© Eichborn Verlag
A Young Couple. Time Passes Differently
((pp. 124 to 141 in the original edition))
During the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, between the opening ceremony on August 1 and the closing ceremony on August 16, Heinrich repeatedly looked for Gottliebe. She was busy day and night, however, and only rarely available to speak with him because she had to look after foreign visitors. She accompanied them from one festivity to the next. Nobody slept much during those summer days; the atmosphere was too scintillating in a buoyant Berlin that was trying to dismiss all shadows and dark forebodings for those two weeks. The days never ended, the nights were short and filled with innumerable balls where young people met summer guests of their own age and danced, just as their parents had at fêtes in Kaiser-era Berlin. Except that the music was more modern, and the lyrics sometimes seemed frivolous. The many young athletes from other countries brought an international flair to Berlin for one last time.
When those days came to an end, the always bustling and idolized hostess was approaching the limits of her strength. She had a fever and developed a sore throat. For this, Heinrich had the only right idea. He packed the utterly fatigued Gottliebe into his car and drove his exhausted and yet joyous girlfriend to Steinort (almost non-stop), put her into a soft bed in a large cool room and let her sleep around the clock. Just how seriously he was taking the matter can be gauged by the fact that he interrupted the trip only once, namely, in Graditz, so he could ask Gottliebe's father for permission to abduct his daughter to Steinort for 14 days. That was the good, old-school way, but it also entailed a pledge. As a result, Gottliebe found herself in a completely novel situation: there were no parents at home and no relatives. A young woman who had just turned 23 and a young man of 26 were left to their own devices, surrounded by one of East Prussia's loveliest country estates. From the balcony on the front side of the castle they could see the sailboats on Lake Dargainensee, and behind the park lay the vast expanses of Lake Mauersee.
[photo caption p. 125: Arriving at Steinort]
Yet the couple's late-night arrival was still to hold a few surprises, as Gottliebe recalls: “We arrived in the middle of the night. Heini opened the doors. As we entered the house, I let out a scream. A bat had become tangled in my hair. ‘Nothing to fear!’ Heini called out. ‘We’re in the country here, so we have big animals and little ones, too.’ Heini turned on the lights, and now I was jolted by a pleasant shock. That hallway! To me it looked as if everything had been covered with gold. Portraits of the Lehndorff's ancestors lined the walls up to the ceiling. In the center of the ceiling were the Lehndorff and Dönhoff family crests. I opened one of the large cabinets and was jolted by another shock. Silver trays, ceramic vases, and broken porcelain came tumbling out. I looked at Heini aghast. I wanted to tell him that I couldn’t help it. He said, ‘Never mind. Don't worry about it. You know, that's all from my Uncle Carol. He was a bachelor and just stuffed everything into a cabinet.’
[photo caption p. 126: Avenue of oaks at Steinort]
As Gottliebe later told her children and nephews, after she had slept for an entire day and night, the two descendants of comital stock set out on a long walk through the woods, along the lake and over the fields. He described the steps he would take to modernize his business operations. He was convinced there was no place more beautiful to live in the whole world. For a long time he sat with her at the edge of a field that had already been harvested of its grain, speaking quietly and thoughtfully in his rich, sonorous voice. He picked up some earth, crumbled it in his hand, and explained how much terrestrial life a handful of dirt contains, and how one needed to treat the fields in order to preserve the good quality of their soil. “You have to smell this earth, then you'll understand the entire landscape.” At that moment, she fell hopelessly in love with him, with his love of nature, his straightforwardness, his repose. And even if this sounds like the storyline from a film in those days, it was exactly what she felt, and it became a lifetime memory.
"It was very peculiar ... we rode horseback together, sailed – and almost lost our lives in the process – went hunting in the evening, for ducks. Everything was incredibly earthy, real, and big. I was very, very impressed by it. Until then, my world didn’t have that authenticity."
[marginal note p. 127:
From Gottliebe’s blue notebook,
the Lehndorff Family Archive.]
Early in November 1936, the couple became engaged. Two misfortunes overshadowed the following weeks. Heinrich's mother, Harriet, was injured aboard the "Bremen" on her return voyage from a trip to the United States, and in Dresden, Kurt Krahmer had a fatal accident. It was not a particularly appropriate point in time to celebrate a big wedding. All the same, on February 24, 1937, six months after the summer weeks spent in Berlin and at Steinort, Gottliebe and Heinrich were married in Graditz. In keeping with ancient tradition, the parents of the bride arranged the celebration. And even though it was viewed as a love marriage, in this instance the parents of the bride were content as well because Steinort was considered one of the most important enterprises in East Prussia, notwithstanding the financial difficulties it had encountered under Carol's leadership. Both the Lehndorffs and the Kalneins were descended from ancient nobility, few objections could be made in that respect. If nothing else, anyone with eyes in their head could see that Gottliebe was a ravishingly beautiful woman. And so the two of them soon became known as a couple who turned heads as they wafted through the ballrooms of Berlin.
"Niemöller married us. Basically, I had no relationship at all to Christianity or Niemöller. He was a revolutionary, that was the unusual thing about him, and it piqued my interest. But it was nothing personal. The marriage ceremony, Niemöller's speech, the wedding verse, etc., I don’t remember any of it."
[marginal note p. 128: ibid.]
[photo caption p. 128: The wedding in Graditz. Seated to the left of the bridal couple are the Kalneins, parents of the bride.
The Lehndorffs, parents of the groom, are seated to the right.]
