Twenty-first July 1944 was a beautiful summer day. After a midday lunch, all was calm at Lautlingen Castle, the home estate of the Stauffenberg family in Württemberg. Countess Nina von Stauffenberg decided to call her two eldest sons of four children to tell them the terrible news. Her husband, the father of her four children, Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, had been shot the night before as a rebel and a conspirator who saw the assassination of Hitler as the last chance to end the Nazi regime. But she wanted to tell her two sons something else – that she was pregnant. So, in that moment, life and death shook hands, fear and hope mingled, and suddenly everything was in danger; family, tradition, security and the dream of the future.
Her sons Berthold and Heimeran listened open-mouthed. Daughter Valerie and son Franz Ludwig were too young to be present. Berthold and Heimeran found it incredible what their mother was telling them. They adored their father, for them he was a hero who never made mistakes. How this fitted in with what their mother was now telling them, that their father had been wrong and had therefore been shot, but that “our beloved firer had been protected by divine providence”.
The Countess knew that the children would also be questioned, and if they spoke well of their father, they would be in danger. And this despite the fact that her father’s life had been a brilliant one. He was a charismatic personality and a war hero, a man you could rely on. His career was an example of what was demanded in Hitler’s country: he never allowed himself to slip up and was the standard-bearer of the Nazi war doctrine. He took part in the occupation of the Sudetenland in 1938 and the attack on Poland a year later, and it was only a matter of time before he was called up to the General Staff.
But nobody knew that he had been doubting Hitler for quite some time. But it was not always so. Both he and his brother Berthold voted for Hitler – as did much of the nobility – although Claus later became disturbed by the persecution of the Jews. He successfully hid the fact that he was an active plotter of Hitler’s assassination, but when it happened he became a traitor, endangering not only himself but also his family.
The consequences of his actions will be fatal for the family. Nina von Stauffenberg knew it too. Thousands of thoughts raced through her mind. What will happen first? How could she cope with the consequences that would follow? How much time would she have before the Gestapo arrived? Can she at least protect her children? She knew that it would be some time before they discovered where she was, because she was not in her home town of Bamberg, but was spending her holidays with her mother-in-law at Lautlingen Castle.
There was no sense of war there. Most of the men were at the front, but the thunder of the guns did not reach there, nor did the sirens that warned of air raids in the towns. Food was scarce, but a garden and a chicken coop covered basic needs. What was going on elsewhere was reported only by the military leave-takers or by the regular military messages, which could be heard over the radios in the two village taverns. Of course, rumours of military defeats were spread in secret, but no one dared to speak out loud.
She and her husband have come to these places before, as Claus grew up here, but they have also become close to her heart and she loves to spend her holidays here. On this trip, she knew that her holiday was over within a few days of her arrival, on 20 July 1944. She was sitting in the garden with her sister-in-law Mika when a maid came running out of the house and told her that someone had assassinated Hitler, but that Hitler had survived. She was told this by villagers who had heard the news in the inn.
Nina knew that her husband was meeting with disgruntled officers, but she never asked about the details. Claus only told her that the chances of success were only half, but what kind of success, he did not tell her. Could he have been involved in the assassination? Could incriminating material be found on her? She had always been very careful and had burned all the papers, but could she have overlooked something? Perhaps the Gestapo are already investigating their house in Bamberg? She had no choice but to wait for events to unfold. Nor did she know at the time that her husband had tried to kill Hitler twice in the past. The first time had been on 11 July at Obersalzberg and the second time on 15 July in East Prussia at Wolfsschanz, Hitler’s military headquarters.
The next morning, my mother-in-law’s brother went to the village early in the morning and on his return confirmed the terrible news. The radio had announced that the conspirators had been executed, including Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg. Already on the night of 20-21 July, a hasty court had sentenced to death, in addition to Claus, three other high-ranking officers; Albrecht von Quirnheim, Friedrich Olbricht and Werner von Haeften. Lieutenant-General Ludwig Beck had already committed suicide. And Nina learned two more pieces of news. Her husband was the man who put the bomb under the table next to Hitler and was shot dead in Berlin in Bendlerblock.
