Schlabrendorff, Fabian von

Lawyer, resistance fighter, federal constitutional judge

Born: 01.07.1907 in Halle an der Saale

died: 03.09.1980 in Wiesbaden

After attending the Leopoldinum grammar school in Detmold, the scion of an old aristocratic and officer's family from the Mark Brandenburg region studied law in Halle and Berlin, graduating with an assessor's degree and a doctorate. During the final phase of the Weimar Republic, he had already courageously stood up to the National Socialists as a panel speaker at their propaganda meetings.

In 1932/33, he worked in Berlin for Herbert von Bismarck, State Secretary in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, who, like him, was a fierce enemy of National Socialism. Early on, von Schlabrendorff had connections to a number of other opponents of National Socialism, both national conservative and of other political persuasions, including Ernst Niekisch and Karl Ludwig Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg, to whose organ "Weiße Blätter. Monatsschrift für Geschichte, Tradition und Staat", to which he contributed. In the fall of 1933, he began to gather reliable opponents of the regime in cells in Rheinhessen and Pomerania and to lead them to the gradually forming opposition movement. In 1938, he joined the resistance circle around Hans Oster in the capital of the Reich. The following year, he married Luitgarde, the daughter of Herbert von Bismarck, with whom he had two daughters and four sons.

Shortly before the outbreak of war, he traveled to Great Britain in agreement with civilian and military opposition figures to inform Winston Churchill, among others, of the existence of the German resistance forces, the impending Hitler-Stalin pact and the imminent invasion of Poland. Drafted into the Wehrmacht in October 1939, he became an orderly officer with the First General Staff Officer of Army Group Center Henning von Tresckow in 1941. Together with von Tresckow, he carried out the famous assassination attempt on Hitler in Smolensk on March 13, 1943. Furthermore, von Schlabrendorff acted as a courier between the resistance circles at the front and those in the home army. He was in constant contact with leading figures in the "July 20, 1944" revolutionary movement, such as retired Colonel General Ludwig Beck and Carl Goerdeler, as well as with Captain Hermann Kaiser on the staff of the Chief of Army Armaments and Commander of the Reserve Army and with the brothers Otto John and Hans John. On August 17, 1944, he was arrested and imprisoned in the Gestapo prison of the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin and later in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. He was severely tortured on several occasions, but nevertheless resisted, did not give up any of his friends who were still alive and was finally acquitted at his trial before the "People's Court" on March 16, 1945, which was postponed five times. Shortly afterwards, he was told that it was a miscarriage of justice and that he would be shot. However, he was taken to Flossenburg concentration camp, then to Dachau concentration camp and then via a concentration camp near Innsbruck to Villabassa in South Tyrol.

In 1945, von Schlabrendorff worked as a lawyer in Frankfurt am Main, and from the following year in Wiesbaden, where he founded a notary's office. At the same time, he acted as legal advisor to the "July 20, 1944 Relief Organization" foundation, of which he was a founding member shortly after the war. In 1967, the independent conservative was awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany and also became a judge at the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, of which he was a member of the Second Senate until 1975. He then moved back to Wiesbaden to work in the law firm again, which was continued by his son Dieprand and his partner Friedrich Christoph von Bismarck. The funeral service for the respected lawyer took place on September 8, 1980 in the Marktkirche with the participation of numerous prominent figures from politics, the judiciary and the military. His final resting place is in the small cemetery in Morsum on the island of Sylt, where his wife is also buried.