Still, the pastor, whose participation Gottliebe reports in such unemotional terms, was no gratuitous adjunct. Apart from Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonnhoeffer, he was the most important personality of the Confessing Church. Martin Niemöller was a former U-boat commander, as was Gottliebe's stepfather, Mellenthin. Much like the latter, he originally stemmed from a strictly conservative-nationalistic background but had emerged as one of the most resolute critics of Nazi ideology at the Confessing Synod in Barmen in 1934. He had protested against the so-called Aryan Paragraph, founded the Pastors’ Emergency League in 1933, and had been summoned to appear before the Gestapo some 20 times. He even had a personal audience with Adolf Hitler in the Reich Chancellery; it had turned so vehement that he had to reckon with being arrested every day from that time on – which he was, two months after the wedding in Graditz. Niemöller was interned until the end of the war in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp as a "special prisoner of the Führer," as was assassin Georg Elser later on. Even during the final days of the war in 1945, he was dragged from location to location along with others whose fate likewise was to be held hostage by Himmler; ultimately, as if by a miracle, these "special prisoners" managed to survive.
We can no longer reconstruct precisely how it came about that Niemöller was invited to serve as pastor for the wedding. It is certain, however, that Heinrich had established close ties to the Confessing Church early on through his cousin Hans; Marion Dönhoff and presumably also Heinrich's parents were card carrying members of the Confessing Church.
For their honeymoon, the young couple traveled to Dubrovnik. Heinrich had not seen much of the world and enjoyed himself immensely. Gottliebe began experiencing the first queasiness of early pregnancy. In the following year, 1937, the couple again ventured abroad to Sicily and Tripoli, which would be their last foray into the wide world together. The year of 1938 was already overshadowed by nervousness and premonitions of the war to come.
Even on their honeymoon, after ten days Heinrich was already anxious to return to Masuria, where the first spring tillage under his oversight lay ahead.
A second wedding celebration was held at home at Steinort, Heinrich placed great value on that. The festivities took place on the Opalten Peninsula, lasted for three days, and included all of the employees, administrators, and farm hands from Steinort’s outlying farms. It was the first major fête the young squire and lord of the castle had arranged, and the first chance for all the residents of Steinort to meet the new lady of the castle. The atmosphere was generous and cordial, and to this day word has it that nothing was lacking. Gottliebe reports: "When we reached the boundary of Steinort, a delegation from the various farms came to meet us. The landholdings of the Steinort estate comprised some 10,000 hectares devoted to farming, forestry, and fishery. One of the five foresters presented us with bread on a rough hewn oaken board and congratulated us on our marriage and our entry onto the estate. Even though I came from the big city, this simple ceremony left a lasting impression on me. Tears filled my eyes, and I made no effort to conceal them. Every person at Steinort had made some small contribution to this day. The front door was garlanded with fir branches. The gardener had prepared huge pots with all sorts of different plants and stood them in the vestibule. An enormous array of cakes had been set out on tables in the reception room. The domestic staff came forward and greeted me. ‘Quick, somebody get a knife,' Heini said. Then he cut a cake into pieces and distributed them among the members of the staff. Everyone stood around munching a piece of cake and enjoying themselves. The ice had been broken."
[photo caption p. 130: Home again after the honeymoon.]
[upper marginal note p. 130:
The correct number is 5500 hectares of farm and wood land.
Presumably the figure in the text includes the surface area of the lake.]
[lower marginal note p. 130:
From Countess Gottliebe von Lehndorff’s unpublished
recollections of Steinort, the Lehndorff Family Archive.]
It was a pity, though, that the wedding didn’t take place in the summer, in the meadows on the estate grounds! On the other hand, the first harvest festival was celebrated there six months later. That was a tradition, and it remained the high point in each of the altogether seven years that Gottliebe and Heinrich von Lehndorff were allowed to spend at Steinort.
It was only their old intimate friends from childhood and adolescence, for example, Heini's sister Sissi who in 1933 married Dieter Dönhoff, the later heir to the von Friedrichstein estate, or cousin Marion, Sissi’s former bridesmaid, who harbored their little misgivings whether the new mistress of Steinort might not be too citified and elegant to feel entirely comfortable in the empty solitude of East Prussia. But such doubts were customary whenever someone married in from the outside. Both Dorothea, the wife of Marion's older brother, Heinrich, (she was a Catholic to boot!) and bourgeois Vera, who in 1931 had ultimately been married to Marion's brother, Toffi, (although against his family’s wishes) had to refute doubts whether they were genuinely suited for the people of East Prussia and their horses. Meanwhile, the young counts apparently had a penchant for falling in love with women who were somewhat different from their sisters and cousins, perhaps even slightly less capable. Instead, they seemed more vulnerable and presumably also more erotic.
Naturally, written records of these initial years at Steinort are sparse. Gottliebe recalls an unbroken stream of projects. The roof had to be repaired. Central heating had to be installed and the kitchen needed renovating. Old furniture and rubbish cluttered the attic. The cellar of the house was flooded. Heini had a large number of oaks felled in the forest so he could pay his inheritance taxes. He liquidated his uncle Carol’s extremely valuable coin collection so he would have the means to invest and modernize. Among other things, this allowed him to buy a modern, Lanz brand tractor.
[photo caption p. 132: Gottliebe also with the dog]
At first, Gottliebe struggled with some uncertainty over the proper way to behave as the new lady of the manor. If it were a question of planning the midday meal or receiving guests, she was to summon the cook, rather than visiting the kitchen herself and seeking her out! She was not to go into the woods alone to gather mushrooms or fruit, but rather have someone accompany her. She was also not supposed to go jogging in the park in her skimpy running shorts, in East Prussia one was not accustomed to that. Altogether there were eight household servants, each of whom had been assigned particular duties; many of them stemmed from Uncle Carol’s days. The young lord and lady energetically went to work removing the dust and must of parlors and rooms that hadn’t been aired in decades. The window with the extensive wood rot was restored. Whenever they opened a drawer, they found piles of broken porcelain, crystal, and damaged minor art treasures that had been hidden by former servants from the strict eyes of Uncle Carol. Heini believed in saving on personnel costs. For example, he reassigned a servant whose main responsibility had been to wind every available clock. In the end, Heini could do that himself! The clocks didn't keep such perfect time after that, but no one was upset. As well, the tradition of polishing all of the silver with sand at regular intervals and drying it with damask napkins was discontinued and reserved for very special occasions.