She was not told the details of the assassination until much later. Claus placed the bomb under the oak table where Hitler was having his consultation and quickly left. He heard the explosion and, convinced that there were no survivors, informed the other conspirators of the successful assassination and they launched the Walkira campaign to seize power. But Hitler survived and acted quickly, leaving the conspirators alone. Nina was convinced that Claus had not acted alone. But why him, when he was actually disabled by the wounds he had received on the battlefield? In Tunisia, he had lost one eye and his right hand in an attack by enemy planes, and was missing two fingers on his left hand. Was he in any condition to adjust the complex mechanism of the bomb so that it exploded at the right time?
She had no choice but to wait and wander in the fields. For two days nothing happened. She knew that this was the calm before the storm and that arrests, interrogations, camps and executions would follow, not only of those directly involved in the conspiracy, but also of their families and children. The one who was suspected of being a conspirator risked that his entire family would suffer. She did not even think of escaping, even though she was at a time advantage. Where was she supposed to go when she was pregnant and had four dependent children?
Arrest, interrogation, camps
“We will root out every last member of the Stauffenberg family”, SS leader Heinrich Himmler told a meeting of all Gauleiters on 3 August. The Gestapo, of course, first searched for Nina in Bamberg and then followed her all the way to Lautlingen. On the night of 23 July 1944, the soldiers knocked on her mother-in-law’s door and did not leave her much time. She was only allowed to take the bare essentials, and then she was stuffed into a car and driven away. The children looked after her, frightened. What will happen to them, Nina wondered. She knew that children of political opponents were deported or given up for adoption to couples who were reliable to the Party.
The ride to the prison in nearby Rottweil took only 30 minutes. She was surprised that she was not being mistreated. “Some were kinder and others less so, but overall I didn’t feel bad.” The prison director was also respectful to her and even brought hot tea to her cell. She spent eight days in prison in Rottweil before being transported by train to Berlin to the Gestapo headquarters on the notorious Prinz-Albrecht Strasse. It was a dark building, a centre of terror and a synonym for a situation in which justice and the law no longer applied. Confessions were extorted in torture chambers and interrogation rooms, and many a prisoner ended his life here before he even came before a Nazi court.
There, Nina was entered in the prison register and taken for questioning to the police headquarters in Alexanderplatz. It was an old police station, crawling with fleas, with small cells, mainly for political prisoners. Nevertheless, as a pregnant woman, she had some advantages. She got cigarettes and some butter. She had no news of what was happening to her children and whether her father-in-law and mother-in-law, or even her mother, who remained in Bamberg, might have been arrested.
The Gestapo interrogated her for hours, asking her about the background to the assassination and other sympathisers of the conspirators. This concerned the Wehrmacht in particular, the one area that the Gestapo had not yet managed to intertwine with its spies and was therefore difficult to control. Nina von Stauffenberg seemed to the Gestapo to be one of the important persons, as they had already discovered several conspirators in the Stauffenberg family, including her husband’s cousin Cäsar von Hofacker and Nina’s great-uncle Berthold, who had already been arrested by the SS on 21 July and hanged three weeks after his arrest.
Nina didn’t know it, of course, but she was afraid for her children and her mother. So she decided to tell the Gestapo what she thought she already knew anyway. “I didn’t talk about the people I didn’t know and the people they didn’t ask me about. I also didn’t sign anything I didn’t want to sign.” She kept quiet about what she knew that would have been important to the Gestapo. Her husband Claus rarely told her about the names of those who were not considered family. “The only name I heard from him was that of the politician Julius Leber, whom I also held in high esteem.”
But Lebr was arrested at the beginning of July 1944 because he was a member of the Kraisauer opposition group, which brought together politicians of completely different stripes. This group had been meeting since the summer of 1940 in Kreisau, Silesia, on the estate of Count James von Moltke, to discuss the necessary reforms. Claus also mentioned several times to Nini General Friedrich Olbricht and Ludwig Beck, the Chief of the General Staff, who had been deposed in 1938, and who, in his view, were the two leading men of the resistance. So she knew a lot, but she kept silent.
After the interrogations were over, she spent lonely nights in her cell. She kept listening to the sirens wailing, announcing the arrival of Allied bombers, and listening for explosions, aware that there were, of course, no shelters for political prisoners. She was greatly supported by the women whose husbands, like hers, were accused of having taken part in the assassination of 20 July. They, too, were separated from their families, and so the criminal responsibility of an entire family for the act of one member brought them together. But in prison she also met political prisoners of another kind. Once a week it was her turn to take a shower, and here she met the wife of the German Communist leader Ernst Thälman, who was crying because she had just learned that her husband had been shot in Buchenwald.
