Christabel Bielenberg

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Christabel Bielenberg (born Christabel Burton June 18, 1909 in London ; died November 2, 2003 in Tullow ) was a British writer who lived with her husband Peter Bielenberg in Germany during the Nazi era . She and her husband belonged to circles of resistance against the Hitler state . She wrote two autobiographical books about it.

Signature of Christabel Bielenberg.jpg

origin

Christabel Mary Burton was raised in the London borough of Totteridge in an Anglo-Irish family who had large and famous relatives. Her father Percy was a Lieutenant Colonel in the British Army . Her mother Christabel Harmsworth was the twelfth child and first daughter in the Harmsworth family, her brothers included the owners of the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror newspapers Lord Alfred Harmsworth and Lord Rothermere - who for a time had little hidden sympathies for fascism on the continent - and the liberal politician Cecil Harmsworth (1869–1948), MP and temporary foreign secretary.

Peter Bielenberg in Hamburg

Like her mother, Christabel was a member of a successful upper-middle-class English family, and like her mother, she made her family rebellion. Instead of accepting a scholarship for Somerville College in Oxford, she decided in 1929 to study singing in Hamburg, impressed by the singing skills of Elisabeth Schumann and Lotte Lehmann . There she met the lawyer son Peter Bielenberg (born December 13, 1911; † March 13, 2001), who was two years her junior , and who had a career as a lawyer and notary in the Hamburg upper class of the Hanseatic League. Their love defied the traditional marriage requirements and the two married in London in 1934, without Peter having finished his legal training, against opposition, but with the blessing from both parental homes (II, p. 251). The couple had three children, Nick, John and Christopher. Christabel surrendered her British passport and received a German passport with a swastika.

The political conditions in Germany were repugnant for both of them, but they could only rebel inwardly and only show their resistance with small gestures. When her Hamburg pediatrician, the Jew Professor Bauer, was no longer allowed to treat her children because of the Nuremberg Laws , and shortly before they finally resigned (I, p. 27) and implemented the planned move to Ireland, Adam von Trott came to the rescue Solz , a college friend of Peters who had also worked in his father's office, returned to Germany after studying abroad in the USA and China at the end of 1938 and won Peter over to join the Berlin bureaucracy of the German Reich in order to get a better understanding of the situation to act.

Berlin

Friend Adam around 1938

Peter Bielenberg got a job in the Ministry of Economics and Trott began his work in the Empire State Department made to link the wires of resistance. The first action and the first disappointment were the efforts to prevent the outbreak of war in 1939 by means of a diplomatic initiative, with which the illusions of Hitler and Ribbentrop about a further English stagnation in German policy on Poland should be dispelled. Christabel describes the situation in August 1939 with British sarcasm: the German resistance members found no interlocutors in the London ministries, because on August 12th the traditional grouse hunt began with the Glorious Twelfth (I, p. 45).

Resistance to National Socialism

They bought the house in Falkenried in Berlin-Dahlem in 1939 with foreign currency from "a young Jewish couple" (I, p. 45), who could use it to buy an entry visa. They could not win the trust of the residents of the neighboring house simply in a conversation about the garden hedge, as was exemplified after "a dangerous coffee company" when the wife of the German diplomat Botho von Wussow was denounced (I, p. 96ff). A mutual confidante, Puppi Sarre , made contact with the neighbor Carl Langbehn (I, p. 89), who was the defender of Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff and who, through private contacts with Heinrich Himmler, played a dangerous game to avoid opportunities for one To plumb the fall of Hitler. When Peter had to build a fishmeal factory in occupied Norway, Carl and Hans ( Hans Oster ) played the male protectors of Bielenberg's wife and children (I, p. 119ff).

In the summer of 1943 Christabel moved with the children to Rohrbach in the Black Forest because of the bombing war .

Carl Langbehn was arrested by the Gestapo in September 1943 after a visit to Switzerland during which he had contact with Allen Dulles (I, p. 135).

On July 15, 1944 (I, p. 184) in Graudenz , where he was now employed as operations manager of an aircraft factory, Peter Bielenberg received the message from Trott zu Solz that he should be in Berlin as soon as possible (I, p. 285f) . Peter was well aware of what that meant, even if he was not involved in the immediate actions of July 20, 1944 : After the coup, energetic organizers were needed.

Ravensbrück cell prison today

After the failure of the assassination attempt, Peter Bielenberg was arrested on August 6th (I, p. 171) and driven through the Gestapo prisons in Graudenz and Berlin Lehrter Strasse . From there he ended up in the Ravensbrück concentration camp at the end of August 1944 , with three Freiburg professors on the transport, Adolf Lampe , Constantin von Dietze and Gerhard Ritter (I, p. 291). The prisoners were largely isolated in Ravensbrück, but he found out that Otto Schniewind and Hjalmar Schacht were among his cell neighbors.