Heini's main thrust was modernizing his business operations. A worker from one of the farmsteads received special training so that the newly acquired Lanz could be put to optimal use. The drainage canals for the arable fields were cleared and renovated. He had major plans to expand his horse farming and had completed an apprenticeship as a tanner. This not only reflected a custom that applied to other estate owners as well – namely, that each person should have mastered at least one trade – it presumably also played a role in his ideas about processing animal hides himself and thereby increasing his profits. These plans were never realized. Even so, he had the houses in the attached village of Klein-Steinort enlarged in a way that created additional living space under the dormers for the land workers and their frequently numerous children. In contrast, for the time being he postponed measures to improve the castle’s external appearance. Steinort, where the gravel was never clean and the terrace never free of weeds, hadn’t ever been a particularly well groomed let alone an elegant property, but it was beginning to function as a business.
Apart from this, there continued to be time and opportunity for hunting, especially in winter. As soon as the first snow was on the ground, the foresters were called together to find the tracks of wild boar. Then invitations were sent out to impassioned hunters, relatives, and the town notables of Angerburg. A wild boar hunt was an all day affair. Six to eight boar were often taken in one hunt. The months of December and January were rabbit season. Forest workers were deployed as beaters; they knew the terrain and that guaranteed successful hunting. When the hunt was over, hunters and beaters gathered for steaming pea soup served along with grog and beer. "Every year in July there was a duck hunt at Steinort. Because of the estate's large population of ducks and it’s beautiful scenery, the hunt was famous as a social event. Days beforehand, long swaths were cut into the reeds at the edge of the lake. At the call of the hunting horn, beaters wearing tall rubber boots waded through the reeds, driving the ducks into the swaths, where the hunters were waiting for them on unsteady footing. Often, up to 700 ducks would be shot in a day’s hunt. Several times in the summer, at six o'clock in the morning, Heini and I rode out in the motorboat with Schuchardt, the fishery master, to catch whitefish in Lake Dargainensee. The nets for the catch had been set the evening before. You could already tell whether the catch was good or not by the time the nets had been pulled halfway out of the water. If you were lucky, the flapping fish glittered like silver treasure trawled from the lake…
[photo caption p. 135: Gottliebe and Heinrich with fishermen on Lake Mauersee.]
In the wintertime, the Masurian lakes always froze over. That’s when the ice fishing began. For that purpose, holes were broken in the ice at certain points, and nets were pushed from one hole to the next. I once experienced a catch weighing 800 centners. It was only with the greatest difficulty that a number of men were able to raise the nets. Afterwards, the fish were taken to Königsberg…
Paddle boating numbers among my most pleasant memories of Steinort. My boat was docked on the canal that led from the park through the reed belt to Lake Kirsaitensee. Everything was covered with water lilies far out into the lake. White mute swans floated amidst the water lilies with their still-gray young. All day long, the water was populated with rafts of tufted ducks, white-winged scoters, and wild ducks. Seagulls and terns bobbed on the waves. In the spring and fall one could watch flocks of water and marsh fowl that used the Steinort area as a stopover point on their flight from south to north and back again. Every so often, one was lucky enough to spot a sea eagle circling above the bog forests.
The best way to travel the long distances separating the holdings was on horseback. The saddle horses for Steinort were stabled next to the main building. There were four saddle horses. Heini's favorite was named Jaromir, mine was called Fine-Fine. Naturally, during the summer you couldn’t trample down the fields on horseback. But in the fall, after the fields had been cut, you could gallop over the stubble to your heart's content. Fine-Fine enjoyed that. I would get up early for a ride across the fields in the morning mist… There were some 40 producing mares on the Steinort properties, and they would foal every year. After three years, the foals were weaned and prepared for sale. The young horses were cleaned and curried, and their manes and tails were trimmed and styled so that they looked as if a magician had just conjured them onto the field. Everything was prepared for the appearance of the horse market commission.[1] The equerries led the horses in front of the castle and presented them to the commission. As a rule, all horses offered for sale were also purchased. After the sales had been concluded, everyone was invited inside for a meal in the handsome Samson room, thus called because it was furnished with old oak furniture and decorated with five tapestries depicting the story of Samson.
[upper marginal note p. 137:
Countess Gottliebe Lehndorff's recollections
of Steinort, the Lehndorff Family Archive.]
[lower marginal note p. 137:
Source: German Federal Archive, formerly Berlin Document Center,
Central Index of Members of the NSDAP.]