Nina von Stauffenberg was imprisoned for three weeks at Alexandrplatz, but then the Gestapo apparently realised that it could not extract anything more useful from her and sent her to Ravensbrück, which was the largest KZ for women at the time. Here she spent five lonely and terrible months. The Ravensbrück KZ was a huge complex, which was constantly being enlarged by external camps. From 1939 onwards, this women’s camp was filled with Romani women, Red Army prisoners of war, Jewish women, prostitutes, lesbians, criminals, nuns, Jehovah’s Witnesses, families of men who had taken part in the resistance and others.
It also included some well-known female artists; cabaret artists who vaguely hinted at what the Gestapo saw as doubt about the final victory of the German arms. There were writers and also the French singer Juliette Gréco. The camp was a labour camp with several textile and leather production plants, and the prisoners also made parts for V-2 rockets for Siemens. The conditions in Ravensbrück were just as terrible as in the other labour camps, and in the summer the camp was so full that they started to put up more tents.
As a political prisoner, Nina found herself in solitary confinement, in the so-called “bunker”, which was in the block for important people. As a pregnant woman, she was given better food, the same as the SS guards, and in the morning she was given milk porridge. The isolation was the worst, as she had no contact with anyone except the women prisoners who brought her food.
One day, a prisoner told her that Anna von Lerchenfeld was also in the camp. Nina felt nauseous. After all, this is her mother. So, really, the whole Stauffenberg family was responsible for what Claus had done. Before she could meet any more family members, the odyssey of travelling from one place in Germany to another began for her. But no one told her that in August 1944, her children were brought from Lautlingen to a children’s home in Bad Sascha, where they lived under a foreign name.
The nights were the worst. Nina was always a night bird. At home she would stay up late reading and listening to music, but here the lights were turned off at 9pm. She kept telling herself that she had to stay calm and sane – for the sake of her unborn child. She was convinced that she would be executed as soon as it was born. Maybe she would not even be allowed to see him and the child would be just one more orphan. She often thought of her husband Claus, who, despite his death, had not lost his attraction for her. She took up a pen – she was allowed to write – and wrote her will. She lived to see the end of the war, and in it Nina wrote that if the child was a boy, it should be called Claus Albrecht Alexander Henning Maria, and if a girl, Konstanze Alexandra Ruth Maria.
This is the mother of my children
Despite being investigated, she managed to get rid of a photograph taken in the summer of 1933 of her and her husband. They were sitting on the stairs, close together, smiling happily. They were a beautiful couple. She, full of energy and self-confidence, wearing a sleeveless blouse, looked almost boyish, but like a woman who knew what she wanted. He wore his uniform with his cap pushed low on his forehead, his mouth stretched into a grin.
It was love at first sight. When Claus first saw her, he said to himself, “This is the mother of my children.” At the time, Nina was just 16 years old and had just returned from boarding school in Bamberg, where her parents lived. The same year, they got unofficially engaged. In fact, they were not planning to get married at that time. She wanted to go to Lausanne to learn French, and she also liked dancing and going to events. But as the old saying goes, we turn, life turns, and so here too, love overcame her desires.
As a garrison town, Bamberg was a place where it was important to be an officer, and when Claus von Stauffenberg came to Bamberg in the early 1930s as a 22-year-old lieutenant, he immediately caught the attention of the female sex with his extreme politeness. He was talkative, kissing women’s hands, opening doors and helping them to put on their coats. It was not the custom for young men to marry early. Claus also had no guaranteed livelihood, he was at the beginning of his military career, which meant constant moves from one place to another.
That made the meeting of the parents of the two families all the more decisive. After a discussion about what to do with the two youngsters, Nina’s mother announced, “But they’ve already kissed!” There was a deathly silence. In those days, a kiss before marriage was, at least officially, a terrible violation of a moral taboo, or else it was already a promise that could not be avoided.
So on 26 September 1933, Nina and Claus walked down the aisle and then went on their honeymoon to Italy. On their return, they set up an apartment in Bamberg. Between 1936 and 1940 their children, Berthold, Heimeran, Franz-Ludwig and Valeria, were born, and then wartime came. The more the war spread, the less frequent Claus’s visits became, and even at home he had to be always on the alert. Even before the air raid alert had begun, he had already been informed of it.
