Elisabeth von thadden biography for kids

Biography

Von Thadden is an editor of the German weekly Die Zeit in Hamburg. She has done research on Goethe\'s concept of nature and is now, as a journalist, interested in the social and cultural aspects of climate change. As a visiting scholar at CES for the fall she wants to work on the question of how societies change routines: Why don\'t people ecologically act as they know they should? Her new book, Wer denkt für morgen? is to be published in August 2010.

Elisabeth von Thadden was born in Mohrungen, East Prussia on July 29, 1890. The eldest ofAdolf von Thadden, district administrator, and his wife Ehrengard's five children, she grew up in Pomerania. The family estate of Trieglaff, where the family resided from 1903 onward, was a traditionally open home with guests from different social, political and ecclesiastical milieus. At the age of thirty, Elisabeth von Thadden left her parent’s estate to make a life for herself.

After working at the children’s village in Heuberg in the Swabian Mountains and at the boarding school in Salem, Thadden made her vision of a school with a pronounced Protestant character reality when she founded a rural boarding school in Wieblingen in 1927.

The threat of war moved her to relocate parts of the school to Tutzing on Lake Starnberg on October 5, 1939. Incriminations and interrogations by the Gestapo and SD there began mounting in the summer of 1940. She was accused of secretly running a confessional school primarily attended by young noblewomen. Since her school’s accreditation was supposed to be withdrawn, von Thadden returned to Baden once again at Easter of 1941. However, the Baden Ministry of Education and Cultural Affairs had already revoked her accreditation to head her school in May of 1941. Forced to abandon her life’s work, she moved to Berlin and found a job with the German Red Cross.

A “tea party” she hosted on her sister Marie-Agnes Braune’s birthday on September 10, 1943 was her undoing. In addition to the guests – friends and acquaintances critical of the regime – a Gestapo informer had also obtained an invitation. Following her denunciation by this doctor from Berlin, the SS arrested von Thadden on January 13, 1944 in Meaux, France where she had been posted as a Red Cross worker. She was sentenced to death by the People’s Court under Roland Freisler on July 1 and executed in Berlin-Plötzensee on September 8, 1944.

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The von Thadden family in Pomerania (PART TWO)

Memorial Address for Elizabeth-von Thadden
By Ehrengard Schramm-von Thadden (Step sister to Barbara)
Wieblingen, 9 September 1947
(Translated by Barbara Fox -von Thadden)
BEFORE WW2

“I myself was a founder member of the school until the take-over by the state. But still I would not be able to draw a completely satisfactory picture of my sister”
“Some of you will barely have a clear memory of the time of National Socialism. Legends arise easily in one or other direction, and soon the picture of a person is distorted and blurred. So let me try today and quite simply to describe for you how it all happened that Elizabeth-von Thadden (founder and head of the school at Wieblingen, Germany) was led from the heights of her public work to her dreadful death.”

“Here let me say at once that Elizabeth von Thadden was not the predestined, undeterred martyr of the Third Reich. Apart from those who were persecuted because of their race, I believe that hardly any German has been one of these, although many would like you to believe that today. She was an infinitely vivacious, happy and active woman, who by nature and on principle disliked anything negative. In 1933 she was at the height of her life. She had created a school, which flourished and grew after only six years. People trusted her; young girls came to her in ever growing numbers from here and from abroad. Her warm maternal nature could offer help to these children who needed that warmth, for there were many without parents. The countrywoman in her had found a beautiful, fertile piece of land, which could be further, enhanced and which repaid all the care quickly and abundantly. All this did not change at all when the Nazis came to power.”

“Admittedly, not one of her many friends belonged to the new masters, they belonged to the Christian conservative or democratic camps. Her instinct reacted with strong disapproval

German resistance member (1890-1944)

Elisabeth Adelheid Hildegard von Thadden (29 July 1890 – 8 September 1944) was a German progressive educator and a resistance fighter against the Nazi régime as a member of the Solf Circle. She was sentenced to death for conspiring to commit high treason and undermining the fighting forces (Wehrkraftzersetzung).

Early life and family

Elisabeth von Thadden was born in Mohrungen, East Prussia (present-day Morąg, Poland) to the long-established noble Thadden family. Her parents were Adolf Gerhard Ludwig von Thadden (1858–1932), Prussian county commissioner (Landrat) of Landkreis Greifenberg in Pomerania (now Powiat Gryficki in Poland), and Ehrengard von Gerlach (1868–1909). She was the eldest of five children. In 1905, the family moved to the Trieglaff (Trzygłów) estate in Pomerania, where Thadden grew up in a big Protestant family.

Elisabeth's brother, Reinold (1891–1976), grew up to be a famous theologian and jurist, and her nephew, Reinold's son, Rudolf (born 1932) is a well-known German historian. Her sister, Ehrengard Schramm (1900–1985), was a Social Democratic politician and member of the Lower Saxon Landtag. Her half-brother Adolf von Thadden (1921–1996), rose to be the National Democratic Party's chairman after World War II in West Germany. Elisabeth herself never married and has no direct descendants.

Elisabeth attended boarding school in Baden-Baden and the renowned Reifenstein school. Upon her mother's death in 1909, Thadden took over managing the family estate, as well as the care of her youngest siblings. She kept an open and hospitable house in Trieglaff, which also was the scene of several discussion circles organized by her and her father. These Trieglaffer Konferenzen attracted politicians, theologians, jurists, and scientists of many political stripes. Here she met with Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze, a theologian, s