One thing that doesn’t jibe with this story of an intact, perished world is a note reporting that Count Heinrich Lehndorff was accepted as a member (Nr. 5286568) of the Nazi Party[2] on May 1, 1937. Experts are aware that hundreds of thousands of others were simultaneously admitted to the Nazi Party on that date. This followed an outright admissions freeze that began in May 1933 on the grounds that membership had risen from 850,000 in January to 2.5 million in April of that year. Thereafter, the admissions freeze was lifted only for subsidiary organizations such as the Hitler Youth, the Mounted Forces, or the Motorcycle Corps. By 1939, membership exceeded 5 million, and by 1945 it had reached 8.5 million. A membership application signed by Heinrich von Lehndorff has not been found. Nevertheless, it would presumably be too simple to excuse this as a case (and there were many other such cases) where an individual was placed on the Party membership roster both unknowingly and against his will. Nor can we assume that he applied for membership with the intention of camouflaging his preexisting political opposition to the Nazi regime, which definitely applied to Hitler's later enemies, for example, Adam von Trott and Arvid Harnack. We can therefore assume that at some point between 1933 and 1937 Heinrich von Lehndorff actually put his signature on an application for membership in the Nazi Party or one of its subsidiary organizations. But why? Was it because he, like many East Prussian aristocrats who lived close to Stalin’s revolutionary Soviet Union, were thinking primarily in anti-Communist terms? The childhood scene described above, when Heinrich and his cousin Hans fired a shotgun at what they assumed to be a communist gathering, much to the consternation of the parish consistory, shows that militant anti-Communist sentiment was already widespread among the young. Or was it youthful naïveté? In a conversation late in life with her granddaughter, Anna Dönhoff, his sister Karin (Sissi) described what she remembered from her own childhood in terms that were of the same tenor. In her case, the initial involvement with the Nazis sounds almost like an episode from the youth movement. "In certain youth circles, you were a Nazi back then. As a young person in those days, when things were getting underway with National Socialism, you had a certain youthful enthusiasm." She recalled that one night she and several other young people had ridden their bicycles to Serappen together so they could paste up Nazi posters at the train station. Still, at a minimum that entails covering several kilometers in complete darkness. And she recalled yet another situation from the same period. "One time when we had gone skiing, there was an election in Germany. So you had to travel to the next border town in order to vote. And among us young people who were skiing there, only Alexander, who was older… voted for the German National ticket, which was the opposition party. And all of us young people voted for Hitler, for the Nazis. Everyone thought there was something new about it, you just had to get on board and things would turn around again… People today can’t imagine why half of the world didn't rise up in revolt. It was such a crazy thing."
[marginal note on p. 138:
From Anna Dönhoff’s master’s thesis.]
There is no indication of which election she might have meant, and it is also difficult to determine. In 1932 alone, there were two presidential elections and eight elections to the Legislative Assembly. It was a year of crisis and armed conflict verging on civil war between Red Front fighters on one side and gangs of SA/SS thugs on the other. Heini was fully twenty-two years old in 1932, his sister Karin twenty-one. We are not told whether Heini had come along on this skiing vacation which was interrupted for a trip to the polls.
And if his application for Party membership wasn't due to recklessness or naïveté, was it perhaps motivated by opportunism or economic calculation? Was it a decision based on business interests? This would by all means apply to his brother-in-law, Dieter Dönhoff, the later owner of Friedrichstein, who joined the Party in 1933 despite his lack of enthusiasm. Membership seemed useful and advantageous for his future business interests which had suffered substantial setbacks during the world economic crisis.
The exact date of Count Heinrich Lehndorff's admission to the Party is not known because the NSDAP simply let all applications accumulate during the membership freeze. Could it perhaps have been filed in 1935, the year Heinrich presumably finished his military service and subsequently wanted to head for Africa, where – that same year – the other Dönhoff, Christoph (known as Toffi), had entered the Foreign Organization of the NSDAP? Or perhaps he was indulging a whim of opposition; there was a certain rebelliousness about the generation that had been caught “between the fronts." Traditional conservatism seemed too fainthearted for them, too behind the times, and for a while they entertained the idea that National Socialism, once it had shed its extreme aspects, would show itself to be a movement that was both "social and national," and thus modern and timely. That, in turn, does not fit well with the rather liberal-minded and cosmopolitan upbringing he enjoyed, and it doesn't correspond at all to the political orientation of his father who was a signatory of “To the German Nobility,” an appeal encouraging aristocrats to support the Weimar Republic. And what did Gottliebe have to say about all this? She had experienced the Nazi movement's early anti-Semitic excesses from frighteningly close by, and purposely characterized them as the beginning of her own "independent thinking." Was she aware of that he had applied; did he ask her? We don't know. Still, it seems likely that the application was submitted earlier, a good while before the marriage.
All we know for certain is that when war broke out three years later, in 1939, he had already discussed the necessity of a life "on the barricades" with his oppositional brother, Ahasverus; that as early as 1940 he was aware of resistance circles and their plans; and that he himself had joined the innermost circle of conspirators surrounding Henning von Tresckow no later than 1941. Somewhere, sometime, in the life of Heinrich von Lehndorff a deep caesura occurred, a fundamental break with his earlier, occasionally thoughtless and spur-of-the-moment decision making. What matters in life, it would seem, is not lacking experience, making mistakes, and then correcting them, but the degree of decision-making autonomy one attains though one’s own wisdom, experience, and a willingness to put one’s own life at risk.
Still in the same year, on November 28, 1937, Heinrich’s daughter Marie Eleonore (called Nona) was born in Berlin. She saw the light of day at the Hotel Adlon. That sounds more unusual and extravagant than it was. The East Prussian nobility differed from the court aristocrats of Vienna or Paris in that they did not maintain palaces in the capital. From the beginning of the 18th century on, this was a thorn in the side of Prussia's kings, for they would have liked to see the center of up-and-coming Berlin adorned with the imposing palaces of the aristocracy. It would have provided the capital with a look of prestige, particularly as it vied with other major cities. But the East Elbian aristocracy would not comply, presumably more because of the cost than for reasons of independence. When they were in Berlin, they and their entire families lodged at one of the hotels “befitting their rank,” which was assuredly less expensive than the costly upkeep on two major properties with staff.
In any event, the Hotel Adlon was an exclusive address, which explains why Eleonore (Nona) was born there. The delivery was somewhat complicated because Gottliebe was suffering from pyelonephritis. A year and a half later, on May 14, 1939, their daughter Vera was born at the hospital in Königsberg. Their third daughter, Gabriele, was born at Steinort on December 14, 1942, shortly before Christmas and in the very midst of the war. Catherina, their fourth daughter, was born just under two years later on August 15, 1944, in the infirmary attached to Torgau prison, where her mother had been interned after her husband’s escape. Some 14 days later, Catherina's father, Heinrich, whom she would never lay eyes upon, was executed. Gottliebe later remarked, "I'm certain we would have had many more children, if times had been different."
[1] The Lehndorffs sold unbroken young horses which are called Remonten in German.
[2] The official name was Nationalsozialistische deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) (National Socialist German Workers’ Party).