Nina first noticed that her husband had doubts about Nazi policies when the Saar was annexed to Germany. “Of course, like all of us, he welcomed the annexation of the Saar, the renunciation of the Versailles Treaty and the rearmament. But not with the new uniform and all its glamour. Even then I had the feeling that he was not happy with our patriotic enthusiasm. But I did not understand his hesitation then.”
In early 1943, Claus was transferred to Tunisia, North Africa, where he was severely wounded. When he was brought to Munich, Nina visited him in hospital. He told her, “It is time to save the German Reich.” She replied, “But you are really the man for the job in your condition.” But he was the right man, even if he was unsuccessful. After Claus’s death, Nina naturally mourned, but the whole family noticed that she was very reserved and did not feel the intense pain that everyone expected her to feel.
She accepted her husband’s death almost resignedly. Was she sure it couldn’t all end well? Did she know much more than she admitted? Was she afraid of how the stigma of her husband’s betrayal would affect his reputation and hers in the event of failure? Was she perhaps aware of how things would go on in the event of a successful assassination, since the conspirators could not have been more heterogeneous than they were? Socialists, democrats, communists, conservative officers, monarchists and others, all had their eye on power. In the last weeks before the assassination, Claus and she did not see each other again, as he was in Berlin, and he telephoned her for the last time on 16 July.
After spending five months in Ravensbrück, Nina finally found out what had happened to her children. Many of her relatives were arrested, but only her sister-in-law Melita, the wife of her husband’s brother Alexander, was released and they were able to exchange letters. Melita had a rather unusual profession for a woman at that time, as she was an aeronautical engineer and also a test pilot. The army needed her and she was released. She grew up in a Jewish fur-trading family and married Alexander von Stauffenberg in 1937, even though persecution of Jews was already in full swing and mixed marriages were only approved with strong reservations.
But in 1939, despite her Jewish origin, all that mattered was her professional qualification, which proved so important that she was reclassified as an “Aryan equal”. In the air force, she had the extremely dangerous task of testing target-measuring devices in crashed flights. This saved her life and spared her extended family from the camp. Claus von Stauffenberg trusted her completely and, on the day of the assassination, asked her to fly him to Hitler’s headquarters. However, she was unable to get a suitable plane at such short notice.
She was arrested after the assassination and was held in the same prison in Alexanderplatz in Berlin as Nina until 2 September. She was released as an aviation expert, but her husband remained in prison and was later transferred to a camp. As she was transferred to Berlin-Gatow airport and was constantly in the air, it was difficult to control her once she was free. She was therefore able to send fruit and carrots and winter clothes to Nina in Ravensbrück. She also informed her that her children were in a children’s home in Bad Sascha, so they were not separated and sent for adoption to different families.
At the beginning of 1945, Nina was ordered to prepare for the move. She was frightened. Would she be sent to Berlin for re-interrogation, or would she be executed before the baby was born? The SS man who accompanied her on the train told her that their destination was near Frankfurt/Oder. This did not mean freedom, as she would be under strict surveillance and would not be allowed to have contact with anyone. She was still a political prisoner and did not know what they were going to do with her.
In the evening, she and her entourage arrived in the small town of Seeläsgen, where she was accommodated in the castle of the Count von Castell family. Since mid-1944, it had been used for mothers-to-be, a kind of Nazi maternity hospital. Here, pregnant women from bombed-out areas of East Germany were supposed to give birth in peace. It was registered under the name Nina Schank. She was eight months pregnant and convinced that her baby would be taken away from her after birth. But soon she and the other pregnant women had to move again. The Red Army had already set foot on German soil and this triggered a new wave of refugees. More and more of them came from the East with their families, completely exhausted.
On January 23rd 1945, Nina found herself in Frankfurt/Oder, where chaos awaited her. The city was considered safe because it had not yet been bombed by the Allies, so many refugees were arriving. The streets were full of people arriving by horse-drawn carts, wagons and chaises, many on foot. It was a harsh winter, hospitals were overcrowded, there was a shortage of food and medicine.
