Michael Field – copyright
Sāmoa, 31 August 1909, and Āpia’s 65-year-old doctor Bernard Funk took the steep trip up to Vailima, official residency of the Governor, Wilhelm Solf and his 22-year-old wife, Johanna. She was in labour, giving birth to her first child, Maria-Elisabeth Augusta Margaretha So’oa’emalelagi Solf. So’oa’emalelagi was a taupou name associated with the A’ana district. As an adult, she always used her Sāmoan name; ‘gift from heaven,’ or simply Lagi.
Even the Gestapo would call her that.
Two months later Johanna took Lagi to New Zealand to stay at a geothermal resort in Rotorua which, in its day, was the closest thing to a luxury spa in the South Pacific.
Solf’s governorship ended in 1912 with his promotion to head the Colonial Office in Berlin. What became a life long yearning, was illustrated by the way he always signed off his letters to Johanna; ‘Alofa tele lava’ (much love, in Sāmoan). Johanna occasionally travelled with her husband. In East Africa, she took part in a hunting expedition, shooting antelope, giraffe and an eagle. When in the Cameroons she shot a bull elephant from 25 metres. Her husband thought it have her an image of glamour and success.
‘She shoots elephants, you know,’ he said.
When Germany launched the Great War, Solf tried to protect his colonies, telephoning the head of the navy, Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, to ask if the they could expect any protection. Tirpitz shouted ‘your colonies are finished’.
Early in the war, Johanna took Lagi on holiday to an estate that was the home of a Norwegian diplomat and his daughters, Sigrid (Sisi) and Armgard Michelet, were there. Armgard and Lagi were six.
‘One day the girls crept into the larder while the guests were straying, hoping to find a tasty morsel to eat,’ a Michelet biography says. ‘They saw instead a table covered from one end to the other with the limp corpses of pheasants, hares, and even deer. Sis had nightmares forever afterwards in which she saw their glazed eyes reproaching her – and trickles of blood dripping off the table to lie in puddles on the flagstone floor.’
With defeat in 1918, war had given way to turmoil and revolution in Germany. Political cliques fought on the streets for control. Anarchy rather than rule was the feature of Berlin. Johanna and her children, including Lagi, lived on Wilhelmstraße in central Berlin. With riots and violence on their front door step, Johanna fled to the country. She took them to Zingst on the Baltic coast, cut off from the world and had no power and water. Cashiered soldiers and thieves broke into the house one night as the family lay in their beds.
Aged 57, Wilhelm Solf was posted to Tokyo where he arrived as ambassador in June 1920. They stayed until 1928, arriving back into a rising Nazi Berlin. The Solfs were dismissive of the Nazis, while the Nazis viewed Solf and his peers as the traitors who had stabbed Germany in the back.
Johanna hired an apartment for the family on Alsenstraße No 9 in the diplomatic quarter of the city. Nicknamed ‘maison japonaise’, it saw a regular flow of Japanese diplomats and nobles.
On 30 January 1933 Wilhelm Solf watched from his apartment a torchlight procession celebrating a new chancellor – Adolf Hitler. Johanna heard her husband utter an expressionless ‘Finis Germania’.
Lagi Solf, a striking young woman, had lived most of her life outside Germany. She had studied arts in Munich and spent time in Paris, learning to paint. She had a boyfriend, a ‘nice looking blond man’ named Wolfgang Mohr. Six years older than Lagi, he was an engineer with a German trading firm, Firma Kunst und Albers, operating in Shanghai. Lagi was aged 22 when she eloped with Mohr, to the dislike of both families. He was a specialist in printing machines, selling them to newspapers in Shanghai. His interests were in the visual arts and in Chinese calligraphy. Lagi was expert on Japanese calligraphy. The couple moved to Shanghai, the epicentre for global power-plays, with the major powers pressing for control and extraterritoriality over better parts.
