württemberg and the Baden-Württemberg State Foundation. Wallstein, Göttingen 2012, ISBN 978-3-8353-0925-8 .
  • Genealogical manual of the nobility , noble houses volume A XXVI, page 557, volume 126 of the complete series, CA Starke Verlag, Limburg (Lahn) 2001, ISSN  0435-2408 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Günter Brakelmann: Helmuth James von Moltke: 1907-1945. A biography. CH Beck, Munich 2009, p. 39 .
  2. ^ Klaus von Trotha: Carl Dietrich and Margarete von Trotha - Kreisau and the Kreisau district. Wallstein, Göttingen 2012; Peter Steinbach; Johannes Tuchel; Ursula Adam: Lexicon of Resistance, 1933–1945. CH Beck, Munich 1998, ISBN 978-3-406-43861-5 , p. 205 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Trotha, Carl-Dietrich von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Trotha, Carl Dietrich Ernst Wilhelm von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer, economist and resistance fighter
DATE OF BIRTH June 25, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Kreisau , Schweidnitz district , Lower Silesia
DATE OF DEATH June 28, 1952
Place of death Fox Lake , Illinois