“I spent the night in an assembly camp among poor people with coughing children, but also with elegant SS ladies in riding boots – that was my first contact with reality.” What will become of her? She could not stay in the concentration camp because it was strictly isolated and she was not allowed to associate with anyone. But this had some advantages for her. As her companions could not find any solitary confinement for her, she was simply placed in a private clinic as a first-class patient, and the care there was excellent.
She had a photo of her late husband Claus with her and put it on her bedside table. Her SS guard noticed her, disturbed that she was publicly displaying a picture of Hitler’s assassin. However, he did not dare to take the photo away from her, but instructed the nurse to persuade her to put it in a more inconspicuous place.
Chaos before the capitulation
She gave birth to her fifth child, Konstanze, on 27 January 1945 at 5 a.m. in Frankfurt/Oder. In these war times, it was difficult to maintain proper hygiene. Disinfectants were scarce, as were medicines. The laundry no longer worked and the towels and bed linen were filthy. After only a few days, Nina became infected and got a painful inflammation of the uterus. Panic seized her, as she could not travel in such a state if she had to move again, as the front was getting closer and closer and the first echoes of the guns were already being heard.
Nazi propaganda claimed otherwise, but the evacuation of the civilian population had already begun unnoticed. Although she was very weak after giving birth due to fever and severe pain, she had to leave the clinic after only a week. She and her guard boarded the hospital train which was used to transport the sick and wounded to safety in Berlin before the arrival of the Russians. She was very frightened, because Berlin meant repeated interrogations. And then what? A camp and death?
The hospital train was also in chaos. There was no water, no medicine, and the wounded were left to their own devices, screaming in pain. She was on guard and with a baby in her arms, she could not escape anywhere. But the train stopped outside Berlin. The Allies were bombing the city every day and the constant air-raid alerts made it impossible to get the wounded there to safety.
After a full day’s wait, the train was diverted to Potsdam and the wounded were accommodated at St Joseph’s Hospital. Nina, who still had a high fever, was admitted to the maternity ward. Then her newborn child also fell ill with pneumonia. There were no antibiotics and hardly any other medicines, but little by little, little, little Constanze’s condition improved. A Gestapo officer kept appearing in the room to check that Nina was still observing the ban on contact with other patients, but he turned a blind eye whenever her sister-in-law Melita visited. Gatow-Berlin airport was not far from Potsdam, so Melita regularly cycled and visited her.
The Russian offensive aimed at Berlin started in mid-January 1945 and some Germans secretly listened to foreign radio stations, which reported on completely different developments on the fronts than German radio, which constantly reported on successes and strategic retreats. How Nina longed to see her children again and to meet her mother. But Melita gave her the sad news that her mother had died of typhoid fever in the SS Matzkau prison camp on 6 February. She was completely innocent, as she knew nothing of the conspiratorial plans of her son-in-law Claus.
The news of her mother’s death completely devastated Nina. The Gestapo first interned her mother in her house, so that only a few good friends could visit her. On 25 July, she was taken to prison and later to Ravensbrück. She was then mistakenly assigned to the transport of the Rus women. When they tried to shave her head, she resisted vigorously. The guards found out that she was in the wrong transport and that she was subject to “sippenhaft”, i.e. criminal responsibility because of someone in her family. Then a Gestapo officer realised that “Germany’s most shameful enemies” were doing too well and she was sent, together with some of her relatives, to KZ Stutthof near Danzig, and then, because of the approaching front, to KZ Matzkau, where she could not escape typhus. No official burial was planned for the camp inmates. They were put in a coffin and taken away. Where she was buried, her relatives never found out.
On 12 April 1945, little Constanze was baptised in the hospital chapel. It was actually a last-minute baptism, because events unfolded with lightning speed. They were standing in the sacristy when the order to leave came. Accompanied by a gendarme, Nina and the child were taken to the railway station and then onto a train, which by then was no longer running regularly, but which took them via Dresden to Eger, where they had to change to a freight train. The gendarme who accompanied them was angry that he was not being left alone, as he was moving away from the place where he was born and where he had lived a relatively peaceful life.
She didn’t know where she was being taken, and the gendarme refused to tell her. All she knew was that she was now in Schönberg, Bavaria. She wondered, in these chaotic days, was there anyone else interested in her? The gendarme didn’t know what to do with her either, so he took her to the Wehrmacht barracks on the edge of town, and from there she was sent to the local SS branch.