Lagi Solf arrived in Shanghai in 1931, one of Europe’s few experts on Asia. Plainly young and beautiful, she was fluent in Japanese and spoke Chinese. The daughter of a governor and diplomat, she had contacts. She regularly updated her father in Berlin over politics and diplomacy. There was much to report: Japan was beginning its war in China and the Chinese nationalists were fighting the rising Communist Party. In their letters father and daughter used a code to hide the names of the people they were talking off. In an October 1935 letter she told her father she had been in contact with Prime Minister Wang Zhaoming. She was 26 at the time, Wang 52. He was said to be ‘startlingly handsome and would build on his charismatic good looks by writing poetry in which he portrayed himself as a selfless patriot who cared little for his own life’. Wang wanted Hitler’s help to reach a compromise between China and Japan. Wang, Lagi wrote, had made a ‘confidential request’ and was urging Wilhelm Solf ‘to work together in a helpful way in Sino-Japanese questions….’ Lagi said Wang had decided that Wilhelm Solf was the only possible go-between in the crisis: ‘We don’t know how Hitler will respond to this, but if he agrees with the wishes of the Chinese, he will probably request a meeting. What kind of role you would play, and how you would carry it out, is really up to you. I know that you have not been very active, but you are sympathetic to both China and Japan and I know you would do whatever is whatever is within your strength and power to do… Depending on what happens, I may be home in the next few months. What you are capable of taking on will depend on large part with your health – please take good care of yourself, so that you can do what you want.’
It would be tempting to dismiss Lagi’s correspondence coming from someone too young and inexperienced to have any significance. Even her father was living his fading years. But Lagi had spent her entire life, from birth at Vailima to Berlin and Tokyo, living in a diplomatic and political world. She may have known no other life; passing significant diplomatic letters was routine. There is this line a letter from Lagi: ‘Mao was called to Nanking to see Premier Wang a few days ago and with him Furholzer.’ They talked of Wilhelm Solf being involved. Fuerholzer and Kriebel were to go to Berlin to advise Hitler. Lagi Solf said there was discussion whether she too should go along. But she wrote that ‘Mao and I after careful consideration decided that we will keep ourselves completely out of it…. Please do not be surprised if the name Mao perhaps often appears, since he has already worked very intensively for 2 years with influential circles in Nanking and in Tokyo.’
Lagi occasionally returned to Berlin. She discussed the mediation idea with Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and Nazi Party leader Herman Göring. Access to the latter, at the time, would have been uncomplicated: Göring’s vice-staathalter (vice minister) was German Sāmoa’s second governor, Erich Schultz. Also involved in the discussion was the Japanese military attache in Berlin, Oshima Hiroshi. He was a regular visitor to ‘maison japonaise’.
Mediation efforts failed.
Wilhelm Solf died, aged 74, on 6 February 1936.
There was a quirk about Shanghai; people arriving there did not need a visa. Shanghai became a bolt hole for Jews who saw no future in Nazi Germany. Nazis followed them. And it was duly noted in Gestapo files that Lagi Solf provided aid to them.
When World War Two began, Johanna Solf was 51, living in an apartment in the diplomatic area of central Berlin. The apartment was owned by her neighbour, Arthur Zarden who lived with his daughter Irmgard. Lagi Solf was back from Shanghai, divorced and 29. ‘Slim and well dressed, (Lagi) imbued any gathering with an aura of international sophistication.’ The Gestapo called her in for questioning over helping Shanghai Jewish refugees. No action was taken, at least at the time.
Johanna and Lagi were quietly using their other extensive ties – to the Wehrmacht and the Defence Ministry’s intelligence service, the Abwehr, to help Jews leave Germany. Lagi found it both dangerous and tedious, visiting ‘innumerable embassies and consulates in quest of visas’.
