Ewald von Kleist

Ewald Heinrich von Kleist (1922-2013), anti-Nazi and post-war founder of the publishing company Ewald-von-Kleist-Verlag in Berlin, was a scion of an aristocratic Prussian land-owning, literary and military family. His father, lawyer and landowner Count Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin (1890-1945) - who was a cousin of Field Marshal Paul von Kleist (1881-1954) - was arrested and executed on 9 April 1945 as a member of the failed 20 July 1944 uprising against Hitler. As a second lieutenant in the German Army in WWII, young Kleist was one of a group of officers associated with Count Claus von Stauffenberg, leader of the 20 July plot. He was the most prominent post-war survivor of the Stauffenberg group. Articulate (in English as well as German) and reflective, Kleist was active as a non-government public intellectual in postwar European affairs. His contribution to the extraordinary 32-hour TV mini-series, 'The World At War' (1974) was among the many candid interviews with contemporary personalities which added incomparable and permanent value to the series. He appeared in several other documentaries about WWII. Resembling a combination of the statesman Bismarck and the actor Curt Jurgens, Kleist in his elder years exemplified an old-fashioned ideal of the dignity and integrity of the past Prussian aristocracy. For 36 years, he chaired a prestigious annual international forum on defense and security matters, the Wehrkundetagung, (aka the Munich Conference on Security Policy) which he founded in 1962. An interview published in February 2009 by 'The Atlantic Times' monthly newspaper attributed to Kleist the view that the security conference, not his part in the July 20 plot to kill Hitler, had been his greatest service and that "everything there is to say about the July 20 plot has already been said". With deliberate irony, he told his interviewer that he had never thought about the plot again since that date. Kleist was one of the official speakers during a ceremony in Berlin in November 2007 to mark the 100th birthday of Count von Stauffenberg.