A Young Couple. Time Passes Differently
((pp. 124 to 141 in the original edition))
During the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, between the opening ceremony on August 1 and the closing ceremony on August 16, Heinrich repeatedly looked for Gottliebe. She was busy day and night, however, and only rarely available to speak with him because she had to look after foreign visitors. She accompanied them from one festivity to the next. Nobody slept much during those summer days; the atmosphere was too scintillating in a buoyant Berlin that was trying to dismiss all shadows and dark forebodings for those two weeks. The days never ended, the nights were short and filled with innumerable balls where young people met summer guests of their own age and danced, just as their parents had at fêtes in Kaiser-era Berlin. Except that the music was more modern, and the lyrics sometimes seemed frivolous. The many young athletes from other countries brought an international flair to Berlin for one last time.
When those days came to an end, the always bustling and idolized hostess was approaching the limits of her strength. She had a fever and developed a sore throat. For this, Heinrich had the only right idea. He packed the utterly fatigued Gottliebe into his car and drove his exhausted and yet joyous girlfriend to Steinort (almost non-stop), put her into a soft bed in a large cool room and let her sleep around the clock. Just how seriously he was taking the matter can be gauged by the fact that he interrupted the trip only once, namely, in Graditz, so he could ask Gottliebe's father for permission to abduct his daughter to Steinort for 14 days. That was the good, old-school way, but it also entailed a pledge. As a result, Gottliebe found herself in a completely novel situation: there were no parents at home and no relatives. A young woman who had just turned 23 and a young man of 26 were left to their own devices, surrounded by one of East Prussia's loveliest country estates. From the balcony on the front side of the castle they could see the sailboats on Lake Dargainensee, and behind the park lay the vast expanses of Lake Mauersee.
[photo caption p. 125: Arriving at Steinort]
Yet the couple's late-night arrival was still to hold a few surprises, as Gottliebe recalls: “We arrived in the middle of the night. Heini opened the doors. As we entered the house, I let out a scream. A bat had become tangled in my hair. ‘Nothing to fear!’ Heini called out. ‘We’re in the country here, so we have big animals and little ones, too.’ Heini turned on the lights, and now I was jolted by a pleasant shock. That hallway! To me it looked as if everything had been covered with gold. Portraits of the Lehndorff's ancestors lined the walls up to the ceiling. In the center of the ceiling were the Lehndorff and Dönhoff family crests. I opened one of the large cabinets and was jolted by another shock. Silver trays, ceramic vases, and broken porcelain came tumbling out. I looked at Heini aghast. I wanted to tell him that I couldn’t help it. He said, ‘Never mind. Don't worry about it. You know, that's all from my Uncle Carol. He was a bachelor and just stuffed everything into a cabinet.’
[photo caption p. 126: Avenue of oaks at Steinort]
As Gottliebe later told her children and nephews, after she had slept for an entire day and night, the two descendants of comital stock set out on a long walk through the woods, along the lake and over the fields. He described the steps he would take to modernize his business operations. He was convinced there was no place more beautiful to live in the whole world. For a long time he sat with her at the edge of a field that had already been harvested of its grain, speaking quietly and thoughtfully in his rich, sonorous voice. He picked up some earth, crumbled it in his hand, and explained how much terrestrial life a handful of dirt contains, and how one needed to treat the fields in order to preserve the good quality of their soil. “You have to smell this earth, then you'll understand the entire landscape.” At that moment, she fell hopelessly in love with him, with his love of nature, his straightforwardness, his repose. And even if this sounds like the storyline from a film in those days, it was exactly what she felt, and it became a lifetime memory.
"It was very peculiar ... we rode horseback together, sailed – and almost lost our lives in the process – went hunting in the evening, for ducks. Everything was incredibly earthy, real, and big. I was very, very impressed by it. Until then, my world didn’t have that authenticity."
[marginal note p. 127:
From Gottliebe’s blue notebook,
the Lehndorff Family Archive.]
Early in November 1936, the couple became engaged. Two misfortunes overshadowed the following weeks. Heinrich's mother, Harriet, was injured aboard the "Bremen" on her return voyage from a trip to the United States, and in Dresden, Kurt Krahmer had a fatal accident. It was not a particularly appropriate point in time to celebrate a big wedding. All the same, on February 24, 1937, six months after the summer weeks spent in Berlin and at Steinort, Gottliebe and Heinrich were married in Graditz. In keeping with ancient tradition, the parents of the bride arranged the celebration. And even though it was viewed as a love marriage, in this instance the parents of the bride were content as well because Steinort was considered one of the most important enterprises in East Prussia, notwithstanding the financial difficulties it had encountered under Carol's leadership. Both the Lehndorffs and the Kalneins were descended from ancient nobility, few objections could be made in that respect. If nothing else, anyone with eyes in their head could see that Gottliebe was a ravishingly beautiful woman. And so the two of them soon became known as a couple who turned heads as they wafted through the ballrooms of Berlin.
"Niemöller married us. Basically, I had no relationship at all to Christianity or Niemöller. He was a revolutionary, that was the unusual thing about him, and it piqued my interest. But it was nothing personal. The marriage ceremony, Niemöller's speech, the wedding verse, etc., I don’t remember any of it."
[marginal note p. 128: ibid.]
[photo caption p. 128: The wedding in Graditz. Seated to the left of the bridal couple are the Kalneins, parents of the bride.
The Lehndorffs, parents of the groom, are seated to the right.]