In the autumn of 1940 Lagi married a conscripted Wehrmacht officer. On leave in Berlin, he was returning from Poland and heading to Norway, soon to be invaded. Count Hubert Graf von Ballestrem, 29, of old Silesian nobility, seventh son of one of Germany’s richest men, coal and steel industrialist Valentin Ballestrem and his wife Agnes. The marriage made Lagi a Countess, and one of Germany’s richest women.
Her husband, a Catholic, had long opposed the Nazis. The newly married couple were soon parted by war; Lagi to join her mother to continue their subversive work. Jewish apartments had to be marked with the Star of David. Non-Jews were forbidden from visiting. Lagi would go into such apartments, getting from the occupants lists of what they needed, including vegetables and items still not rationed.
‘Our butcher’s wife, with a wink, would weight me up a larger piece of meat than the ration called for.’
Jews were occasionally hidden in the Solf apartment. The janitor said he knew who was being hidden ‘but they would never have found out from me’. Everyday involved great effort; Lagi could avoid giving the mandatory Nazi salute on the street by carrying a shopping bag loaded with laundry or vegetables in each hand.
The Gestapo pulled Lagi in again. She told her mother to get help if she was not back within six hours. Lagi was accused of helping Jews: ‘I pointed out that the Jewish couple who owned the house were friends of mine.’ She was released. She believed her encounter with the Gestapo had been relatively gentle because of the family connection with Japan, soon joined in a ‘Pact of Steel’ between Tokyo, Berlin and Rome. At the Japanese Embassy, military attaché and later ambassador Baron Hiroshi Oshima was a favourite with senior Nazi figures. He had been friendly with the Solfs, not least because Wilhelm Solf had been respected in Tokyo.
Lagi and Johanna met with friends at their apartment, to ‘speak freely, vent their disgust and despair, receive information, and take counsel’. They listened to banned-foreign radio stations.
‘Foreign diplomats visited us, and we made them realize that the reports they heard about concentration camps were not mere horror stories, as the Nazis would have it, but a small portion of the bitter truth,’ Lagi wrote. ‘But although we considered ourselves co-fighters for freedom and humanity, we were not heard aboard.’
In time the gatherings would be marked up in Gestapo files as the ‘Solf Circle’.
It was not plotting to overthrow Hitler; helping Jews was their work. A regular participant was Albert Hahl, the one-time governor of German New Guinea, celebrated for his romantic and sexual life in the Pacific.
Another member was Elisabeth von Thadden, described by American broadcaster William Shirer as ‘a sparkling and deeply religious woman’ Born in East Prussia (today Poland), she started a private boarding school for girls incorporating Christian ethics. She ignored edicts not to enroll Jewish girls. She was given to reducing their boarding fees rather than lose them. There was no portrait of Hitler. The Baden Education Ministry saw in Thadden’s school ‘no satisfactory guarantee for a National-Socialist-aligned education’. The school was taken over. Fired, Thadden moved to Berlin to work with the Red Cross.
Rumours of new routes out of Germany involved, for the Solf Circle, gambling. One route they discovered involved a farm on the border of the German state of Baden and Switzerland.
‘The farmers who helped in such an undertaking usually did it out of sympathy and occasionally from a desire to make money.’
They would take the refugees in for the night and just before dawn guide them along a path across the border.
‘A picture postcard from Switzerland was indication that the fugitives had got through.’
Johanna and Lagi were aware of what the Gestapo were doing because close confidents spied, in turn, on the Gestapo. Johanna sent another couple down to Baden but they were arrested and tortured. The said Johanna Solf had told them where to go. Again, nothing happened to the Solfs.
‘No one who has not lived through it can fully understand the feeling of being cornered that haunted us day and night. We could trust no one except those whom we knew well. We could not use the telephone freely – it might be tapped. We were never sure we were not being watched,’ Lagi wrote. ‘As the war went on, we saw ourselves losing out in our struggle against the Nazis.’
In August 1943 Lagi was warned by the Gestapo were watching them closely: ‘We became still more careful on the telephone.’
