Grandson of German prince who helped 'Valkyrie' plot to kill Hitler loses bid to win back his family's £6m estate



Prince Friedrich zu Solms-Baruth III was swept up by the Gestapo the day after the failed bombing attempt on Hitler in 1944

A German nobleman whose family estates were seized on the orders of Adolf Hitler after a failed plot to kill him has lost his bid for restitution.

A court near Berlin threw out the claim despite the expert testimony from British Third Reich-era historian Anthony Beevor, who backed Prince Friedrich zu Solms-Baruth, 45, in his bid to gain back the £6million ancestral lands.

His grandfather signed away the rights to the estate after he was arrested by the Gestapo for his involvement in the plot to assassinate Hitler in July, 1944.

The prince claims that after German reunification, his own father had 'fought the German authorities tirelessly for restitution of the family's estates and property - until his death in January 2006'.



A settlement was achieved between his father, the 4th Prince of Solms-Baruth, and the German government regarding the bulk of the estates in 2003.



Prince Friedrich says what was now being claimed – over 17,000 acres of land worth over £6million - is the rest.

Yesterday the Administrative Court in Potsdam near Berlin rejected the attempt to regain the family estate and dictated there could be no appeal in Germany.

The prince had already vowed to go before the EU with his claim if he failed.

'I am disappointed,' said Prince Friedrich. 'The court did not recognise sufficiently my grandfather’s fight against the Nazis. But my fight goes on.'



The court found that previous restitution for the land was sufficient and that it could not hand back land later expropriated from aristocrats seized by the Soviet Army at the end of World War II.



Most of the prince’s family land was seized by Hitler in his wide-sweeping vengeance after the failed bomb plot.

Some 7,000 people were murdered by the Gestapo after the assassination attempt at Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair HQ in East Prussia.



Hermann Goering (in the light uniform) inspects the wrecked room after the bomb exploded under the table close to Hitler

The prince, who was betrayed as a sympathiser, was thrown into the Gestapo main jail in Berlin because of his association with the nobles who plotted the Fuehrer’s death and his estates seized. But he survived the war.

The case came amid a renewed focus in recent months on the bomb plot, which was led by Col. Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg, in part because of the upcoming Tom Cruise film 'Valkyrie' based on the event.

Cruise plays the aristocratic colonel in the film.

Von Stauffenberg placed the bomb in a conference room where Hitler was meeting with his aides and military advisers, but the dictator escaped with scrapes and bruises.

Solms-Baruth's grandfather, a long-time anti-Nazi, was involved in discussions of the plot and provided two of his mansions as meeting places.

The Hitler assassination plot is the subject of the 2008 film Valkyrie starring Tom Cruise who plays plot leader Col. Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg

But the evidence against Solms-Baruth was thin, and he was kept alive in an attempt to extract information about other plotters, according to his grandson.

Incarcerated in the Prince Albrechtstrasse Gestapo prison in Berlin, dubbed the 'House of Horror', he was kept in solitary confinement and interrogated incessantly, according to his family.

The prince dismisses suggestions his grandfather received preferential treatment.



'He was banished under pain of death from his former properties, and his rights of ownership over his companies and estates were taken from him,' he said.

The day after his arrest, the Nazis 'ransacked the prince's castles, threw out the family, felled timber in vast quantities and organised large Nazi Party hunts, treating the estates as if they were their own,' claims Prince Friedrich.

Released near war's end, his grandfather fled to a small farming property he owned in Saxony, close to the Elbe river, with his wife, youngest daughter, and loyal staff, then to the home of his brother-in-law, the Duke of Schleswig-Holstein.

Later he stayed at Castle Hega, the home of the Crown Princess of Sweden in Stockholm, before leaving Europe to 'begin a new life in Namibia with his wife, son and three daughters', explained Prince Friedrich.