Still, the pastor, whose participation Gottliebe reports in such unemotional terms, was no gratuitous adjunct. Apart from Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonnhoeffer, he was the most important personality of the Confessing Church. Martin Niemöller was a former U-boat commander, as was Gottliebe's stepfather, Mellenthin. Much like the latter, he originally stemmed from a strictly conservative-nationalistic background but had emerged as one of the most resolute critics of Nazi ideology at the Confessing Synod in Barmen in 1934. He had protested against the so-called Aryan Paragraph, founded the Pastors’ Emergency League in 1933, and had been summoned to appear before the Gestapo some 20 times. He even had a personal audience with Adolf Hitler in the Reich Chancellery; it had turned so vehement that he had to reckon with being arrested every day from that time on – which he was, two months after the wedding in Graditz. Niemöller was interned until the end of the war in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp as a "special prisoner of the Führer," as was assassin Georg Elser later on. Even during the final days of the war in 1945, he was dragged from location to location along with others whose fate likewise was to be held hostage by Himmler; ultimately, as if by a miracle, these "special prisoners" managed to survive.
We can no longer reconstruct precisely how it came about that Niemöller was invited to serve as pastor for the wedding. It is certain, however, that Heinrich had established close ties to the Confessing Church early on through his cousin Hans; Marion Dönhoff and presumably also Heinrich's parents were card carrying members of the Confessing Church.
For their honeymoon, the young couple traveled to Dubrovnik. Heinrich had not seen much of the world and enjoyed himself immensely. Gottliebe began experiencing the first queasiness of early pregnancy. In the following year, 1937, the couple again ventured abroad to Sicily and Tripoli, which would be their last foray into the wide world together. The year of 1938 was already overshadowed by nervousness and premonitions of the war to come.
Even on their honeymoon, after ten days Heinrich was already anxious to return to Masuria, where the first spring tillage under his oversight lay ahead.
A second wedding celebration was held at home at Steinort, Heinrich placed great value on that. The festivities took place on the Opalten Peninsula, lasted for three days, and included all of the employees, administrators, and farm hands from Steinort’s outlying farms. It was the first major fête the young squire and lord of the castle had arranged, and the first chance for all the residents of Steinort to meet the new lady of the castle. The atmosphere was generous and cordial, and to this day word has it that nothing was lacking. Gottliebe reports: "When we reached the boundary of Steinort, a delegation from the various farms came to meet us. The landholdings of the Steinort estate comprised some 10,000 hectares devoted to farming, forestry, and fishery. One of the five foresters presented us with bread on a rough hewn oaken board and congratulated us on our marriage and our entry onto the estate. Even though I came from the big city, this simple ceremony left a lasting impression on me. Tears filled my eyes, and I made no effort to conceal them. Every person at Steinort had made some small contribution to this day. The front door was garlanded with fir branches. The gardener had prepared huge pots with all sorts of different plants and stood them in the vestibule. An enormous array of cakes had been set out on tables in the reception room. The domestic staff came forward and greeted me. ‘Quick, somebody get a knife,' Heini said. Then he cut a cake into pieces and distributed them among the members of the staff. Everyone stood around munching a piece of cake and enjoying themselves. The ice had been broken."
[photo caption p. 130: Home again after the honeymoon.]
[upper marginal note p. 130:
The correct number is 5500 hectares of farm and wood land.
Presumably the figure in the text includes the surface area of the lake.]
[lower marginal note p. 130:
From Countess Gottliebe von Lehndorff’s unpublished
recollections of Steinort, the Lehndorff Family Archive.]
It was a pity, though, that the wedding didn’t take place in the summer, in the meadows on the estate grounds! On the other hand, the first harvest festival was celebrated there six months later. That was a tradition, and it remained the high point in each of the altogether seven years that Gottliebe and Heinrich von Lehndorff were allowed to spend at Steinort.
It was only their old intimate friends from childhood and adolescence, for example, Heini's sister Sissi who in 1933 married Dieter Dönhoff, the later heir to the von Friedrichstein estate, or cousin Marion, Sissi’s former bridesmaid, who harbored their little misgivings whether the new mistress of Steinort might not be too citified and elegant to feel entirely comfortable in the empty solitude of East Prussia. But such doubts were customary whenever someone married in from the outside. Both Dorothea, the wife of Marion's older brother, Heinrich, (she was a Catholic to boot!) and bourgeois Vera, who in 1931 had ultimately been married to Marion's brother, Toffi, (although against his family’s wishes) had to refute doubts whether they were genuinely suited for the people of East Prussia and their horses. Meanwhile, the young counts apparently had a penchant for falling in love with women who were somewhat different from their sisters and cousins, perhaps even slightly less capable. Instead, they seemed more vulnerable and presumably also more erotic.
Naturally, written records of these initial years at Steinort are sparse. Gottliebe recalls an unbroken stream of projects. The roof had to be repaired. Central heating had to be installed and the kitchen needed renovating. Old furniture and rubbish cluttered the attic. The cellar of the house was flooded. Heini had a large number of oaks felled in the forest so he could pay his inheritance taxes. He liquidated his uncle Carol’s extremely valuable coin collection so he would have the means to invest and modernize. Among other things, this allowed him to buy a modern, Lanz brand tractor.
[photo caption p. 132: Gottliebe also with the dog]
At first, Gottliebe struggled with some uncertainty over the proper way to behave as the new lady of the manor. If it were a question of planning the midday meal or receiving guests, she was to summon the cook, rather than visiting the kitchen herself and seeking her out! She was not to go into the woods alone to gather mushrooms or fruit, but rather have someone accompany her. She was also not supposed to go jogging in the park in her skimpy running shorts, in East Prussia one was not accustomed to that. Altogether there were eight household servants, each of whom had been assigned particular duties; many of them stemmed from Uncle Carol’s days. The young lord and lady energetically went to work removing the dust and must of parlors and rooms that hadn’t been aired in decades. The window with the extensive wood rot was restored. Whenever they opened a drawer, they found piles of broken porcelain, crystal, and damaged minor art treasures that had been hidden by former servants from the strict eyes of Uncle Carol. Heini believed in saving on personnel costs. For example, he reassigned a servant whose main responsibility had been to wind every available clock. In the end, Heini could do that himself! The clocks didn't keep such perfect time after that, but no one was upset. As well, the tradition of polishing all of the silver with sand at regular intervals and drying it with damask napkins was discontinued and reserved for very special occasions.