Early in 1943 Germany suffered its monumental military defeat at Stalingrad. Elisabeth von Thadden saw letters from German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union. They were being destroyed because Hitler believed the information would weaken morale. With this news, she went to a Solf Circle gathering on Friday 10 September 1943. She arrived with a 30-year-old who called himself Robby. His name was Paul Reckzeh, a doctor at Berlin’s Charite Hospital. He said he was back from Switzerland and had a letter-of-introduction from Maria Segantini, daughter of an influential but long dead Swiss painter. Reckzeh told the circle he was keen to take mail out to Switzerland for them. That was an offence. He told Johanna he could deliver messages to her contacts among German emigrant circles in Switzerland. She refused: ‘we were too careful with messages aboard to entrust them to any but the closest friends’. Irmgard Ruppel, the daughter of Arthur Zarden who lived next door to Johanna, discovered Thadden had just met him 24 hours before.
‘That should have run an alarm – a young man in health, not in the army, travelling to Switzerland in the middle of the war?’ she wrote.
‘Obviously on that afternoon everybody had forgotten that the first rule in the fight for survival was never to speak to strangers about politics… Reckzeh was a colourless man with no distinctive features, ideal for a spy.’ Her father, present at the meeting, told her: ‘I wish I had not gone, I have a bad feeling about this man.’
Reckzeh was a medical doctor and member of the Schutzstaffel or SS, reporting to Sturmbannführer (Major) Herbert Lange at the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Main Security Office). Lange had pioneered a new method of killing disabled people. He had used a van, with the words ‘Kaiser’s Kaffee-Geschäft’ (Kaiser’s Coffee Company) written on the side which was loaded with patients who were then killed with carbon monoxide fed into the back. He killed several thousand in Poland this way. It was to be used on Jews in time. Rechzeh told Lange of the Solf participants and quoted them saying Germany was in a hopeless military position. They discussed ways of overthrowing Hitler.
The Abwehr, the intelligence arm of the Defence Ministry, was monitoring Lange. Abwehr lawyer and friend Helmuth von Moltke warned Johanna. Another Abwehr staff member Catholic monarchist Karl Ludwig von Guttenberg was in the Solf Circle and he too got the warning. Once they released what happened, the Solf Circle, according to Ruppel, decided to lay low and refrain from further contact: ‘We noticed that our phone was tapped; it emitted tell-tale clicks.’ Reckzeh pressed Johanna for letters to take to Switzerland. Johanna agreed to another meeting. Johanna gave him three letters addressed to the Danish ambassador to Switzerland.
‘They were harmless, concerned with personal matters, and quite unimportant; they were not even closed,’ Lagi wrote. As Solf Circle members worried about arrest, Berlin suffered a series of Allied bombing raids.
‘I was bombed out and moved to my mother’s house,’ Lagi said. Johanna’s apartment was destroyed and she left for her sister’s home in Partenkirchen, 700 kilometres south of Berlin on the Austrian-Bavaria border. Lagi had been injured fighting fires. She had ‘a rupture’ and needed surgery. She travelled on later.
On Wednesday 12 January 1944, the Gestapo moved, seizing 74 people linked to the Solf Circle. Seven Gestapo men arrested Johanna and Lagi.
‘Though the Gestapo were often fiendishly clever in their methods, they could be exceedingly stupid.’
Johanna was held incommunicado in a windowless tower and interrogated for two days before being sent north. Two Gestapo agents, a man and a woman, took Lagi on a regular passenger train. One of them was SS Leader Heinrich Himmler’s niece.
One of the guards gave her the ticket and suitcase.
‘In case we get into different cars, don’t forget that you get out at Drogen,’ he said.
As she sat for two hours in the crowded station, Lagi found the situation grotesque: ‘I had money, my identification card, my baggage… But I knew the Gestapo too well to think lightly of what they might do to my mother if I escaped.’ She took the train.
