Ewald von Kleist(1922-2013)
- Additional Crew
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.