Heini's main thrust was modernizing his business operations. A worker from one of the farmsteads received special training so that the newly acquired Lanz could be put to optimal use. The drainage canals for the arable fields were cleared and renovated. He had major plans to expand his horse farming and had completed an apprenticeship as a tanner. This not only reflected a custom that applied to other estate owners as well – namely, that each person should have mastered at least one trade – it presumably also played a role in his ideas about processing animal hides himself and thereby increasing his profits. These plans were never realized. Even so, he had the houses in the attached village of Klein-Steinort enlarged in a way that created additional living space under the dormers for the land workers and their frequently numerous children. In contrast, for the time being he postponed measures to improve the castle’s external appearance. Steinort, where the gravel was never clean and the terrace never free of weeds, hadn’t ever been a particularly well groomed let alone an elegant property, but it was beginning to function as a business.
Apart from this, there continued to be time and opportunity for hunting, especially in winter. As soon as the first snow was on the ground, the foresters were called together to find the tracks of wild boar. Then invitations were sent out to impassioned hunters, relatives, and the town notables of Angerburg. A wild boar hunt was an all day affair. Six to eight boar were often taken in one hunt. The months of December and January were rabbit season. Forest workers were deployed as beaters; they knew the terrain and that guaranteed successful hunting. When the hunt was over, hunters and beaters gathered for steaming pea soup served along with grog and beer. "Every year in July there was a duck hunt at Steinort. Because of the estate's large population of ducks and it’s beautiful scenery, the hunt was famous as a social event. Days beforehand, long swaths were cut into the reeds at the edge of the lake. At the call of the hunting horn, beaters wearing tall rubber boots waded through the reeds, driving the ducks into the swaths, where the hunters were waiting for them on unsteady footing. Often, up to 700 ducks would be shot in a day’s hunt. Several times in the summer, at six o'clock in the morning, Heini and I rode out in the motorboat with Schuchardt, the fishery master, to catch whitefish in Lake Dargainensee. The nets for the catch had been set the evening before. You could already tell whether the catch was good or not by the time the nets had been pulled halfway out of the water. If you were lucky, the flapping fish glittered like silver treasure trawled from the lake…
[photo caption p. 135: Gottliebe and Heinrich with fishermen on Lake Mauersee.]
In the wintertime, the Masurian lakes always froze over. That’s when the ice fishing began. For that purpose, holes were broken in the ice at certain points, and nets were pushed from one hole to the next. I once experienced a catch weighing 800 centners. It was only with the greatest difficulty that a number of men were able to raise the nets. Afterwards, the fish were taken to Königsberg…
Paddle boating numbers among my most pleasant memories of Steinort. My boat was docked on the canal that led from the park through the reed belt to Lake Kirsaitensee. Everything was covered with water lilies far out into the lake. White mute swans floated amidst the water lilies with their still-gray young. All day long, the water was populated with rafts of tufted ducks, white-winged scoters, and wild ducks. Seagulls and terns bobbed on the waves. In the spring and fall one could watch flocks of water and marsh fowl that used the Steinort area as a stopover point on their flight from south to north and back again. Every so often, one was lucky enough to spot a sea eagle circling above the bog forests.
The best way to travel the long distances separating the holdings was on horseback. The saddle horses for Steinort were stabled next to the main building. There were four saddle horses. Heini's favorite was named Jaromir, mine was called Fine-Fine. Naturally, during the summer you couldn’t trample down the fields on horseback. But in the fall, after the fields had been cut, you could gallop over the stubble to your heart's content. Fine-Fine enjoyed that. I would get up early for a ride across the fields in the morning mist… There were some 40 producing mares on the Steinort properties, and they would foal every year. After three years, the foals were weaned and prepared for sale. The young horses were cleaned and curried, and their manes and tails were trimmed and styled so that they looked as if a magician had just conjured them onto the field. Everything was prepared for the appearance of the horse market commission.[1] The equerries led the horses in front of the castle and presented them to the commission. As a rule, all horses offered for sale were also purchased. After the sales had been concluded, everyone was invited inside for a meal in the handsome Samson room, thus called because it was furnished with old oak furniture and decorated with five tapestries depicting the story of Samson.
[upper marginal note p. 137:
Countess Gottliebe Lehndorff's recollections
of Steinort, the Lehndorff Family Archive.]
[lower marginal note p. 137:
Source: German Federal Archive, formerly Berlin Document Center,
Central Index of Members of the NSDAP.]