At Drogen a police car took her to Ravensbrück, Hitler’s concentration camp for women, 160 kilometres up the Berlin to Rostock road. At its height on any one day, Ravensbrück, opened in May 1939, had around 45,000 prisoners. Over six years 130,000 women were ‘to be beaten, starved, worked to death, poisoned, executed and gassed’. How many people were to die in the camp was never really known; estimates range between 30,000 to 90,000.
‘That raw, gloomy evening I saw for the first time the dreary barracks and the columns of inmates in their striped uniforms…,’ Lagi wrote. ‘I could see the large open space of the camp square and hear the shrieking siren and the roll calls and camp activities.….’
Elisabeth von Thadden was already at Ravensbrück.
On her brief exercise one day, Lagi heard her named called.
‘Mother’s sad face was pressed against a barred window. I had to control myself in order not to show the shock I felt, for she looked emaciated.’
Mother and daughter were given medical checks. The SS doctors wanted to know if the women were strong enough to be tortured. They were not.
‘Every day I saw men return from interrogation with obvious signs of beating; sometimes they were covered with blood,’ Lagi wrote. ‘A young man in the cell next to mine had been so brutally used that he was afraid he might reveal the names of friends in the next interrogation.’
He hanged himself.
Lange would give Johanna sleeping draughts then wake her up for sessions that lasted six to 15 hours. He threatened her with execution. He threatened to arrest her youngest son; told her she would have to cart rocks; that he would put her in a dark cell.
‘Mother was depressed and quite broken physically. It took much self-control not to reveal anything harmful to others, not to show fear, and not to lose her temper.’
Johanna was on a starvation diet of decaying turnips.
‘I saw her from the window and was dismayed at her pitiable condition,’ Lagi wrote. She went on hunger strike. A guard threatened her with grave consequences. Her mother was given more food.
Lagi was taken out of her cell at four in the afternoon. After waiting in another room until 10pm, her interrogation began. It was to last until 4 am.
‘What is your attitude toward National Socialism?’ was an opening question. She was to be asked it many times but each time she emphasized her complete and total rejection of Nazism. That was enough, they told her, for a treason conviction.
‘There was actually no conclusive proof that any of us had committed high treason, but the Nazis had been watching our circle for years and viewed us all with hatred and deep mistrust,’ she said. ’They wanted to destroy us and all we stood for, and tried to find some legal basis on which to do it.’
As her father feared, the letters and messages Lagi had written from Shanghai were produced by her interrogators. She had referred to Gestapo and SS buildings. Lagi said had used a code in her letters so that she could write more freely about the people: ‘This made it appear more incriminating than it actually was, for it was ten years old.’ Interrogators warned her that her situation was bad, as high persons from the best families were being arrested. Lange came to her cell and shouted at her: Lagi shouted back. He said that unless Joanna provided information she would die.
‘Herr Lange,’ Lagi replied, ‘you have it in your power to execute my mother.’
Lagi and Johanna were then placed at the mercy of Roland Freisler, judge-president of Volksgerichtshof (People’s Court). Freisler became infamous for wild temper tantrums and screaming fits. Around 2600 people were killed on his orders. He specified the manner; hanging or death by fallbeil, the German variation on the guillotine. Others were shot.
The Nazi’s chief public prosecutor, Ernst Lautz, presented Johanna with the treason indictment. She would appear before Freisler on 1 July 1944 along with Thadden, Irmgard Zarden and the diplomats Hilger van Scherpenberg and Otto Kiep. Lagi was not charged, perhaps because she had not been at most of the circle meeting the Gestapo infiltrator had attended.
Johanna was accused of instructing Reckzeh on how to begin peace negotiations with the Allies. She replied that if she had wanted to do that she would have found a better messenger.
‘You called our treatment of the Jews inhuman?’ Freisler barked.
‘Yes.’
He asked her what Wilhelm Solf’s political ideology had been.
‘He was a humanitarian: he tried to be a good Christian, he served his country and helped his fellow men.’
