Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist-Schmenzin

Ewald-Heinrich Hermann Konrad Oskar Ulrich Wolf Alfred von Kleist-Schmenzin (10 July 1922 – 8 March 2013) was a German publisher and convenor of the Munich Conference on Security Policy until 1998. A member of the von Kleist family and an officer in the Wehrmacht during World War II, his parents were active in the German resistance against Adolf Hitler. Von Kleist was designated to kill Hitler in a suicide attack and was the last surviving member of the 20 July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. Early life Von Kleist was born on the family's manor Gut Schmenzin at Schmenzin (Smęcino) near Köslin (now Koszalin, Poland) in Pomerania. The family was firmly monarchist, and his father, Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin (1890–1945), had been an active opponent of Nazism well before the Second World War broke out. The young Ewald grew up in that milieu. Like his father, who had criticised Nazi ideology in print as early as 1929, Ewald-Heinrich loathed Hitler and National Socialism from the beginning. The Nazi murders of 30 June 1934, the "Night of the Long Knives", further intensified young von Kleist's hatred of the Nazi régime. World War II In 1940, at 18, he joined the Wehrmacht as an infantry officer. He served on the Eastern Front near Lake Ladoga and was wounded in July 1943. While recovering in Potsdam, von Kleist was personally recruited for the resistance by Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg. In January 1944, with his father's blessing, he volunteered to replace the wounded Axel Freiherr von dem Bussche-Streithorst in another suicide assassination attempt on Hitler.