One thing that doesn’t jibe with this story of an intact, perished world is a note reporting that Count Heinrich Lehndorff was accepted as a member (Nr. 5286568) of the Nazi Party[2] on May 1, 1937. Experts are aware that hundreds of thousands of others were simultaneously admitted to the Nazi Party on that date. This followed an outright admissions freeze that began in May 1933 on the grounds that membership had risen from 850,000 in January to 2.5 million in April of that year. Thereafter, the admissions freeze was lifted only for subsidiary organizations such as the Hitler Youth, the Mounted Forces, or the Motorcycle Corps. By 1939, membership exceeded 5 million, and by 1945 it had reached 8.5 million. A membership application signed by Heinrich von Lehndorff has not been found. Nevertheless, it would presumably be too simple to excuse this as a case (and there were many other such cases) where an individual was placed on the Party membership roster both unknowingly and against his will. Nor can we assume that he applied for membership with the intention of camouflaging his preexisting political opposition to the Nazi regime, which definitely applied to Hitler's later enemies, for example, Adam von Trott and Arvid Harnack. We can therefore assume that at some point between 1933 and 1937 Heinrich von Lehndorff actually put his signature on an application for membership in the Nazi Party or one of its subsidiary organizations. But why? Was it because he, like many East Prussian aristocrats who lived close to Stalin’s revolutionary Soviet Union, were thinking primarily in anti-Communist terms? The childhood scene described above, when Heinrich and his cousin Hans fired a shotgun at what they assumed to be a communist gathering, much to the consternation of the parish consistory, shows that militant anti-Communist sentiment was already widespread among the young. Or was it youthful naïveté? In a conversation late in life with her granddaughter, Anna Dönhoff, his sister Karin (Sissi) described what she remembered from her own childhood in terms that were of the same tenor. In her case, the initial involvement with the Nazis sounds almost like an episode from the youth movement. "In certain youth circles, you were a Nazi back then. As a young person in those days, when things were getting underway with National Socialism, you had a certain youthful enthusiasm." She recalled that one night she and several other young people had ridden their bicycles to Serappen together so they could paste up Nazi posters at the train station. Still, at a minimum that entails covering several kilometers in complete darkness. And she recalled yet another situation from the same period. "One time when we had gone skiing, there was an election in Germany. So you had to travel to the next border town in order to vote. And among us young people who were skiing there, only Alexander, who was older… voted for the German National ticket, which was the opposition party. And all of us young people voted for Hitler, for the Nazis. Everyone thought there was something new about it, you just had to get on board and things would turn around again… People today can’t imagine why half of the world didn't rise up in revolt. It was such a crazy thing."
[marginal note on p. 138:
From Anna Dönhoff’s master’s thesis.]
There is no indication of which election she might have meant, and it is also difficult to determine. In 1932 alone, there were two presidential elections and eight elections to the Legislative Assembly. It was a year of crisis and armed conflict verging on civil war between Red Front fighters on one side and gangs of SA/SS thugs on the other. Heini was fully twenty-two years old in 1932, his sister Karin twenty-one. We are not told whether Heini had come along on this skiing vacation which was interrupted for a trip to the polls.
And if his application for Party membership wasn't due to recklessness or naïveté, was it perhaps motivated by opportunism or economic calculation? Was it a decision based on business interests? This would by all means apply to his brother-in-law, Dieter Dönhoff, the later owner of Friedrichstein, who joined the Party in 1933 despite his lack of enthusiasm. Membership seemed useful and advantageous for his future business interests which had suffered substantial setbacks during the world economic crisis.
The exact date of Count Heinrich Lehndorff's admission to the Party is not known because the NSDAP simply let all applications accumulate during the membership freeze. Could it perhaps have been filed in 1935, the year Heinrich presumably finished his military service and subsequently wanted to head for Africa, where – that same year – the other Dönhoff, Christoph (known as Toffi), had entered the Foreign Organization of the NSDAP? Or perhaps he was indulging a whim of opposition; there was a certain rebelliousness about the generation that had been caught “between the fronts." Traditional conservatism seemed too fainthearted for them, too behind the times, and for a while they entertained the idea that National Socialism, once it had shed its extreme aspects, would show itself to be a movement that was both "social and national," and thus modern and timely. That, in turn, does not fit well with the rather liberal-minded and cosmopolitan upbringing he enjoyed, and it doesn't correspond at all to the political orientation of his father who was a signatory of “To the German Nobility,” an appeal encouraging aristocrats to support the Weimar Republic. And what did Gottliebe have to say about all this? She had experienced the Nazi movement's early anti-Semitic excesses from frighteningly close by, and purposely characterized them as the beginning of her own "independent thinking." Was she aware of that he had applied; did he ask her? We don't know. Still, it seems likely that the application was submitted earlier, a good while before the marriage.
All we know for certain is that when war broke out three years later, in 1939, he had already discussed the necessity of a life "on the barricades" with his oppositional brother, Ahasverus; that as early as 1940 he was aware of resistance circles and their plans; and that he himself had joined the innermost circle of conspirators surrounding Henning von Tresckow no later than 1941. Somewhere, sometime, in the life of Heinrich von Lehndorff a deep caesura occurred, a fundamental break with his earlier, occasionally thoughtless and spur-of-the-moment decision making. What matters in life, it would seem, is not lacking experience, making mistakes, and then correcting them, but the degree of decision-making autonomy one attains though one’s own wisdom, experience, and a willingness to put one’s own life at risk.
Still in the same year, on November 28, 1937, Heinrich’s daughter Marie Eleonore (called Nona) was born in Berlin. She saw the light of day at the Hotel Adlon. That sounds more unusual and extravagant than it was. The East Prussian nobility differed from the court aristocrats of Vienna or Paris in that they did not maintain palaces in the capital. From the beginning of the 18th century on, this was a thorn in the side of Prussia's kings, for they would have liked to see the center of up-and-coming Berlin adorned with the imposing palaces of the aristocracy. It would have provided the capital with a look of prestige, particularly as it vied with other major cities. But the East Elbian aristocracy would not comply, presumably more because of the cost than for reasons of independence. When they were in Berlin, they and their entire families lodged at one of the hotels “befitting their rank,” which was assuredly less expensive than the costly upkeep on two major properties with staff.
In any event, the Hotel Adlon was an exclusive address, which explains why Eleonore (Nona) was born there. The delivery was somewhat complicated because Gottliebe was suffering from pyelonephritis. A year and a half later, on May 14, 1939, their daughter Vera was born at the hospital in Königsberg. Their third daughter, Gabriele, was born at Steinort on December 14, 1942, shortly before Christmas and in the very midst of the war. Catherina, their fourth daughter, was born just under two years later on August 15, 1944, in the infirmary attached to Torgau prison, where her mother had been interned after her husband’s escape. Some 14 days later, Catherina's father, Heinrich, whom she would never lay eyes upon, was executed. Gottliebe later remarked, "I'm certain we would have had many more children, if times had been different."
[1] The Lehndorffs sold unbroken young horses which are called Remonten in German.
[2] The official name was Nationalsozialistische deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) (National Socialist German Workers’ Party).