‘Then he was a liberal?’
‘Yes, he was.’
‘What about the Quakers?’
‘I believed they are the most unselfish and Christian people,’ Johanna said.
‘How can you, as an internationally educated person, say that? Don’t you know that they are pacifists and play their politics under the clock of Christianity?’
‘I do not think so,’ Johanna replied. ‘Charity stands above all things and pacifism is, in my eyes, no crime. Love and faith in each other should be our goal. That is what we have to learn again, and the churches fighting with us are going to help us.’
Freisler reached his guilty verdicts three hours into the trial. Thadden was decapitated with an axe at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin.
‘Put an end, Lord, to all our sufferings,’ she said at her execution.
Charges against Johanna were withdrawn. ‘Further investigation’ of mother and daughter was to take place. The Ministry of Justice in a Führerinformation (information for the Fuhrer) said the case against Johanna had been separated because of new evidence. A lawyer helping Johanna met with ministry officials and was told ‘the case against Solf is absolutely serious and the death sentence will be seriously considered’.
Then came an attempt to kill Hitler on 20 July 1944. Wehrmacht Oberst (Colonel) Claus von Stauffenberg, a friend of Lagi’s husband, smuggled a bomb inside his briefcase into Hitler’s Eastern Front headquarters, the Wolfsschanze (Wolf’s Lair). Hitler survived the explosion and in revenge had some 5000 people executed in the following months.
In Ravensbrück the failed plot had its effect.
‘All of us saw with dread the prison filling with our friends who had been free up to that time,’ Lagi said.
The Gestapo began to work brutally on Solf Circle members, looking for the links into the plot. Lagi was again questioned. Her interrogator asked her what would have happened had Hitler been killed.
‘A great deal,’ she said. ‘Above all, you would be in this cell and I would not.’
Lagi described how a ‘new and grim mood’ swept Ravensbrück. Old guards who might have still been human were replaced with younger men mostly Romanians and Hungarians, with a few Russians: ‘We called them the “rats”.’ The perpetrated senseless incidents to make the inmates lose their nerve.
‘We were wakened in the middle of the night and asked name, age, sex, religion, amount of savings, and other pointless questions,’ Lagi said. ‘Once they roused me at 2 am to ask to which units of the Nazi party I belonged. They switched bright electric lights alternatively on and off during the night. Another irritating technique was to have guards run through the corridors at all times of day and night, stamping, shouting commands, stopping at various cells, and marching away again.’
Her cell was near the execution grounds.
‘During the warm evenings and nights of August and September I heard many shots from there.’
Johanna Solf was, after the trial, sent back to Ravensbrück for further investigation.
‘The reprieve meant more uncertainty,’ Lagi believed, ‘more interrogations, more misery…. The examination lasted all night and stopped only at 7 am when Mother fainted,’ Lagi wrote.
The treatment the two women received and the absence of executions raised questions. Johanna was not cooperating with the Gestapo; besides previous cases showed that even those who gave up information to the Gestapo ended dead anyway.
Lawyer Rudolf Dix, who had been assigned her case just an hour before the first trial, feared the Nazis wanted to hold a bigger trial with more defendants from the Solf Circle. It was rumoured to that Himmler was building up a list of political prisoners, Lagi and Johanna included, that he could be traded with the Allies.
Lagi would sometimes watch out from her cellar window, seeing hundreds of other women punished daily: ‘The measure of daily misery and atrocity in the camp was beyond human understanding.’’ The crematorium went 24 hours a day, its smoke thicker and thicker.
On 18 October 1944, a guard appeared at Lagi’s cell: ‘Get ready, you leave in twenty minutes.’
She was put in a prison van holding seven men. They were taken to Moabit criminal prison.
‘Hunger tortured us. Hunger affects people differently: some grow gaunt; others swell like misshapen balloons. Mother became a living skeleton; I looked like a blown-up rubber doll.’
