Ulrich Wilhelm Graf Schwerin von Schwanenfeld
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Ulrich Wilhelm Graf von Schwerin und von Schwanenfeld (born 21 December 1902 in Copenhagen; died 8 September 1944 in Berlin) was a German landowner, officer, and resistance fighter against the Nazi régime.
As a man of Christian social convictions, Schwerin found Nazism quite loathesome. Already by 1935, he held the view that Adolf Hitler must be killed to be brought down. Beginning in 1938, Schwerin belonged to the tightest circle of the resistance along with his personal friends Peter Graf Yorck von Wartenburg and Fritz-Dietlof Graf von der Schulenburg, and later also to the Kreisau Circle. From the beginning of the Second World War, he belonged to the Wehrmacht as an officer. In 1942, Hans Oster appointed Schwerin to the office of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht in Berlin. He participated in the doomed attempt on Hitler's life and coup d'état on 20 July 1944 from a position at the Bendlerblock, where the plotters' headquarters were, although he had been saying for weeks that the chances for a successful coup were very slight. There, on the night of 21 July 1944, he was arrested, and on 21 August, he was sentenced to death by the Volksgerichtshof, with Roland Freisler presiding (the German-language article about Freisler includes an exchange between him and Schwerin which demonstrates how contemptuously Freisler treated the people that he was trying). On 8 September (or according to some sources, on the same day as the trial), Ulrich Wilhelm Graf Schwerin von Schwanenfeld was hanged at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin.
[edit] Literature
- Detlef Graf von Schwerin, Die Jungen des 20. Juli 1944. Brücklmeier, Kessel, Schulenburg, Schwerin, Wussow, Yorck; Berlin 1991
- Hans-Joachim Ramm: ... stets einem Höheren verantwortlich. Christliche Grundüberzeugungen im innermilitärischen Widerstand gegen Hitler; Neuhausen u, Stuttgart (Hänssler) 1996 (ISBN 3-7751-2635-X)
See also: List of members of the July 20 plot, Widerstand.