The first thing Nina noticed on the way was a car with a “fast court” sign. Bodies were hanging in the trees by the side of the road, with the word deserter written on a cardboard sign around their necks. More and more soldiers were deserting and trying to hide, and the SS was frantically pursuing and hanging them, while at the same time the Nazis were mobilising anyone who could still walk to stop the approaching Russian troops with an army of old men and children. From September 1944, Hitler also enrolled all men between the ages of 16 and 60 in the Volkssturm, the state militia.
For the first time since her night on stage in Frankfurt, she saw what the real world is like. For many months she had been locked behind the walls of hospitals, prisons and camps, and now she looked in horror at the corpses in the trees. Nine months have passed since her arrest, and in that time Germany has changed completely. The illusion that the war was far away was gone, the regime was crumbling, robberies and shootings were the order of the day. When they arrived at the SS office, the officer behind the desk did not even know what to do with the mother and child. He ordered the gendarme to take them to Plauen, hoping to get rid of them. He claimed that Plauen was not far away, but Nina knew this was not true and protested, although it did not help.
The trains to Plauen were no longer running, so a car driver took them part of the way, and they continued on foot. She knew that no one would have any idea where she was with the baby. They could have been shot on the road and no one would have known what had happened to them. So the three of them walked along the road, passing dead people in ditches. They arrived in Trogen and spent the night with a peasant woman. Chaos reigned here too. Groups of soldiers were wandering here and there, soldiers were running into the woods, others were shooting after them at the command of the officers.
A few days later, the gendarme told her they had to go on. She resisted, exhausted and with a sick child, she saw no point in wandering around the countryside. The gendarme had had enough and told her he was leaving them. Did this mean freedom? And what was she to do with it? She was penniless, without help and without much hope of getting home. She wrote a note to the gendarme saying that he had done his duty and that she and the child would report to the nearest police station. He was satisfied, said a quick goodbye and left, as rumours spread that American soldiers were already in the vicinity. At the beginning of March 1945, American troops crossed the Rhine River at Remagen and slowly penetrated into the interior of Germany. Everywhere, smaller or larger clashes broke out, the Volkssturm ambushed the Americans, and gunfire and explosions were heard.
The family she and her daughter were staying with allowed them to stay with them for a while. This was not a matter of course, as food was extremely scarce and sometimes not even money could buy it. So people often helped themselves and took what they could get their hands on.
“There was an abandoned camp nearby and people looted it. My farmer’s two young sons were also there. They brought food. The farmer’s family was very kind to us and shared everything they had with us. Because of the danger of bombing, all the lights had to be switched off in Trogen even at night. Anyone who did not comply was severely punished. So we were all sitting together in the dark in the evening. Suddenly, American troops arrived, first reconnaissance vehicles, then armoured vehicles. They came and immediately went on.”
Of course, she could not stay in Trogene forever, but she did not dare to go on alone with her child and unaccompanied. A few days later, she learned that a count, a friend of her father’s, was living in a nearby town. She and her daughter managed to get through to him. They were warmly welcomed and here she decided to wait for Germany’s surrender. Only then would she dare to continue her journey to Lautlingen.
Because there was no electricity, she couldn’t listen to the radio or make a phone call. She was completely cut off from everything, and everything she learned came from the mouths of the fugitives and the escaped soldiers who walked past the house to the nearest American checkpoint to surrender. “So an unstoppable stream of refugees, mostly from Czechoslovakia, soldiers and officers, poured past us. I heard dramatic stories! It was strictly forbidden to accommodate soldiers, so the Count let them stay in a remote barn. They were thirsty and hungry and gratefully accepted water and potatoes, which they then cooked in their helmets.”
Nobody knew who he was except the Count’s family. She remembered the corpses in the trees and realised that everyone knew who Stauffenberg was. Soon she could find herself in front of a hasty court presided over by some overzealous Nazi. She could not move freely without the necessary papers, and there were American checkpoints at every turn, which could not be avoided. The situation was still tense, Germany had not yet capitulated, and in some places German soldiers were still occupying some places, while in others the Americans were already a few kilometres away, so that everyone had to have a suitable response. Anyone who acted suspiciously was going to get a bullet.
But the mayor of Unterhartmannsreuth was kind enough to make her identity papers with her real name. “Every new document had to have a fingerprint, at the request of the Americans, and that’s how some people found out about me. One of them was the chairman of the district council, who had just come from the concentration camp and who gave me his car. So I was able to go and look for my children. But where do I start?”