In December 1944, Lagi’s husband Hubert visited her. He was being transferred from the Eastern Front to the West. Lagi found the meeting her worst moment in jail.
‘For fifteen minutes we sat facing each other, separated by a large table. Beside us stood a female official who constantly looked at her watch. Both of us were too stunned to say anything sensible, for we had to assume that we were seeing each other for the last time.’
Johanna and Lagi each received a typed copy of the 12-page indictment against them, charged with treason. Ernst Lautz, the prosecutor, began by listing the accused, beginning: ‘Johanna Solf, nee Dotti, unemployed, of Berlin, born 14 November 1887 in Neuenhagen near Berlin, widowed, not punished. Provisionally arrested on 12 January 1944. Has been in remand since 8 August 1944 due to the detention order from the investigating Judge at the People’s Court in Berlin. Approved defence lawyer: Judicial Dr. Rudolf Dix in Berlin.’
Her daughter was last on the list: ‘Countess Lagi Ballestrem, nee Solf, of Berlin, born 31 August 1909 in Āpia (Sāmoa), married, not punished. Provisionally arrested on 12 January 1944.”
The two women were to stand trial with Richard Kuenzer, Count Albrecht von Bernstorff, Professor Friedrich Erxleben, a Jesuit priest described as an Army Rector and Professor of Philosophy, and Maximilian von Hagen, writer and historian, of Berlin.
‘I go further to accuse/charge,’ the indictment said, that the accused, ‘Had numerous conversations in Germany with one another and others between 1941 – 1943 where they championed the destructive ideas that the Empire would lose the war, and, in accordance with their reactionary, enemy of the state attitude, the violent overthrow of the national socialist governance….’
The day of the trial was set of Saturday 3 February 1945. It turned out the US Army Air Force planned a thousand bomber daylight raid on Berlin, for that day.
Lagi was locked in a cell as the bombers arrived: ‘The huge old prison building with its thick stone walls shook to its foundations. We sat in our cells – I darning a bottomless pile of military socks – when the bombs fell all around and the air was filled with the noise of modern aerial warfare.’
Amidst the bombing Freisler carried on at his desk. He was expecting a busy day of sending people to their deaths. Heading to see him was the family of Rudiger Schleicher, 50. He was married to Ursula Bonhoeffer, sister of the celebrated anti-Nazi theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. On Friday Freisler had sentenced another brother, Karl Bonhoeffer, 44, to death. The delegation from his family were nearing the court, to ask for a stay of execution. Among the group crossing the city by train was his brother Rolf, a medical doctor serving in the military. They reached the central Berlin Potsdamer Platz as the bombers came over. Freisler and an accused man were still in the court. They made for an air raid shelter when Freisler realized the accused’s file was still on his desk. He turned back as a bomb exploded close by. Freisler was hit. As the bombing stopped Dr Rolf Schleicher and the family left the station and headed to the court to appeal for their brother’s life. Emmi Bonhoeffer told of how Rolf was near the scene.
‘His uniform showed that he was a military doctor and he was called to a serious injured person without knowing it was Freisler. He could only certify that the man was dead,’ Bonhoeffer said. ‘Then he learned that this was the judge of the People’s Court whom everyone was so afraid of. He pointed to the corpse and said to the bystanders: “This is the man who illegally condemned my brother to death yesterday”.’
Word reached Lagi next day: ‘Fellow prisoners whispered, “Freisler is dead!” I could hardly believe it. It meant life for us – time gained, and the elimination of our most dangerous enemy. He had delayed going to the air-raid cellar and was killed by a bomb which hit the court building. Many records were burnt in the raid, among them our own.’
A fever gripped Lagi: ‘Even the most apathetic developed a wild desire to live. We knew that the war could not last much longer but that there was still danger of being killed, at the end, by the SS.’
Some criminals and lesser political prisoners were freed, female guards stopped coming to the camp, fearing that liberation might mean their deaths. The trees in the prison yard were turning green. Birds sung. The chill was easing a little in the cells.
