Solf Circle

After her husband's death in 1936 she had presided over a circle of anti-Nazi intellectuals in her salon in Berlin, reminiscent of the SeSiSo Club, together with her daughter, the Countess So'oa'emalelagi "Lagi" von Ballestrem-Solf.

On 10 September 1943 the Solf Circle met at a birthday party given by Elisabeth von Thadden, the Protestant headmistress of a famous girls' school in Wieblingen, near Heidelberg.

Among the guests were: The following paragraphs are paraphrased from William Shirer's, "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich": To the party, Thadden brought a handsome Swiss doctor named Paul Reckzeh,[3] who was said to be practising at the Charité Hospital in Berlin under Professor Ferdinand Sauerbruch.

Moreover Reckzeh was not in fact Swiss, but a German born in Berlin, and had only been sent by his spymasters to neutral Switzerland the previous year to gather intelligence on the various resistance networks active in Germany.

He waited four months to act on it, hoping to cast a wider net; apparently he succeeded, for on 12 January 1944 some seventy-four persons, including everyone who had been in the tea party, were arrested.

But that was not the only consequence of Kiep's arrest - its repercussions spread as far as Turkey, and resulted in the final demise of the Abwehr, already under suspicion as a hotbed of anti-Nazi activity.

Vermehren, by profession a lawyer from Hamburg, was prevented from taking up a Rhodes scholarship in Oxford in 1938 because he repeatedly refused to join the Hitler Youth.

Arthur Zarden, knowing what was in store for him and afraid to implicate others under torture, committed suicide on 18 January 1944 by throwing himself out a window at the Gestapo interrogation center.

Together with Richard Kuenzer, Bernstorff was taken out of the prison two days before to the vicinity of the Lehrter Bahnhof, and presumably shot upon the orders of Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Nazi Foreign Minister.

In June 1944, shortly before the 20 July 1944 coup attempt, the People's Court indicted Halem for conspiracy to commit treason and undermining the war effort.