Gestapo headquarters

At first he remained in the dark about the execution of Trott zu Solz (on August 26, 1944) and Langbehn (October 12). Despite house arrest, Christabel drove to Peter in Ravensbrück after Christmas 1944 and informed him about the executions so that he no longer had to cover both men during interrogations (I, p. 215). At the beginning of January 1945, she went to Berlin's Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse to see Kriminalrat Herbert Lange , who was investigating the Gestapo into the July assassination attempt. Christabel wanted to make him believe that she and her husband got into the attackers' environment out of pure naivety. In the meantime, Lange had received a draft order for the Wehrmacht and was about to swap the Gestapo's uniform for the gray soldier's coat, which promised to be less sensitive after the foreseeable defeat. Maybe that's why he was accommodating. Peter Bielenberg's imprisonment in Ravensbrück was ended, he was instead transferred to a punitive unit of the Wehrmacht to fight for the “ final victory ” . Whether the unscrupulous Lange, previously commandant of the Kulmhof extermination camp and persecutor of the Solf circle , had promised advantages in view of Christabel's influential relatives remains speculation. Lange is said to have died in April 1945 in the battle for Berlin .

The German bureaucracy was still functioning, it issued Peter Bielenberg food stamps and a military ticket and released him from custody with the necessary papers. He should go to the troops with his marching orders . However, Peter Bielenberg drove to the Black Forest and hid in Rohrbach as a deserter . Christabel dedicated her second memory book to the "people of Rohrbach" out of grateful recognition.

Munny House in Ireland

After the end of the war, they found an apartment with their children in Kronberg , which they tried to share with their Hamburg friends Freda, who had made her way as Wilhelm Furtwängler's secretary , and Johannes Winckelmann , who had also been in the Reich Ministry of Economics. Christabel then took the three sons to England, left the children in boarding school, the youngest with A. S. Neill in Summerhill , and returned in uniform as the Observer's war correspondent . Peter had a job at the American Occupation Authority as an economic expert for the metal company and assessor in the denazification (II, p. 96f). The relationships they now had were used up, so Christabel helped a General Graf Schwerin out of custody in the Dachau internment camp , because he, too, had been involved in one of the futile initiatives before the outbreak of war, the English to take a clearer stand against Hitler to motivate, and got to know David Astor (II, p. 129ff).

The self-pity of the Germans (II, p. 93) and also the Germans' hatred of the traitors wore down the morale of the two and so they decided to start again in 1948 when they bought the dilapidated Irish farm "Munny House" in Tullow and became farmers .

Christabel was able to organize an English foundation initiative for the survivors of the German resistance fighters and secured the help of Marion Countess Dönhoff (II, p. 135). On their farm in Ireland they offered the widows and orphans of Carl, Adam and other resistance fighters a summer residence and refuge for many years. For Marion Dönhoff and also for David Astor this was "a kind of psychological base".

In the 1970s she was an active organizer in the Irish Women’s Movement for an End to the Civil War (II, p. 258).

Her memories are most haunted in a sketch of a conversation with her very close friend Adam von Trott zu Solz , whom she visited in his apartment in Berlin on her return journey from Graudenz to the Black Forest in early 1944 (I, p. 145ff). He recommended her to write a book after the war, and recommended a title for it: "Life among the huns " (I, p. 154). Christabel found the book title “The past is myself” in a birthday calendar of her mother as a daily saying for July 20 from a quotation from Stevenson's “Tales of the Road” (II, p. 255).

After the publication of her first book, she was invited to readings in Germany as a contemporary witness .

On December 10, 1986, she received the Great Federal Cross of Merit .

Works

  • When I was German: 1934 to 1945 - An English woman tells. Authorized German version by Christian Spiel. Biederstein-Verlag, Munich 1969 ( The Past is Myself , 1968, When I was a German , Introduction by Klemens von Klemperer)
  • It was a long way to Munny House: From destroyed post-war Germany to Ireland. Translated from the English by Elke Langbehn. Piper-Verlag, Munich / Zurich, ISBN 3-492-12017-2 ( The Road Ahead , 1970)
  • Peter Bielenberg: The objection to existence in international law . Hamburg 1936
  • Heinrich Riensberg, Olga-Maria Gagel, Ernst Jünger , Christabel Bielenberg: A memory book for Werner Traber. With 38 of his photos from the years 1937 to 1973. o. O., o. J. (Werner Traber, (I, p. 191), became chairman of HAPAG in 1953 )

Movie

Elizabeth Hurley, actress in Christabel

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Citation in the text I = When I was German ; II = It was a long way to Munny House
  2. ↑ Cecil Bisshopp Harmsworth, 1st Baron Harmsworth on thepeerage.com , accessed August 20, 2015.
  3. ^ Obituary in the Independent
  4. ^ Biography Botho von Wussow from the German Resistance Memorial Center
  5. ↑ See action grid .
  6. ↑ It was a long way to get to Munny House , p. 6.
  7. ↑ Nicholas later married Charlotte, the daughter of the executed Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg , the other sons were John and Christopher.
  8. ↑ Klaus Harpprecht : The Countess. Marion Dönhoff. A biography . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2008, p. 403
  9. ↑ "The future is nothing, but the past is myself, it is my own story, the seed of my thoughts today and the mold of my inclination today" The quote is not verifiable, instead from Stevenson: "Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant. " - also without precise information
  10. ↑ Information from the Office of the Federal President
  11. ↑ Christabel (TV series) in the English language Wikipedia
  12. ↑ Christabel in the Internet Movie Database (English)
personal data
SURNAME Bielenberg, Christabel
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Burton, Christabel Mary (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English-German writer
DATE OF BIRTH June 18, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH November 2, 2003
Place of death Tullow