‘All these seemed promises of early freedom.’
Volksgerichtshof trials later resumed, with Johanna and Lagi scheduled for late April trial.
On 23 April, the door to Lagi’s cell was thrown open.
‘Get ready for discharge,’ the guard said.
An official responsible for the distribution of rationed shoes, Ernst Heuss, had been working to get Johanna and Lagi out. He had started out as a lawyer, but had refused to take an oath to Hitler. He had helped the Solf Circle to get Jews out of Germany. Heuss came to the prison that day and found senior guards who were disorientated and hysterical as the Soviets moved closer. Many were drunk. He managed to get them to release Lagi and Johanna. They were taken to the prison office where Maria Elsas, the widow of a former Berlin deputy mayor, Fritz Elsas, and her daughter Barbara, were waiting.
‘We were all bewildered and not sure what was happening to us, but we found ourselves indeed discharged and walking out of prison.’
It was a mistake and Goebbels who was alarmed and ordered all efforts made to get the two women back. It was too late. Hitler killed himself.
Around a hundred people had been involved in the Solf Circle; 66 were murdered.
At Nuremberg, major war criminals were tried over a year from November 1945.
Johanna Solf was a prosecution witness against the Nazi’s chief public prosecutor Ernst Lautz who had approved 1500 prosecutions bought each month.
‘As to the prisoners who were with me at Ravensbrück,’ Johanna said in evidence, ‘as far as I can remember there was only an Italian woman of Belgian descent who was treated well, better than we were. However, in the penitentiary of Cottbus, as well as in the prison of Moabit, I met many foreigners….
‘In the penitentiary of Cottbus, there alone were 300 French women who were sentenced to death, and five Dutch women sentenced to death who after a week or two were pardoned to penitentiary terms and whom I saw in the courtyard. The 300 French women sentenced to death were sent to Ravensbrück at the end of November 1944.
‘The night before they were transported they had to sleep on a bare stone floor. One of the auxiliary wardens, who was also an interpreter for them and who had a great deal of courage and a kind heart, came to me in order to ask us political prisoners to give them our blankets, which we certainly did.’
At Moabit she said the had seen brutal wardens kick and shout prisoners.
Lautz was convicted of enforcing a law that comprised ‘the established government plan for the extermination of those races. He was an accessory to, and took a consenting part in, the crime of genocide’. He won a favourable comment from the judges who said Lautz had not been active in Nazi Party matters and had only followed Hitler’s orders believing he was required to do so. He was sentenced to 10-years imprisonment. He served less than three years.
Soon after the war ended, Lagi learned her husband Hubert was a prisoner of war in England. She and her mother, as well as her brother Hermann, went to England. Amidst the new turmoil of a shattered Europe, Germans such as Hubert and Lagi, were required to return to their normal residency, in their case, Potsdam, which after the war became part of the Soviet zone of the soon to be divided Germany and Berlin. Herbert, a devout Catholic, joined the Catholic charity Caritas. The Soviet police Narodnyy Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del (NKVD) arrested him and in 1949 he was charged with spying ‘for the Vatican’. Convicted, he was sentenced to 10 years forced labour. Three years were in solitary confinement. He was then locked up in NKVD Special Camp Nr 7, the former Nazi concentration camp at Sachsenhausen outside of Berlin.
Johanna Solf, aged 67, died on 4 November 1953. Herbert was released in 1954 into East Germany. Lagi was in Bonn, the new capital of West Germany. Lagi died on 4 December 1955 without being able to reunite with Herbert. She was 46.
‘I do not want to think of the past because it has lost its meaning,’ she wrote.
‘The world has learned nothing from it – neither slaughterers not victims nor onlookers. Our time is like a dance of death whose uncanny rhythm is understood by few. Everybody whirls confusedly without seeing the abyss.’
Michael Field – copyright
Invincible Strangers: Samoa's 20th Century 