Hans von Lehndorff

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Hans Graf von Lehndorff (born April 13, 1910 in Graditz near Torgau, † September 4, 1987 in Bonn ) was a German surgeon and writer .

Live and act

Hans von Lehndorff's father, the Landstallmeister Siegfried Graf Lehndorff , head of the Prussian main studs of Graditz and Trakehnen , had the daughter Maria von Elard von Oldenburg-Januschau from Gut Januschau not far from Deutsch Eylau in the district of Rosenberg i. Western pr. got married. Mother Maria von Oldenburg and her numerous children often visited the estate. Two of her sons died during World War II . In 1944 Lehndorff's mother was arrested by the National Socialists because of her steadfast attitude towards a pastor friend . In 1945 she and her eldest son were shot by Red Army soldiers while they were fleeing on a trek west . A cousin of Hans Graf Lehndorff, Heinrich Graf von Lehndorff-Steinort , was hanged as a resistance fighter after the assassination attempt on July 20, 1944 .

Hans Graf von Lehndorff, who had studied medicine and became a surgeon, came into contact as an assistant doctor at the district hospital in Insterburg at the end of 1941 with a group of Protestant lay people who had come together at a time of growing political distress. From this group, paths led him to the Evangelical Confessing Church and to internal resistance against National Socialism . Lehndorff was not drafted into the Wehrmacht because he was indispensable in the hospital. At the beginning of 1945 he headed a hospital in Königsberg and witnessed the battle for Königsberg and the capture of the city by the Red Army . After months of bombardment of the largely enclosed and destroyed city with artillery and low-flying aircraft, he cared for the wounded, the sick and giving birth in hospitals, bunkers and cellars, and held devotions and Bible readings. He did not take an opportunity to flee the city, also motivated by his Christian faith. Lehndorff continued to work as a doctor, even when the situation in Königsberg, after the conquest by the Red Army, with looting, murders and mass rapes in the city, which was turned into a sea of ​​flames by arson, turned into an apocalypse. "I am so wiped out that I can not even pray", "This is man without God, man's grimace", "Can you even write about these things, the most terrible things that exist among people?" Lehndorff made Also with the temporary expulsion of the Königsberg population in April 1945 to Samland , came to the internment camp Rothenstein of the NKVD and then continued his medical work under extreme conditions until October 1945 in the city ravaged by hunger, epidemics and massive deaths. Then Lehndorff fought his way through to western East Prussia and neighboring West Prussia, a region that he knew well from his childhood and youth through visits to his grandparents. He lived illegally under miserable conditions between remaining Germans, Poles and Soviet occupation soldiers. Often on the run, he worked with medical assistance and received in kind. At the manor cemetery in Januschau, he temporarily put the troubled graves of his relatives back in order. In addition to his maternal ancestors, two of his brothers rested there. Lehndorff also tracked down the spot in Kontken near Stuhm where his mother, a brother and sixteen other members of the Januschau trek had been shot by Red Army soldiers. They were buried in a mass grave only weeks after their death. From Rosenberg , where Lehndorff last worked in the hospital, he was allowed to leave for Germany in May 1947.

Lehndorff recorded his experiences from 1945 to 1947 after the conquest of his homeland by Soviet troops in his East Prussian diary , which has been published again and again to this day (the 35th edition was published in 2020) and was also made into a film. The Kaliningrad newspaper Novyje Kolyossa published an excerpt in Russian translation.

1951 Count of Lehndorf was Georg-August University of Göttingen to Dr. med. PhD . He later ran a clinic in Bad Godesberg for many years. He was involved in hospital pastoral care and in diakonia. He was married to Margarethe Countess Finck von Finckenstein .

Lehndorff belonged to the Order of St. John from 1949 as an honorary knight and from 1952 as a legal knight. From 1954 to 1962 he led the Prussian Cooperative of the Order of St. John as commander. His song "Komm in unsre stolze Welt" , composed in 1968, is contained as No. 428 in the current Evangelical Hymnbook (EG) , as No. 833 in the Hymnbook of the Evangelical Reformed Churches of German-speaking Switzerland (RG) and as No. 592 in the Catholic Hymnal of German-speaking Switzerland (KG).

Count Lehndorff died in Bad Godesberg a few months after the death of his wife.

Honors

See also

Works

literature

  • Wolfgang Herbst (Hrsg.): Composers and songwriters of the Protestant hymn book . (= Handbook for the Evangelical Hymnal; Vol. 2). Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Göttingen 1999, ISBN 3-525-50318-0 , p. 193f
  • Volker Klimpel : From Insterburg to Bonn. The surgeon and writer Hans Graf von Lehndorff (1910-1987) . Chirurgische Allgemeine Volume 11, Issue 5 (2010), pp. 313-317

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hans Graf von Lehndorff: East Prussian Diary . dtv, Munich 2010. pp. 67 and 73.
  2. ^ Hans Graf von Lehndorff: East Prussian Diary . Biederstein, Munich 1961, p. 258.
  3. ^ Ostpreussisches Tagebuch dtv Verlag, accessed on May 29, 2020
  4. ↑ Friedrich Schmidt: Kaliningrad's unexplained legacy . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of August 31, 2016, p. 6.
  5. ↑ Dissertation: About iliac blade osteomyelitis .
personal data
SURNAME Lehndorff, Hans von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lehndorff, Hans Graf von (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German surgeon and writer
DATE OF BIRTH April 13, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Graditz
DATE OF DEATH 4th September 1987
Place of death Bonn