Freya von Moltke | Resistance leader, 98

Freya von Moltke, 98, a prominent member of the anti-Nazi resistance during World War II, died Friday after suffering a viral infection, her son Helmuth von Moltke said.

Mrs. von Moltke was born in Germany but had lived in Vermont since 1960.

In her writings after the war, she described her life in the resistance with her husband, Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, who cofounded the anti-Nazi Kreisau Circle and was executed for his activities.

She was born into a banking family in Cologne as Freya Deichmann and met her future husband when she was 18. They were married in 1931, and both received law degrees.

The couple settled on his estate, Kreisau, in present-day Poland. In 1932, they moved to Berlin, where he set up an international law practice. He opposed Adolf Hitler's regime from its start, and he helped Jews and other victims of Nazism in his early law practice.

The von Moltkes formed the center of a resistance group that became known as the Kreisau Circle.

In 1943, the group established contact with Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, the leader of the German military resistance, and supported his failed attempt on July 20, 1944, to assassinate Hitler. The story of that plot was brought to the big screen in 2008 in Valkyrie, starring Tom Cruise as von Stauffenberg.

Helmuth von Moltke was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944 and executed a year later. In 1947, Mrs. von Moltke left for South Africa. She returned in 1956 to Germany, where she began publicizing the activities of the Kreisau Circle.

She moved to Vermont to live with Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, a Dartmouth College professor who had fled Germany after the rise of the Nazis. He died in 1973. - AP