Little Constanze, meanwhile, was doing badly. Because Nina could not breastfeed her enough, she put some flour in her diluted milk, which caused itchy rashes. The little girl cried and scratched herself, so her hands and feet had to be bandaged.
What about the children?
She drove to Heinersreuth, her father’s home estate, and finally met her immediate family there. They looked at her as if she had risen from the dead. They all believed that she was dead, because from the moment she left Ravensbrück they had not heard from her again. First she asked where her children were. Are they still in Bad Sascha? No one knew the answer, but someone was able to say that the camp inmates who had come from Buchenwald had told us that there was also a group of German children there.
Buchenwald! Not that, because no one comes out of there alive, especially not the children, Nina thought. She quickly went to the Buchenwald camp near Weimar to look for her children. But the journey was in vain, as no one had seen any children fitting the description. She then tried Schönberg, as the original intention was to transport the children there. They were not there either. Despairing, she returned home to bad news. On 8 April, her sister-in-law Melita, who had helped her so much and who was the only member of the family not to be imprisoned, was shot down by an American fighter and died of her serious wounds.
Nina had only one option, to travel to Bad Sascha and find out what had happened to her children at the children’s home. If they were still there, it was high time to take them away, because the Russians would soon be invading. But just as she was about to set off, a car pulled up outside the house and her mother-in-law’s friend and – she could hardly believe her eyes – her son Berthold got out. They travelled across the country from place to place, where they thought Nina might be. She could hardly wait to return to Lautingen and embrace her children.
Even the children did not know if their mother was still alive. All they were told was that something bad had happened to their parents. In the days and weeks that followed, Nina found out what had happened to her children in Bad Sascha during this time. There, the Gestapo had interned a whole group of children whose fathers had been involved in the assassination, including the children of her uncle Berthold von Stauffenberg. The children’s home consisted of seven identically built houses. The children mostly did not know each other and lived in the home under assumed names.
Cäsar von Hofacker’s son recalled how they met one night: “I was in house 3 with ten children. One evening, when the lights went out, we gathered in the hall where we were sleeping and told each other our real names. That’s how I met some of my relatives.”
The children were then indeed taken to Buchenwald KZ, where the parents of some of them were imprisoned. They were on their way to the railway station in a closed lorry when the air-raid alarm sounded. They jumped out of the truck and sought shelter in an alley. When the alarm was over, they continued in the truck towards the station, but were stopped by a policeman who told them that the station had been completely demolished and that the trains were no longer running. So they were returned to Bad Sascha. They were thus spared the camp.
After the last fierce fighting, in which a children’s home was bombed, American soldiers appeared and presented them with sweets. A few days later, they still did not know what to do with them. Finally, the mayor of Bad Sascha, who had just been released from the KZ, came to them, gathered them together and said, “You can be proud of your fathers.” The children did not know what to say and just looked at him puzzled. For months they had been told that their fathers were traitors and conspirators. Even Nina said to her sons Berthold and Heimeran: “Daddy was wrong.”
Nina did not tell the children what happened to her. All that mattered was that she survived and that she was together with her children again. It is important to look forward, she told herself. But how, because she couldn’t pretend as if nothing had happened and live a normal life? What was normal for her now? What was left of the life she had before 20 July 1944? Her life was just a pile of rubble. In the confused situation that prevailed after the end of the war, she was only aware of how tired she had become. Today we would say that she was a victim of post-traumatic stress. But who knew then anything about psychological help for those traumatised by the events of war.
So, in Lautlingen, she and her children moved into the castle’s forestry house, as there was no more room in the castle. They ate in the castle and most of the social life took place there. Her mother-in-law Caroline’s sisters, her sister-in-law, the wife of Claus’s brother Berthold, as well as seven children, maids, a cook and business people lived in the castle. It was not easy to organise life for so many people and to take care of the other relatives and guests who came regularly, but Claus’s mother ran the large household with an iron hand. It was, however, a life of wives without husbands.
Why was everyone silent?
What kept Nina most busy and heavy at the time was the devastating realisation of what kind of country the Third Reich had been in the first place. Photographs, films and stories came to light, revealing the true extent of Nazi atrocities. Nina experienced a glimpse of this in Ravensbrück, but what was happening everywhere else was beyond her imagination. No wonder, after all, Nina von Stauffenberg was only a privileged political prisoner. She was threatened with death, but she was not beaten, she had little but enough to eat, her children were taken away from her, but the Nazis always made sure that she remained alive until the final judgment.
Of course, after the war, adults talked about the horrors that had been discovered. But it is well known that in the immediate aftermath of the war, nobody in Germany liked to deal with the past. A 1942 leaflet of the White Rose student resistance movement said: “Why do the German people behave so apathetically in the face of these terrible and inhuman crimes? Hardly anyone thinks anything about it. The German nation continues to sleep its foolish sleep and gives the Nazi criminals the courage and the opportunity to rage on. And that is what they are doing.”
These accusations are in fact what the whole world thought of Germany. Why were they silent, why did they do nothing? There was no serious resistance to the regime, which would have reached wider sections of the population. Even the assassins with Claus von Stauffenberg at their head on 20 July were just a small group of disgruntled officers without any wider support.
Nina eventually took over the kitchen in Lautlingen, which was then in the French occupation zone. The French knew who Claus von Stauffenberg was and treated the family almost respectfully, leaving the castle and its inhabitants alone. Nina rarely came to breakfast, slept late, gave instructions for lunch in the kitchen, then went to her room and reappeared for dinner.
She also started to rebuild her parents’ house in Bamberg, which was in the American occupation zone and had not only been partially demolished but also looted. She was determined to move in with her children one day. It took eight years, until 1953, for the family to actually move to Bamberg, and that was only because Nina had received a large general’s pension from her husband and could afford to rebuild the house. This was a nice gesture by the authorities, because Claus von Stauffenberg was, after all, only a colonel and had been promoted to general posthumously, so to speak.
Nina von Stauffenberg never remarried, nor did any of the other widows of the conspirators. She was still a beautiful woman. She kept the memory of her husband alive and consciously avoided making too much of a cult of him. A photograph of her husband was always in the house, but it was never made into an altar. But even in Germany they did not like to glorify conspirators. Immediately after the war, nobody saw the German resistance against Hitler as a heroic act. Nina soon realised this. She had to wait a long time for public recognition of the merits of her husband and the conspirators.
Even abroad, it was only hesitantly acknowledged that there was such a thing as active German resistance to Nazism. The first to acknowledge the role of the conspirators was Winston Churchill: “There was an opposition in Germany which may be regarded as the noblest and the greatest that can be produced in the political history of nations. They fought without help from without or within, driven by a restless conscience. Their deeds and sacrifices are the foundation on which reconstruction can be built.”
But it would be nine years before the first official commemoration of the conspirators. On 20 July 1954, the then German President Theodor Heuss spoke of a “different Germany” on Berlin’s Bendlerstrasse, the place where Claus von Stauffenberg and others ended up. But it was this ‘different Germany’ that still aroused suspicion and even resistance in the country. For some, the conspirators were traitors to their homeland, others despised them as elitist nationalist junkers who would not bring democracy to Germany after a successful coup.
Nina only followed these discussions from afar. She always attended the commemorations, but she remained in the background. She rarely spoke to journalists, and in the end not at all, because too often she was misunderstood or misquoted. A few years later, she took on two tasks that she considered important. She wanted to improve understanding between American officers and Germans and to preserve the monuments of the past. She was therefore very sad, but also very happy, when she sold the castle at Lautlingen.
It was bought by the municipality and turned into a museum of the events of 20 July 1944. It was opened in 2007 to commemorate the centenary of Claus von Stauffenberg’s birth. However, Nina was no longer living in Lautlingen at that time, because everything that meant anything to her was in Bamberg. Bamberg was in the American occupation zone and many Germans did not see the Americans as liberators, but as unpleasant new masters. It bothered Nina that a climate of revanchism against the American soldiers was slowly being restored. She was one of the founders of a club where Americans and Germans met to exchange views.
Over the years, she has become more and more distant from everything. She liked to be alone with her memories of her past life, but she became completely estranged from everyone when her daughter Valerija died of leukaemia in 1966 at the age of 25. Nina von Stauffenberg died one Sunday, 2 April 2006, in the company of her family, aged 93. She outlived her husband Claus by 62 years. There were no official speeches at the funeral and it was no longer an event of interest to the media.
